Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.

I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!

As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022

Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.

@scottjenson I’m not interested in following any “AI people”. That doesn’t make it an echo chamber. We don’t need equal amounts of people who love puppies and want to kill puppies, not everything needs to be equally represented.

@Gargron That is a personal choice and one which I totally respect. But I do think Mastodon should be big enough, and open enough, to allow an "AI community" to form, even thrive.

Too many people in my replies don't seem to agree with that.

@scottjenson

There's "communities" for nearly everything on the #Fediverse. It is a strange misconception that a server software like Mastodon was something like a centralized #server #instance that was required to "allow" for anything, or could "prohibit" it, for everybody.

On the Fediverse, your server instance can allow or prohibit anything, just like any other instance. When your topic is hated on most other instances, there might be good reasons for that, though.

Still you can even run your very own instance fully dedicated to ShittyTopic™. It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you, or to say friendly things about it, or to never block your instance.

@Gargron

@katzenberger

"It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you"

I think it would be great if we could all agree on this.

Don't like someone? Block them. Don't like a community? Block their server.

It's when people try to actively police members of other communities they don't belong to when things turn nasty.

I think this is something moderators need to clamp down on.

@scottjenson @Gargron

Thank you! That's exactly was the point I was trying to make. But clearly the delivery got in the way of the message.

@stefan @katzenberger