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!

@scottjenson @carnage4life threads and bluesky are single monolithic platforms. masto federated. so would likely depend on which masto server someone's posting on i'd guess as a starter...

also, purely anecdotally/for my own part, there's less of a culture of boosting/liking/trying to make things go viral for the algorithm. lack of apparent engagement may not signal lack of people actually reading posts/following links/etc.

@scottjenson @carnage4life "we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!" if they're only coming to see number go up engagement metrics... they may have a hard time. maybe they should come here to, oh i don't know, spread information? have targeted discussions with specific folks (rather than hoping for drive-by engagement)?

@patrick_h_lauke So is the only alternative "number go DOWN" metrics? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to find a way to have both be possible: how can we keep our soul but still have a diverse community.

My concern is that your comment uses the "we don't want a number go up mentality" argument to hide the fact that our community is a mono culture.

@scottjenson sounds a bit like "people don't engage with my content, so it's a monoculture"?
@scottjenson the alternative is a "number mean NOTHING" metric...
@patrick_h_lauke The metrics are clear, people are leaving mastodon, our daily actives are going down. I agree that pursing follower count is not what Mastodon should be about, we likely agree on many points here. I'm just trying to say 'being more welcoming of other points of view' shouldn't be controvertial. Yet so many replies have been "we don't want them here!" which feels very head-in-the-sand to me.
@scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke "people are leaving mastodon" oh my gosh! A trend! You should go follow it.

@wizardponderingorb

Having never interacted with none of the people in this thread outside of it, that seems like a dick way of putting things.

Even if someone has ideas that you don't agree with (and which will never get approval of majority), just talking why the experience/opinion exists may lead to other improvements.

[This of course barring stuff that can be seen as a threat to safety. Fascists and the like.]

@iju What's a dick way of putting things? Following trends or the thing where the corpo compared his AI advertising struggle to the struggle of black people on the internet? Or Scott being sad?