My current way to interest people to join us: The Fediverse is more like local politics, with small communities discussing things. Centralised networks like Twitter, TikTok, instagram etc are more like national politics, with loud mouthpieces shouting over everyone else.
This mental image helps me in understanding why the influencers fail here and they of course think that means that the fediverse must be a lost cause while we commoners happily chug along and enjoy our little street parties ;)
I tried to find something like astronaut with Mastodon, mastodonaut?, but I don't know.
But I like fedinaut.
Yes, I totally get the logic. It is just that I didn't find at first that mastodonaut roll off the tongue very well in french.
But on a second thought, yes, it does sound nice in french and so I'm adopting "mastodonaute" in french.
I will writing to the Académie tomorrow in the morning.
There is probably something similar in german. In french there is internaute for the one who navigates the internet.
It is an old word from, I think, the "information highway" era.
"I am a member of the federati" which I'm reading in Jean-Luc Picard's voice.
@aslakr @Mercurial @jwildeboer
Village idiots are better than national idiots. Quieter.
@jwildeboer Yes! If the goal is "convincing people of a predetermined agenda", then fedi is indeed a failure -- not a very good tool for propaganda. The masters will not find it pleasing.
If the goal is "getting good ideas into the discussion so they can propagate naturally", however... ^.^
@jwildeboer @evan "My friends and family are here when I invite them in to see something cool I've been working-on. In the meantime, like minded randos occasionally visit to help me build said cool thing because they are way more experienced/interested in cool thing than friends/family and give way better advice. Some of them become friends, but most just appreciate getting to help build cool thing."
Just like my house.
That's the algorithms.
On the big corporate sites, everything is getting steered for "engagement" which usually means conflict. The divide and conquer thing, deliberately designed to be toxic.
Because for some reason most people seem to have no clue just how pernicious and awful those algorithms are.
I left Facebook as soon as it became clear it was pushing in my face the exact types of things I'd rather NOT engage with. It was like watching sewage seeping in to fill the room, but loads of people are still standing around nattering while the rising flood laps against their chins.
@jwildeboer That's a really interesting question! This is actually a measurable quantity -- mean path length between nodes in the graph. It's the famous "six degrees of separation" metric. Meta showed a mean path of ~4.5 hops on their network in 2016:
https://research.facebook.com/blog/2016/2/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/
I have no idea what it is today, or what it is on the Fediverse -- I think it would be a really interesting calculation to do!
In honor of Friends Day, we've recalculated the classic 'Six degrees of separation' statistic for everyone who uses Facebook and determined that the number is actually 3.57. Each person in the world (at least among the 1.55 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half steps.
There is a self-selection that gives the fedi a particular culture. E.g., I am here because I find targeted adtech social media disgusting human torture chambers.
But to think of the fediverse as "positive" oriented is strange. There are recurring episodes of toxic attacks on anybody expressing an opinion that doesn't fit the echo chamber and that's just my limited graph.
Being open source, decentralized etc is not a magic wand that fixes inherent limits of online worlds.
Sorry but disagree. I see here some "influencers" acting at smaller scale. Not the same ones than in megacorp networks, neither same discourse but the same patterns: disinformation, cult to personality by their followers and no rational debate.
I like this "lost cause" and the parties. ;)
@jwildeboer
What's cool is that I see lots of posts about local or niche topics ("small communities") *and* posts about international news that I can't find in many of the mainstream news sources I follow. It's a very eclectic mix that depends on what users and hashtags you follow.
It's so helpful to be able to follow hashtags, not just do searches with them!
each instance is a town.
In theory but in reality almost none of my local communities use the Fediverse.
There does also seem to be quite a high proportion of US users.
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