Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it's sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don't like twitter (because it's too "toxic"). This means that you can't really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that's largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.

I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don't imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it's own kind of different thing.

There have been talks about tumblr joining the fediverse which seems like a similar scenario!

"You can't protest agains police violence because we don't have enough police officers". I'm sure that will stop them

Five years ago does not sound right to me at all, but I looked it up and apparently it was in 2018, so I guess it has been five years after all. Total mandela effect moment for me.

I think that the main thing this reveals about the bluesky admins is that they haven't thought that hard about harrasment, which is weird to not do if you're trying to launch a new social media platform.

Hey, glad to hear that we're mostly on the same page!

I should clarify that I'm just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they're both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it's not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.

I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.

Hey, I think that was my comment!

What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn't otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).

I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn't come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can't expect everyone to share my connotations.

What I think is important isn't the exact wording (if I hadn't written "normie" I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn't otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn't contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don't have those associations with that word so that doesn't ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.

I feel like instagram is one one of those apps - at least the way I use it - that relies on a lot of your irl friends having it as well. I would love for them to be open to signing up to some fediverse platform but we're not there right now sadly.