I can't figure out if mastodon is a high context culture or not. People seem to be expected to give long introductions and do a lot of identity/positionality disclosure, but also an enormous reply guy culture which is defined by low context drive-by. Conversational turn-taking is extremely low compared to other platforms ime, but depth-seeking is high. What an interesting mix.
*obviously, these experiences are all situated within my own network effects, and I'm not well networked here.
@grimalkina You've hit upon something that I've been trying to untangle, too, but maybe on a wider level. One way I've parsed it is between the difference between communicating for information vs. communicating to build relationships. A large demographic seems to lean into communicating for information (either broadcasting it or offering it up to others). A smaller group seems to be here to communicate for relationship building and discussion. (I'm in the latter group.)
In my experience, it can be hard to start a conversation because of this mix. If I ask a question or say "I'm curious about," a person responding thinking I want information can stop the discussion short. However, if someone meets curiosity with curiosity and shares their own experience, then it goes a little better.
I also have noticed that sometimes people have a hard time asking questions (in general, not just on Mastodon), so I wonder if that has something to do with conversational turn-taking being low?
@grimalkina to me the most interesting thing about Mastodon is that anyone's experience here really is whatever they make it out to be.
Since there is no algorithm whatsoever, it's 100% up to each user to curate a space they enjoy and find valuable.
It's worked out brilliantly for me. But I understand why others might have a tougher time adapting to it, especially given the most recent social landscapes that are out there.
@RVLara23 I think the toughest part for me to "adapt to" (I don't actually want to adapt to this) is there's less community of practice here; my professional and scientific communities are far more on other platforms and on other platforms my communities are far more diverse. It is really noticeable no matter how well I curate my experience, I can only curate it down, I can't find people who simply won't be here
@grimalkina sure, valid. It can be tough if you're looking for something really specific bc I think we're still hovering at around 1mm active users over here. The user pool is going to be limited no matter what anyone is searching for, absolutely true.
I'm curious how Threads and Bluesky federating will change that but there's also a lot of resistance to those integrations from this side so.... who knows?
Also, hope you didn't think I was singling you out or anything - wasn't my intention.
@pseudonym@grimalkina I think of all of these as being like a convention's lobby during break. And different conventions differ in quality and form. And the goodness of the snacks.
@grimalkina When you say you are "not well networked here" what do you mean? Closing in on 7k followers you must get a decent amt of replies so have a pretty decent sense of what Masto repliers are all about. Moreso than most of us who don’t have nearly that same amount.
I personally haven't seen a need for long-winded intros from people but having a bio in place goes a long way it seems.
If I (and thus we) had more than 500 chars by default, maybe we'd be more willing to thoughtfully engage…
@shellsharks I do think I get a fairly broad sample of replies and interaction! But on the other side of the coin I think I don't follow or broadly reply myself enough to say I've explored a bunch of different networks here, that's all. Was just trying to be careful to not overgeneralize and note that my experience was limited by that :)
I'm having some strange and I guess maybe ironic reactions to this post.
Your post is stirring up a lot of my own opinions as well as questions about what you mean, and I kind of would like to have a conversation with you about it, but I also find myself anxious about replying at all, and I'm not sure why!
I think part of the issue here is that I still don't know what a "reply guy" is. I'd never heard the term until the large influx of users during Twitter Muskopocalypse.
I had the impression that a reply guy was someone unconnected to the original poster who shows up in replies and acts like they belong there, which hits a nerve because that's exactly the behavior that enabled me to make friends on Fedi.
But your phrase "drive by" that makes me think you mean something else?
I think there's a broader thing where a lot of people have things that bother them about Mastodon and Fedi, and when one person complains about an aspect of the platform and culture, other people seem to hop in with "oh thank goodness someone else sees the problems", only in a lot of those threads I feel like maybe people don't even agree about what the problems are, and it's hard to tell whether real communication is occurring or not.
@dynamic I can understand this frustration! Because I study social topics and issues, sometimes I think people take my observations even about things I like (I really like a lot of the high context behaviors I experience on mastodon!) as if they're a criticism -- maybe it's the detached way I think out loud. But that's just me and my neurocomplex brain, and I don't feel like it's very kind when folks treat someone's personal experience like a threat when it's just someone trying to navigate
"I don't feel like it's very kind when folks treat someone's personal experience like a threat when it's just someone trying to navigate"
Er... did it sound like I did that? I certainly didn't see anything you wrote as a threat. I think maybe that's not what you meant because of the way you started your reply, but then I suddenly wasn't sure : )
@grimalkina I find replying to comments/threads to be confusing on Mastodon. I don't have this same issue on Lemmy - another ActivityPub/fediverse platform that can intersect with Mastodon but is more like Reddit than Twitter and makes it easier to create or follow a 'community', like this lemmy science community https://mander.xyz/c/science
@jaystephens i curated mine and was part of some really good communities of practice and had a great time. Still the most incredibly diverse and scientific community I've found online
@grimalkina I curated both heavily so if your experience here feels weird I can only conclude my best curation efforts converge on that same weridness lol
I think part of it is that the context is expected around the person and not the post, for whatever reason, people want to know everything about you and what you stand for, what your opinions are, what led you to some decision or path, but within actual conversation that falls away.
@grimalkina From what I’ve seen, different people experience the Fediverse very differently. I’m not sure why!
My own experience, in your terms, is (usually) low-context and high-conversation. I get to interact casually with lots of people; I’ll mostly only look at their bio or old posts when I feel it’s necessary to understand them. My own bio essentially says “milquetoast”.
OTOH I have far more extensive and interesting conversations here than I did on other social media.
@grimalkina I'm curious what you mean by turn-taking is low. The number of turns in the average conversation? Or (relatedly) low number of obvious transition points, or long length of turns between transitions? It seems like any or all of these could be true.
I ask because I honestly haven't noticed any difference in these respects from when I was on Twitter, and I'm interested in your experience of platform difference.
@gregtitus Conversational turn-taking is a set of different interrelated social cues that we use to direct convo (not my area so not sure on terms but) things like reflection ("oh I like that you...interesting that you say...") and joint perspective taking ("I recognize x in your experience and to me I see it in y...")! So I'm thinking a lot about the diffs in the STYLE of convo here and what I experience here vs other platforms, and what this prompts me to do as well!
@grimalkina I feel like this gordian knot is easily cut by the blade of “mastodon is not a monoculture”. Something I often remind people of when we fall into the attractive nuisance of believing that “twitter says A”, “tiktok thinks B”, “mastodon does C” is that huge portions of these sites do not even have mutually intelligible language, let alone culture. Does the word “mastodon” in a cultural analysis include all of its monolingual Japanese-speaking users, for example?
@glyph I never think there is truly a single "culture" but if we didn't think general patterns of group normative behavior that reinforces itself in networks of people were possible, we wouldn't believe that culture exists at all! I'm only reflecting on my particular experience but I'm also allowed to have had a particular experience, with particular trends
@glyph also haha this just reminded me, people in bio and neuro joke about whether you are a lumper or a splitter and I guess I'm just organizing my thinking as a lumper right now but other days, I will be splitter with you!! :)
@grimalkina I am interested in both that particular experience and your analysis, but I think your initial framing sets up the discussion for a sort of hotdog/sandwich classification failure mode. As I struggle to affirmatively suggest a more useful way to describe cultural boundaries on the fediverse, I am realizing that maybe there just isn’t a better way to talk about this sort of experience without being painfully and awkwardly wordy about it yet, though. I need to think about that.
@grimalkina I’ve noticed it’s odd too (though I find I like it), and I resonate a lot with what @hazelweakly said, esp with the poor threading. (I always feel like I’m losing some of a convo - and I can’t set up a thread to notify me when it gets an update - all making it hard to follow at times.)
I’ve also wondered whether high levels of neurodivergence here affects anything, or if that’s just my feed. Thoughts?
@jonobie@grimalkina hmm, I think my Twitter feed was sufficiently neurodiverse that it's comparable to here. There's definitely more of it here than Twitter, but I was so thoroughly on ADHD, queer, and systems thinking Twitter that basically nobody was neurotypical 😅
@grimalkina oh it's a super fascinating mix, honestly. I'd be very interested in seeing the real reasons behind this.
I suspect having to do self curation of your feeds puts people more in the "actively seeking out depth" category, but the really poor UI for having threaded conversations and actually seeing things in a certain way prevents you from having those longer conversations.
Lack of QTs and algorithmic ranking ironically likely also contributes to lower conversation depth? Dunno! 🤷♀️
@grimalkina I mean, honestly, even when writing that I realized after I sent it that I sent my response in a more closed loop framing and didn't really leave room for a further follow up response from you. I can't remember if that's how Twitter ended up being too (I think so), but I see that closed form sort of response a lot more often here for some reason.
Lemme open it again
What do you think about that? Does any of that resonate with you, or am I thinking about it wrong? :)
@hazelweakly haha thank you, love this explicit conversational talk-out-loud :D -- it does resonate with me, totally!!
I LIKE being able to "microblog" in a more "blog" style, but then sometimes I wonder if the acceptance of that on here also prompts a kind of reactivity because everything reads like a "thesis." I miss that everything on twitter felt 'lighter.' (I also miss how diverse my community was there). I appreciate the rawness of people sharing experience but it can be a rant spiral
@hazelweakly I've certainly also changed in my relationship to social media over the last couple of years so maybe that's separate from any platform, how about you??
@grimalkina oh yeah. Social media is now much more transactional and time boxed for me. We got too good at building exploitative platforms and so it's more of a Self-Protection mechanism to make sure I can still get something valuable out of it and continue to have the social connection without being drained.
There's also an element of it now being a career growth tool, which is an interesting mix for me
@grimalkina I think it actually transcends social media specifically because I see the same thing happening in gaming and any other computer related activity.
There was a time period of about a decade where I was fairly all right with removing time out of my life in order to spend it in virtual reality, and now I want to use technology to enhance the real world and my life in the real world rather than using them as an escape mechanism
@grimalkina If I dig into that more, I think of the fundamental shift for me was actually not a coming of age (although that played a big part), But rather it was going from having no agency to having sufficient agency to where I want to (and can) intentionally seek out fulfillment
So, now that I have that agency, I take steps in order to minimize use of things that remove agency from my life. But I see people that still use tech for escapism having that lack of agency; I think it's related?
@grimalkina I totally get how things on Twitter feel lighter. I bet the character limit and the ease of how quickly you could reply or navigate helped a lot. I'd feel like I wasted a reply if I sent "wdym?" In a mastodon reply, but doing so on Twitter felt natural.
Durable conversation streams vs talk panel format, hmm... That sounds more like it, honestly? Like sometimes I feel as if I'm speaking on a panel when replying on mastodon rather than having a conversation
@luis_in_brief fair enough -- although in my particular case I am just aware I'm probably not browsing, discovering, following very much so my "sample" is small!
@grimalkina the default mastodon UX does not really encourage any of those things, which is part of the dynamic— a meta layer on top of all the various subcultures.
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