@evan I’m ‘somewhat unsatisfied’ with the state of the fediverse
I can’t be satisfied when:
• the fediverse fails to attract huge swathes of people (not necessarily a problem with the fediverse per se)
• we miss out on things like academic discussions (and other good forms of ‘engagement’), which still happen in other, mostly awful places
• marginalised people, especially people of colour, find it uncomfortable to be here (despite potentially excellent human-scale moderation)
• almost everyone seems to be a (white) computer geek – hardly reflective of the wider population
• it can be hard if not impossible to find your community here
• the dominance of Mastodon™ masks the potential of the fediverse to host (non-micro) blog posts, photographs, music, videos, scrapbooks, you name it
• Mastodon gGmbH effectively dictates how microblogging happens in the fediverse by controlling the software most instances run
• Mastodon gGmbH also operates two of the largest instances, mastodon.social and mastodon.online (both of them, imo, a couple of orders of magnitude too big to form a reasonable ‘home’ community or to be moderated effectively)
I’ll leave it there for now. It’s nice here, but it could be so much better
@evan I like it. A lot. Came here last December and its so much more vibrant. I have two mastodon accts, this one and on lor.sh. Im very happy with the vibe and quality of ppl and content. On the tech side I think exporting/importing (or downloading in json etc) posts for account transfer would be very useful. Maybe also the option to use quote posts (toots). Having an acct RSS easily accessed. *I can think of more but thats enough for now :) *
I'm glad to see so much positive response. A lot of people in the comments called out survivorship bias; that is, only people who like the social web enough to stick around would respond to a poll posted on the social web.
@evan can you talk about ways it supports transparent user-first data? It is a computer network/graph, it can always be "exploited," maybe the safer and nicer thing to do is make that one of its features. What do you think of bluesky's "bring your api?" Are there ideas to expand on it serving as a linked data carrier, and to support anonymous user managed identities?
@evan does mastodon support geolocation? That was one of the most useful features of "twitter," hyper local news. The other thing is the unfolding disaster of CWs. If someone is triggered by "porcupine," they're going to see the word "porcupine." If there were a more formal ontology, then their client could take care of it. In an age of guessificial data and graphs, I would go well past this, but it's a start.
@evan It could definitely be better, and I was hoping there would be a lot more growth within specifically the threadiverse (kbin and Lemmy) by this point. By growth, I mean moreso on the software side of things - kbin especially is still very janky. Artemis makes it better, but it's still not perfect (due to, in my opinion, underlying problems with how kbin was built). Examples would be embedded videos still skewing, page-content indexing issues (seeing posts many, many times), etc.
@evan It's still an edge culture. I won't be satisfied until nearly everyone is on it, or at least aware of it, and community tools are advanced enough that this makes it better, not worse.
@kfury@evan Agreed with M. Fox. I have the (perhaps mistaken) impression that the population active on Mastodon has been draining slowly over the last few months. It seems less active. Not sure if people are off to Ex-Twitter or BlueSky, but they seem to be here less.
I am very enthusiastic about the control that Mastodon grants me over a lot of aspects of my experience, but I remain concerned about the future of the community.
"Very satisfied"! I came here with the migration wave in early November and loved the place from day 1. It was a liberation. Micro-blogging as a form of free and respectful dialogue. Considered, slow and organic.
There are plenty of things that could be improved, of course, but what we have now is a miracle as it is. Several of the changes that are under way I find harmful rather than helpful, but I trust in the power and wisdom of the fedi process. We will find a way.
@evan I love the culture here but the tools still feel lacking to me. Absolutely incredulous we can’t have a web version which changes with my device light/ dark settings...
Improvements could include the How-to-Mastodon-Correctly crowd and Alt Text Nazis keeping their opinions to themselves, better threading, and quote toots.
Otherwise, I really like it here and don't miss the dead bird site at all.
@evan Ifeel I can’t give an honest opinion about the state of the Fediverse because I’m not a regular user. I’ll connect to Mastodon for a few days then ignore it for a week.
But that might be a good thing: the ability to not be addicted to a software, to have control over it, not it over you.
@evan I’ve worked with computers for 30 years now. It’s true that all software sucks, but some software sucks more than others. There is software that sucks more than the Fediverse
@evan I want this place to work for more people than it does right now, but I fear the only feedback that's heard and acted upon comes from the people who are already here
@evan By far the best place to be. Lack of normies keeps conversations interesting and meaningful. The fact that it’s tech centric is amazing given my interests. No algorithms means it’s not inherently predatory for your time and mental health.
@evan my big concern is that Federation is simultaneously the biggest advantage against big tech of the fediverse and a potential huge drawback because it relies on the continued hard work and honest behaviour of the instance admins. Some of them seem unable to cope or be capricious or trigger happy.
It’s very difficult to have a conversation about this because many people seem to see it as a threat to them personally.
I'd venture a guess that if you added a second factor in the poll of time spent on the Fediverse, you'd get a bimodal distribution, where people who haven't been on the Fediverse long find it confusing and thus unsatisfying, then learn the nuances and enjoy themselves, until they understand it quite well and the flaws become more obvious.
Also it should go without saying that any poll on the Fediverse about how happy one is with it will be selective in that it's like asking "How much do you like this restaurant" to patrons who happen to be in the restaurant on a given day. :)
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