I know mastodon has issues, I know the fediverse is basically a prototype of what it could be. I know it’s annoying when people are snobby about masto despite its faults.
But for real, if we want this shit to succeed, we’ve got to also love what is good here and be growing it. That doesn’t mean yelling about how all other social media sites suck. It means focusing on what we’re getting right here, listening carefully to complaints, and putting a little energy into solving problems
@seachanger@Em0nM4stodon I just love the coincidental nature of mastodon and getting to know more folks out there the more you start looking and following — it’s kind of building your "algorithm"
Great sentiments expressed here. While certainly not perfect, it is pretty solid, and keeps making incremental improvements. Most recently adding search is pretty huge.
Sometimes we get focused on what could be better and fail to appreciate what makes Mastodon superior in many ways from other platforms. Yesterday Grant Gulovsen @gulovsen, penned a really excellent tight essay highlighting a few of these strengths: 8 Really Good Reasons to Try Mastodon >>> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-really-good-reasons-try-mastodon-grant-gulovsen
@staidwinnow@seachanger@gulovsen Think the biggest limitation is how content is distributed/copied across the federated servers which results in not all users actually seeing all posts. The problem is more pronounced for smaller instances which undermines the architectural benefit of many smaller distributed servers. No easy way to "fix" this, as it is pretty fundamental to how the protocol works. In actual practice it is less of an issue for medium to large instances.
@staidwinnow@seachanger@gulovsen If you would like to know more about some of the technical limitations of ActivityPub a good resource is @hrefna . She has written a very good critique of the protocol, but without search it is lost to time and her prolific posting.
@seachanger For my part, I'm trying to figure out what I want from Mastodon. It's a good place to post my stuff, but I don't know that it will ever cultivate enough of an audience to be really powerful for that. But it does attract a certain combination of activists and writers that I do want to be connected to, so perhaps its function really is social.
@Zeb_Larson@seachanger It doesn't have to be The One True Social Media Platform. Neither the #Fediverse as a whole, nor any particular federating instance, needs to be that.
It has to be a good place to hang out, exchange ideas, encounter interesting people, maintain friendship networks. And it already is all those things. Of course, we can make it better.
I intuit that a lot of that 'making it better' will be more social and diplomatic than technical.
@Zeb_Larson I mean who knows what it will become. who knows what will happen with other sites or how changes within the fediverse will impact people’s overall experience here. The future is not written!
But I agree, one of the real strengths is the ability to actually have relationships and people who are genuinely interested in what we post and who we are
@seachanger And maybe dreaming of having one central hub isn't a good idea at all. It's fine to have Mastodon be one thing, and that's what you use it for. I mock LinkedIn all the time, but I use it for certain things and in those contexts it's useful. The moment I step out of those contexts I want to delete my profile so I just stay in my boundaries.
At the end of the day, I've met multiple people here who I want have relationships with outside of here -- that is a victory.
@Zeb_Larson@seachanger I really love that Mastodon is mainly real people doing or sayings real things without the need to have to sell something.
For as long as I am here, it is really refreshing and relaxing.
So unless, if suddenly, everybody that I follow is leaving, it is already a success for me.
It is not a real strength of Mastodon to have relationships and people who are actually interested in what we post. I had that on Twitter (pre-Musk). For that matter, there are people I've had that with from Usenet to the blog era to Twitter to here.
Any social medium can do that: any social medium is bad at it mostly as a function of how many people are on it, since you lose track of people who aren't on it. Those people are not replaceable: some of my interests have < 100 people on the planet who are interested in them.
@seachanger I agree, but it would help if it were easier to use. I like the communities I've managed to find on Mastodon, but having never used other social networks before I still haven't been able to figure everything out. Like these middle 2 buttons, what do they do? When I long press them I don't get any help text :( I'm of the opinion that if I need to google how to use something, it's probably not very well designed... Maybe I'm a stick in the mud though
@seachanger bravo! love this. And have empathy for developers. Don't jump at the conclusions that they are not doing certain feature because they hate a group of some sort or due to belief, etc. It could just be lack of time, resources, or not understanding the issue fully.
@seachanger I hate to use the "E" word. But we have to actually engage others and the stuff they post. No one is farming it, it's purely for each other's benefit.
@seachanger that's a really good point, I'm still trying to figure some stuff out myself but I love what is here now. I just wish I could figure out how to help grow it. I try focusing on positives but unfortunately, I try to tell this to don't like social media and don't have it or if they do end up leaving what they are on, they vow to never use another social media platform again. I crossed over by myself and feel that but I hope to build something here and help make a better
@RickiTarr
I want it to be more like my local community FB page -
Person A makes generic statement
Person B "I disagree and here's why you are a bad person and here's what you need to do to improve yourself"
Person C "you're complaining about that? That's far too petty, I'm outraged"
Person D (paraphrasing)" fuck you! Your post sucks"
After about 130 more comments like that
person A "fuck all of y'all, I'm going outside"
This is what we should striving for here in the fedi
@seachanger I'm ok with complaint against quora, reddit, FB, etc. They are white supremacist playgrounds. Reddit also hosted the largest rape guide forum in the world and for some reason couldn't shut it down. I call them racist a few times and I'm banned for life. This can happen to mastadon and eventually will. Women are sexually harassed out of tech and permanently traumatized so mastadon will be lead by mostly white men eventually if it already isn't and go down the same way if were not car
@seachanger We need to get down to the basics of what we want in a social media engine. For many of us, that includes some insurance that whatever platform we use won’t implode like Twitter/X and take us with it. BlueSky, Spill, Threads, &c still have that same fatal flaw at the root. Mastodon has it too, but at a •much• smaller scale and with an easy escape route. If we can flesh out migration to pull our history with us and make instances more transparent, that would be a thing.
@seachanger
I left Facebook for Mastodon and have no regrets other than leaving friends and family behind.i love the absence of advertising and be able to follow all sorts of people and interests. It's a bit too serious
@seachanger What I love most about Mastodon in my near-year here is that I see what I want to see. The hashtags I follow, the users I choose to follow, the topics I seek out...it's what I want. Not what some unseen algorithm wants me to see. Which I appreciate. I can't get irritated or annoyed at something I have to go out of my way to find, as opposed to having it forced on me.
@seachanger Well put! This is just a life lesson in general.
Focus on cleaning your own part of the sidewalk and don’t waste mental / emotional energy on other things outside of your control. i.e. work to make Mastodon an amazing place and don’t worry about other platforms.
We often forget that billions of people didn't join Facebook in its first decade. They joined because it embraced mobile when people were buying their first smartphones.
Instagram was successful because you could use filters. It drove people there and created the network effect.
Twitter was where events across the world developed live by the people who lived there – a journo's dream.
@seachanger I think it’s the influx of a ton of people used to all of the features of other platforms, expecting an identical experience here & not so much that this platform is somehow a prototype. I don’t really see issues aside from accountability and moderation insofar as harassment and racism and stuff needing to be addressed.
@seachanger part of the construction of culture, which is what we are doing here, is definitely shouting about corporate social media, in general.
This is an indelible part of our culture, for those who fled corporate social media for mastodon? I dare say this is one of the bedrock reasons to even make this new culture.
@seachanger for those who arent aware of the specifications of corporate, for-profit social media, including connecting this.... to corporate social media.... detailing the REASONS why we need to steer this culture 180 degrees away from all of that... is respectful, polite, and normal.
This begs the question: is this about connecting mastodon to corporate networks?
@seachanger it is literally worse elsewhere. This is literally the reason mastodon was created. Millions of existing mastodon users came here TO GET AWAY FROM those other networks. This is literally why there is any argument or debate here about it at all. Or is this about CWs and alt text??
So this is about connecting mastodon to corporate social networks -- something MILLIONS of us do NOT want -- but here you make it all sound like its you being gaslit, not a major debate between different kinds of people on Mastodon.
Mute away. Welcome to mastodon, by the way. I did notice your brand new account, lol.
I think the main motivation of @Gargron and the #mastodon developers is not so much to be against something, but because he had a positive vision of how social media should be like.
Personally I like the approach of being driven by a positive vision.
@folkerschamel@seachanger@Gargron again, most people who came to mastodon for the first 6-7 years it existed came here to specifically escape multiple objectively negative aspects of corporate, centralized, psychologically manipulative (as a business model), propaganda-filled (corporate and state), abuse-heavy networks.
That didn't suddenly change when Twitter was bought by a fascist, pushing a few million more over here. The culture didn't change.
@folkerschamel@seachanger@Gargron what I just said is literally the positive vision, and the bedrock reason to be here for a lot of people these new folks are ignoring. That's the MAIN reason to be here.
You and gargron and every other goon who shows up may decide they want that corporate connection and all the baggage that goes with it, but fortunately the technology allows you to have your own space, and me mine. So be it. This is the way of the western world. Divided.
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