Ok. Yelling at (non abusive) noobs is the least effective and most diversity-destroying way to maintain norms, especially when those norms are otherwise impossible to learn.
As @fraying said earlier this week, productive barriers to entry are intentional and thoughtful. Confusing UX, missing docs, and conflicting + insufficient info on how to select an instance are neither intentional nor thoughtful, and their main effect is to skew a place toward nerds. (I am a nerd.)
@adamgreenfield I mean, what I want is a really sturdy underlying system that can support many interlocking communities with their own norms and shared cultures, because "everyone in one room" seems doomed to failure. But I also want people to be able to reach the big cross-cutting stuff—like disaster/emergency news—as needed.
We're obviously not there yet technically or culturally. Fedi and Bluesky are both trying, but I think we're 2-3 years out from the first big success along those lines.
@adamgreenfield Yeah, my preference would be to have everything official/ infrastructural in a layer, and all the newsroom official accounts in a layer, and so on. Like, I don't care if individual people want to talk about sports, but I don't want to federate with a full-on sports bar. I do want to connect with official comms.
@misc@adamgreenfield I mean, there's full-on act-of-god stuff and the internet will be down but then there's like "What was that noise??" and it's planned demo rather than an act of war. So it's not all one thing.
This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.
I said "lastly" but then my replies become almost immediately overwhelming. It's great that a lot of people like this/want to argue about it/are thinking about it!
But I am just one brain so I'm going to miss a lot of things, apologies.
I think it's crucial that we don't conflate "algos" with "evil algos," but also that whatever we do with recommendations and non-chrono feeds be handled with the kind of care we use with explosives.
@Fullnihilism Maybe! I block a LOT of people on Bluesky for shit like that, so I feel like that should reduce some of the worst nonsense, but I'm sure some slip through.
A couple were scientists talking about their work and being told to CW, several wanted to talk about their experiences with racism or their transitions and got yelled at. Probably a mix.
@anarchopunk_girl Totally agree, I think there needs to be a lot more information and a lot of it needs to be better structured. I also suggested elsewhere that fedi is eventually going to need a reputation system, but culture here is SUPER not ready for that yet, with all the drama.