I suspect they just know their model is shitter than the other corporate ones, and want to reap the benefits of the FOSS community hacking it

I think there’s something about the type of people who are attracted to fame and power being more likely to be sociopathic, or at least more narcissistic. Not all of them, just a higher-than-background rate.

I don’t find it hard to find great people IRL.

Labels never more useful than just as a shortcut to understanding someone’s whole nuanced belief…

Surely there is a meaningful difference between a planned economy/command economy and a semi-regulated market economy? Like, I get that corporate control can still be authoritarian, but it’s different to state control in some ways, I think?

Agree, but I think there are lots of people who are a bit more on the fence, or playing around with ideas. If someone says something stupid out of ignorance or inexperience, and they get blasted for it, they probably aren’t gonna learn much from it, and they might go hang out with the people who responded well to it…

Obviously if you try and it turns out they understand what they are saying, and are doing it intentionally, they can get fucked. Problem is it’s hard to tell sometimes, and not many people have the capacity to tolerate that behaviour enough to find out.

Comment has “no bad vibes” vibes

Isn’t this just an argument that left-right is a bad categorisation?

Tankies are authoritarian socialists. The american right are authoritarian and socially conservative individualists. Anarchists are libertarian socialists. American libertarians are also individualists.

There are lots of other dimensions too, but the left-right designation has been kind of useless at least since communists started fucking over anarchists in various parts of Eurasia in the first half of last century…

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was pretty inspiring to me

(I’ll also add that Anna Funder’s Wifedom make Orwell seem a bit fucked in his personal life. I haven’t read it yet, just had convos with people who did. Seems maybe Homage to Catalonia could have been a better book if he was less of a mysogynist)

Definitely not generally acceptable here in Australia

I think your approach is very valid IRL, where there’s vocal nuance, and body language, and real people who probably aren’t Russian botfarms and communities that you are both part of. In that case calling-in is the far better option the vast majority of the time.

The general open internet doesn’t have much of any of that though, and general numbers and anonymity and lack of repercussions or accountability make it way too easy to be an arsehole/troll and never try to come to a common understanding. If someone’s doing that, they can fuck right off.

I think there are smaller semi-private internet communities that operate kind of half way between those extremes, where you probably have to take it case-by-case.

I think Lemmy is kinda halfway between the second and their option, but will gradually head more toward the second option as it gets bigger.

You might be right. I’m not a lurker. I’m not a heavy poster either though.

It sounds like you should just try it out, and find out if your assumptions are true

Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…

I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.

I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.

I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.

I think you’re making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.

Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a “please boost and follow for federation” post to get them kick started.

But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how did you choose an email provider, or a phone service? How do you block spam? Those are basically identical questions, and yeah, they can be annoying, but I don’t think anyone finds them that hard to comprehend.

Yeah, Lemmy is good because of the topic and threading focus. Mastodon seems better for exploring lots of issues. I’m finding them fairly complementary, they cover different bases.

Still need something I can pull my IRL friends in with though. Pixelfed might work for people who are used to Instagram, but I think it’s probably still a bit sparse content wise.

Mastodon could definitely do with some more discovery methods. Hopefully something like bluesky’s starter packs get implemented eventually (but I understand why they aren’t rushing it, there are abuse risks).

Best approach for now on mastodon is to follow all the hash tags you’re interested in, and then follow everyone in your feed who posts anything interesting. Takes a few weeks to ramp up, I guess. My feed got good once I was following around 1k users. You can always unfollow if someone’s annoying.

Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.

I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won’t see that for another couple of years… Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.

Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out…

But also I don’t really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is “nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to”.

In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)