The title I have assigned this article is intentionally boring. The article’s body goes out of its way to not provide simple summaries, silver bullets, or otherwise give a single size fits all answer to everything. The author actually gave it a fun title that, I felt, did a slight disservice to their overall point, but hey, we all make our own decisions.
I thought there was some interesting stuff in there about the Fediverse at large, even if that wasn’t expressly what the author was getting at.
I’ve never found Twitter or Mastodon type of social media blogging interesting, personally. I don’t need to know what person X is saying or what is buzzing.
I more like to hear topic based conversation, where who is saying it matters less, so Lemmy (and formerly Reddit) was for me.
In the article apparently things feel too sanitized/no-fun-allowed on Mastodon, which is interesting. The most popular communities on Lemmy are Memes and shitposts, which I guess follows suit with this.
Blog formats (which includes mastodon) always lend themselves to either screaming into the void or following influential people screaming into the void. Forums (which includes lemmy) have always offered an easier point of entry because there’s a set topic to start out. Same goes for chat rooms, I think. Meanwhile I think blog formats get an outsized portion of media coverage because they feel familiar. They’re formatted like a newspaper with journalists shouting into the void and op ed pieces being a slightly contextualized version of screaming into the void. Twitter has always been a smaller part of the internet than Facebook, YouTube, or any of the other big names really, but it gets an outsized piece of coverage because journalists like it
…screaming into the void…
Yeah, to me, following people on Twitter is like an online and more socially acceptable form of following that mentally unstable person that’s walking along the street yammering on to themselves about how everyone’s a scumbag and the world is out to get them.
Mostly yes, but sometimes people drop the occasional kernal of wisdom or knowledge. Sometimes it’s about finding “your people.”
“Lastly, I’ve intentionally done this work in a way that will, I hope, prove illegible and hostile to summary in media reports”
lel I like the way this person thinks. Did a quick read, is worth re-reading.
I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.
There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.
And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.
But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.
I don’t want to necessarily gatekeep it, but I don’t want to go back to a centralized algorithmic platform in order to cater to everyone. I’m sure there are some things federated platforms can do to be more approachable, but some of them we shouldn’t do. But Twitter and clones are out there already for people to use–Mastodon doesn’t need to copy them.
