Critical thoughts about Mastodon
So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.
I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.
But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"
I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.
That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.
Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.
This. Fucking. Sucks.
And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.
Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.
But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.
I would hope you'd be concerned by that.
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
@TechConnectify - "This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop."
This. So much this. I had a lot of hope or Mastodon when it came out, and worked hard to help friends join...but I'm in the minority. So much of Mastodon (much like Linux) feel complicated as a way to "keep it to ourselves."
If it weren't for a friend who helped teach me Linux, I'd be deep in the Windows world, because 90% of the support I got was "maybe this isn't for you" or "try another distro" instead of, you know, help.
Yeah, if you put the time and the effort into Mastodon, it's great. But how many CAN'T put the time and/or effort in? We could make it easier for them...but we don't. And frankly, the impression I get is "it's complicated cause that makes a great barrier to entry."
Critical thoughts about Mastodon
@dolari
The type of thing that tends to bridge these sorts of gaps is finding sources of revenue to pay people to do the things they wouldn't otherwise choose to do. Like moderators who are paid to do nothing but read and see the most awful things in the world for 8+ hours a day (as YouTube and Facebook do) and have teams of people who do nothing but queue and address technical support tickets and people who acquiesce to the decisions from the chain of command lest they risk their paychecks for making their own decisions independently. Decisions like how to develope and maintain algorithms to curtail unhealthy communication and conversations. And how much to pay people to implement such algorithms.
This likely would require exclusive content available for subscribers only or advertisement funded content. Neither of those seem very popular among the current Mastodon crowd.
Existing Mastodon instances don't seem to receive a lot of financial support to do much more than pay for server and bandwidth costs and the rest is filled with uncompensated voluntary action. No one seems willing to do the unappealing work on that basis and I don't blame them.
@TechConnectify