There are two problems that are coming for Mastodon of which apparently an awful lot of people are unaware. These problems are coming for Mastodon not because of anything specific to Mastodon: they come to all growing social media platforms. But for some reason most people haven't noticed them, per se.
The first problem is that scale has social effects. Most technical people know that scale has technological effects. Same thing's true on the social side, too.
@siderea Please copy this brilliant thread to a blog post or article somewhere so it's easier to link back to later. It is too good to get lost to the backscroll ether.
@siderea
I've been moderating/governing online spaces for 25 years, and I've come to one clear conclusion: You will never make a space comfortable for everyone. It will not happen. Accept it, and decide explicitly what kind of person you want to feel "safe" and which you don't.
And anyone that is outside the Overton Window you want to have, exclude fast, exclude hard. (cf the "Nazi bar" story that's gone around, but for much milder things than Nazis.)
@siderea More mundane example: If you want a Star Trek fan forum, cool. If someone keeps starting threads about Game of Thrones instead... they don't belong there. Really, they simply need to leave. Not because GoT is bad, it's just Not Appropriate Here(tm).
This of course gets much harder at scale, as you note. Which is why mega-scale networks... maybe aren't even the right model in the first place.
@Crell Oh, hard agree! I actually have two other rants in me illuminating exactly this.
The issue isn't mega-scale networks, it's whether or not there are *boundaries* that demarcate *topic spaces*. In THIS space we discuss Star Trek, and in THAT space we discussed Game Of Thrones. Both spaces can be on the same network or even on the same server, but it has to be possible for the people who want to see only Star Trek to not see any GoT, and the people who want to see only GoT to not see any ST.
Not because either is offensive to the other, but because neither group will feel that it is in control of its experience unless that is true, and they are likely to start treating the others as interlopers and get defensive and hostile.
@Crell it's like Frost wrote: Good fences make good neighbors.
@siderea @Crell I'd be very curious about ACL, because I think such separation is very effort -intensive and difficult to maintain. Do we need to tag ST and GoT in each post? How do I tag a post about fantasy in general? G+ circles got mentioned - a good example for difficult to maintain for single users. And it was per-person filters, not per topic, or what interests me - per language.
