I don't even think it's that.
The place needs a culture other than "we are fleeing from other places."
It's like early Reddit, lotta nerds and dropouts, dissidents and hermits, but there is no clear idea of how people should interact so it becomes scrolling through lots of tangentially-related activity.
@amerika @zleap @thor The beauty here is that it's like a real life social gathering, say a party or a pub. You wander around, until you find people you think are interesting. They might like you, they might not. The conversation might turn to something you dislike, but you can just wander off and talk to other people. No feed algorithm will keep on shoving more people who sound like the ones you briefly met, into your face.
It can be hard to find friends, but it's easy to avoid the worst.
I think it's part of the problem. I can see the appeal of Meta: a place like this needs a topography, so you can go visit a forge or a fletcher and see what type of people hang around there.
Generally, I find that there are lots of randoms from no particular type that I think are interesting, and follow them.
Over time, it's like building up a keyring of interesting people... unlocks other doors.
Good point, I am just going to keep making posts about the James Webb Deployment, right now there are about 3 people who are taking about that,
I am not driven by number of likes so 3 is fine for me, the posts are there, if someone searches for #jwst they will find related posts, from me and others so can follow further.
You've met Paul and Thor, but here are some other interesting people:
@sim
@Jar
@pensees
@dew_the_dew
@p
@rasterman
@basadeskaiser
@LadyMont
@Sapphire
@deprecated
@D00B
@dubh
@pyrate
@PlipO
That'll get you started (and provides an excellent opportunity for the worst "hellthread" of all time).
@ehhh @basadeskaiser @rasterman @p @D00B @Sapphire @brian @thor @deprecated @dew_the_dew @pyrate @zleap @sim @pensees @Jar @LadyMont
You're right; that's a well-behaved user.
But these users are not selected for their starting of hellthreads, just for being interesting.
It's hard to navigate this place without a map. I think @blog made some great ones awhile back, but they're visual, not clickable and all that.
Maybe an image map? heh
@pyrate @basadeskaiser @rasterman @p @D00B @Sapphire @brian @thor @deprecated @dew_the_dew @ehhh @zleap @sim @pensees @Jar @LadyMont
"Loli" is anime images of underaged people in nude or sexual poses?
A weird kink, but at this point I get more excited over fixing a lawnmower than another set of deceptive internet mammaries.
@ehhh @basadeskaiser @rasterman @p @D00B @Sapphire @brian @thor @deprecated @dew_the_dew @pyrate @zleap @sim @pensees @Jar @LadyMont
That's reassuring but generally I hate small children because I hate humanity, or at least most of it.
Trust me, you don't have to like them, you are not supposed to like them, the whole purpose of dealing with children is to make you the adult in the room.
@basadeskaiser @rasterman @p @D00B @Sapphire @brian @thor @deprecated @dew_the_dew @ehhh @pyrate @zleap @sim @pensees @Jar @LadyMont
I agree. I like the good ones.
Most of them are horrid brats like the adults that produced them.
I'm an equal opportunity standard distribution hater like Elizabeth Bennet: I recognize that most of the world is tard and scorn it appropriately.
Yo see their cringe will force you to mature faster and it will do you good.
If you have the opportunity get exposed to kids, play with them or something.
It will do you good on the long run.
@D00B @basadeskaiser @dubh @rasterman @p @Sapphire @brian @PlipO @thor @deprecated @dew_the_dew @pyrate @zleap @sim @pensees @Jar @LadyMont
A Fedi alphabet...
A is for Autoeroticasphyxiation
B is for Battered (And Fried) Women
C is for Communism
D is for muh digital penis
The fediverse when it was smaller appealed to people like me that saw what was wrong with places like twitter... then mastodon came and brought that twitter culture with them. Except they wanted a place without nazis, something they had more control over. Hence you see things like block lists and people being more block happy. Perhaps the problem is that social media doesn't scale well. You don't want huge popularity, but rather smaller communities with culture in them. When I first came here, I thought that bringing more people here would solve everything. Other people agreed back then, wanting to spread free software to everyone. It has only made the problems worse on here. I have felt less happy/healthy for it. I don't think I am alone in this. I don't know if it can be solved. It may just be a people problem.
But I'd also add that some people want more control and others want more freedom in those interactions. When I first came here, I needed the extra freedom after being on twitter which was restrictive and controlling, filled with algorithms. Now I'm not so sure what the answer is after seeing what has become of the fediverse.
Hellthreads produce culture. So does posting quality content, which you already do.
I think it helps to also engage people across a wide spectrum. Most of the Fedi is totally atomized, and while we need decentralization, we also need "meeting" somewhere in the center in socializing and what we discuss.
I think there is an advantage to havcing self hosted, small instances for a few people, family or small community who just want to connect with each other.
I have said before, more people brings more positive interaction but also negative interaction. I think that is a people problem.
The fact is that we need chanels, categories, and tags. These are all sorting methods.
People want stuff about what they are interested in, and the Fedi response is to do that by node.
For example, a politics channel, or a social channel.
Within that, people need topics, such as far-Right, far-Left, etc.
And then, tags designate specific threads, which on the Fedi get dropped, which is sort of sad.
We're not yet at an ultimate communications system for humans.
If I were a node admin, I'd like to have the ability to designate certain users, hashtags, and threads for public consumption.
I like your idea of "public bookmarks": like a bookmark list, but forms the default view of the node.
Then you just need a node list and a node browser. I'm sure there's a node discovery protocol or something like it in ActivityPub.
Yeah, I think we are suffering from the people problem. People bringing their usual baggage and attitudes with them here rather than adapting to idea of community here.
As far as I can tell, the free software community kills everything it touches.
Too much posing. "If you want software to actually work, jUsT wRiTe yOuR oWn."
It's not much different than any other volunteer field in this regard...
Ego always comes first with humanity.
To have a community, you need a function, not just preaching.
The Fedi has the same problem the far-Right does: nothing to discuss but a single topic.
I don't think fork your own is a good response for a lot of people. It works well if you are a dev and know what you are doing. But not for the average person. I think there are attempts to make things more accessible though. This seems to be more the attitude for pleroma.
I can't argue with the single topic. The fediverse and its values are the uniting factor for the culture. But this doesn't necessarily lend itself to something more, like you'd hopefully get in community. If you don't care about that, and now a lot of people don't here, then you are left to wander and treat the fediverse just like you would twitter. I don't think things were introduced well, and it doesn't help to have certain devs treating their software like their babies to do with as they please rather than focusing on the fediverse community.
It seems to me right now that most of our values are defined by the platform: decentralization and free software.
That's not a culture, or even a community.
One is slowly being forged, but for now, the apathetic nature of this loosely-linked coalition threatens its ability to develop further.
Fedi reminds me most of Gettr.
Small groups have formed and participate in "trains," or posting lists of other users to follow.
But no one interacts much except with people who are already big celebrities from somewhere else.
On Fedi, it seems as if most traffic is bot-generated, basically people posting updates for others to ignore.
This emphasizes the clannishness of nodes.
@The_Quantum_Alpha @brian @thor @zleap @sim
I think this is why Twitter et al persist and the fediverse is generally in denial of this.
It's the challenge.
The real big challenges are usually hidden behind near-universal denial.
So the question is, how do we build a culture that encourages interaction instead of apathetic tolerance?
I think that at least two things apply here, there are likely more people on twitter but we don't know how much of that is genuine and then twitter has an algorithm which the fediverse doesn't have that pushes interactions. So what you get on the fediverse is probably just more genuine.
It's less denial for me and more that I don't see what the problem is, but that is probably just because I prefer few interactions. But then I wasn't getting a lot of interaction on twitter because I wasn't popular anyway. A lot of that is discoverability and posting what people like. Usually images work better.
I also think that people just give up on the fediverse so quickly. They think it is dead here and find somewhere else to post. But it needs people being more active, you have to go out and find content to interact with and other people need to do the same. We also don't get to see everything when looking at remote instances.
Personally, the thing that made me feel more encouraged to post is being able to see peoples replies so that I can join part way through the thread or discover it part way through. This is a great feature. But most people here are boring for me for lack of a better word, I have nothing to contribute to their threads or the topics don't interest me. It's likely people here feel the same about my posts. It's hard to get over that.
@sim @The_Quantum_Alpha @brian @thor @zleap
Gab just launched custom feeds -- that "public bookmark" that was discussed here some time ago:
@sim @The_Quantum_Alpha @brian @thor @zleap
Right, well, there's not a sense of community...
USENET had a sense of community. We had our own hives, for sure, but there was crossover and it was considered good that people were heavily invested in whatever interested them.
This place is defined too much by what it is not -- not commercial software, not big tech, not centralized -- and not enough by what it *is*, or can be.
I would say that the same applies here. We have our own instances and people that we like to interact with, people are free to be heavily invested in what interests them. It's just not necessarily going to translate well that many others will share interest in that or be aware of it. But then things are still a work in progress, I think there is still work going on for projects like groups to be implemented right. Gab can do a lot of things because they don't care about the rest of the fediverse and being compatible. Or not fucking up.
I would at least say that decentralisation is a positive thing itself. It just has its own drawbacks too. But it does allow you to move about the fediverse more freely, you aren't tied to just one instance. People are encouraged to make accounts elsewhere, to make their own instance or join one already made. Seeing replies encourages more interaction to a thread, and you can see this working because if people only saw the first post then things would not only seem more dead but you'd lose out on people joining threads partway through. On saying this, I'm not sure if mastodon has this feature so that might be why people think it is more dead than it is. I know it works for me. I'll have to think on this though.
@sim @The_Quantum_Alpha @brian @thor @zleap
No one argues with its capacities.
But look at the reality: no culture.
Therefore, no competition with the big sites where people can actually get some traction.
It's like all the kids who got thrown out of class are meeting behind the school to commiserate.
@zleap @thor
I don't think this is possible. They're going to say whatever they want.
I'd stick to core message: we're the anarchistic free zone where people can express themselves without limitation, so you WILL be offended and you WILL get over it shortly ;)