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I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

blog.joinmastodon.org

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Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#491

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

lapcat wrote: post #408
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my personal experience with Mastodon and other "fediverse" projects; they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture. I'm sure there are "nice" instances out there, but I gave up after trying 2-3 and having flashbacks to regular twitter from 7-8 years ago. No thanks

> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture. That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things. Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature ( maybe we could say the adaptability of human behavior to environment and circumstance is inherent, but that's a different kettle of fish).

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#492

Post by Nextgrid »

berkes wrote: post #480
Nextgrid wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity. (One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this si…

> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse” Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore cri…

The issue with the current iteration of fedi is that it misses the main problems that average, non-technical people experience with social media, so those people remain unaware of fedi and/or can't get past the friction of using it, as a result they remain on the mainstream services, all while fedi remains a nerd echo-chamber with significant unsolved issues around funding, moderation, spam protection, etc (the only reason it doesn't collapse under spam/unsavory content is that it's mostly just not even worth spamming due to its irrelevance).

I'm not particularly sure the current iteration of fedi being around is better than other systems... it sucks the oxygen out of the room and reduces/fragments demand for an actually good replacement for FB/X/etc...

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#493

Post by lapcat »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #491
lapcat wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't really fix the central problem with modern social media, the godawful culture. That's just human culture, or more accurately, human nature. If you gather a bunch of anonymous strangers online in one place and let them run free, they'll likely make a mess of things. Perhaps it's an unpopular opinion here, but I think that HN culture for example is horrendous.

I think if a certain contexts encourages a certain behavior, that's not something essential to humanity. if a group of fur trappers has to resort to eating Jean-Luc because they're trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, I wouldn't say that cannibalism is "human nature". I similarly, wouldn't say that the behavior engendered by modern social media is so essential as to be labeled part of our nature…

I don't find this analogy enlightening. Only a few people are ever trapped in a mountain pass during a blizzard and starving, so of course it doesn't tell us much about humanity.

Whereas millions of people participate in online forums every single day, and not because they're desperate, in danger of death or the like.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#494

Post by arjie »

pjc50 wrote: post #351
arjie wrote: post #95

> I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a particularly bad interaction with a user last summer that made me realise that I need to take a step back and find a healthier relationship with the project, ultimately serving as the impetus to begin this restructuring process. Many of these microblogging sites seem to be populated by people with extreme views. One of the pleasant things about old Inte…

What has happened to the group of close friends that I met over the years on Twitter is that we retreated to a Discord; but within that, we noticed that those who also stayed on Twitter maintained a much more angry, confrontational style and we ended up with a couple of them leaving as a result. It's viral as in smallpox. > the microblogging sites seem like a completely flat layer. There isn't really a community sens…

Amusingly the same thing happened to us, though we ended up on Slack/Signal/iMessage group chats. And I was the only left who stayed on Twitter and consequently the only one[0] with the confrontational style. To my good fortune, it was Twitter that I left, rather than the group chats.

And yeah, Elon is certainly a victim of this virus. I think Bill Ackman getting snookered into paying a tip twice in a classic cabbie scam was the first time I could clearly see how people could end up suddenly stupid through this disease

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Outrage_is_the_Universal_Par...

0: I actually got called out on this once https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Bridge_Nodes

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#496

Post by hinkley »

velcrovan wrote: post #25
hinkley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truthfully, the web never did depend entirely on Tim. He made neither the browsers nor the servers that people used, and libwww was so full of bugs and memory leaks that it was heavily modified by those who did, if they used it at all. The W3C was its own thing.

Also kind of like John Gruber and Markdown.pl

Jeff Atwood is too nice for our own good.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#497

Post by account42 »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #382
brabel wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of funny how you complain about people being mean to you and then accuse a high percentage of them of being apes flinging shit. You have some unresolved issues.

I think when you get literal shit mailed to you, it’s ok to think that people can be shit-flinging apes.

No, having experienced a small number of deranged individuals that does not excuse calling "a high percentage of people" barely functioning apes.

IME mods deserve a lot of the shit they get. It's not exactly well-functioning individuals that tend to choose such a (unpaid) position for themselves.

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