Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?
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@scottjenson @cratermoon @evan
Which gauntlet?Nobody is stopping you posting. Nobody is stopping you firing up an instance on a $30 second hand rpi on your home internet, or a vps. There is very minimal oversight on creating an account on most instances. Moderation is manual, minimal and usually only reacts to reports.
If you're posting with hash tags your readers will look for and you're getting nowhere it's because there's just no "organic" audience for what you're doing. Maybe check out an instance you share more interests with? Find your people.
I'm on this thing, at least in part, because I do not want a "for you", I don't want a "people like you wanted" or a "trending" or a "most heart upvoted by gold users" algo feed. I definitely don't want a "somebody paid me to show you this post" feed. What I want is to see posts from the people on whom I clicked the "show me this persons posts" button
If users don't want to read/interact with the content you'll find "Boosting" it by changing the machinery of the platform is just going to piss people off. They'll just block you, or defederate
I don't see how "people wanting to read your posts" is too high of a bar — in the context of a posts by/about AI there's a good chance the poster didn't even care enough to sit down and write the post. Why in the world would anybody be ok having that "boosted" in their faces. More importantly, would they be happy about it?
Maybe post something appealing, like cat pics or lockpicking or xcom shitposts or some gay shit or a skirt go spinny? That ikea shårk is pretty popular on here, maybe that's something?
@EndlessMason @scottjenson @cratermoon @evan this. I’ve been struggling to articulate that this whole conversation appears to be nonsense. Nobody is stopping AI bros or even straight-up Nazis from joining mastodon. This platform is literal anarchy.
Anybody can join. Anybody can say whatever they want. Anyone can chose to block or defederate from anyone they want. There are no limits or rules, beyond those imposed by individual instances and users over their own feeds.
What more could you possibly ask for in terms of ‘inclusiveness’?
The only thing you cannot have on this platform is a guaranteed audience. If people don’t want to follow you or see your toots, they have that option. There absolutely, 100% are pro-AI people on Mastodon. Technically, even Truth Social is Mastodon, it’s just not federated with anyone else.
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@scottjenson One reason I'm not on Threads/Bluesky anymore is that they both feel like an echo chamber, just a very large one. I've heard it expressed by others here: the other platforms have a strong US presence which is hard to steer clear of.
There's a certain "type" of post that gets boosted a lot. It's hard to describe but it's a style that runs across the US spectrum but it isn't particularly relevant to me.
@scottjenson I should add that I'd welcome more people on Mastodon. But part of the UX challenge, I think, is to prevent one big group from sucking air out of the room. Even if that group has a lot of subgroups.
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@scottjenson @Gargron why do you feel that AI as a product has any special "too important to fail" property such that people who choose to invest in it are entitled to systemic protections that guarantee their product visibility and success in a place where most people do not want it? This is not gatekeeping a person, this is choosing not to buy a product. I like Obasanjo's writing just fine but making articles about a topic that I do not want to read is his choice as a professional.
@scottjenson @Gargron and the comparison with black Twitter is a huge false equivalency as black people cannot opt out of being discriminated, they write about their experience and organization, and being hostile to that writing is tantamount to being hostile to them as people. I absolutely affirm that happened in 2022. But "being an AI supporter" is not by any measure a type of otherized social group subject to discrimination. It is a PRODUCT and if your product doesn't sell you have to take it
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Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.
I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!
I don't understand why growth is a metric on this inherently non-capitalist platform. It doesn't need to get bigger - it just needs to be fun and useful for the people who use it.
Niche communities used to be everywhere, without expectations of growth. If I was on a forum for VW Golf owners, the admins didn't complain that we needed to attract Ford Focus owners too.
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@scottjenson @Gargron It feels like you are looking at this backwards to me. The *system* needs to be fair and the result is what happens. When Black people told Mastodon they needed safety features like shared blocklists etc; that could benefit *everyone*, they were not listened to. They left. That was a culture choice at Mastodon HQ.
What do AI people / journalists need *to express themselves safely*? Safety and inclusivity to engage is the goal. Not being owed an audience.
@mattwilcox this right here is all that needs to be said. I don't understand how somebody with so much experience in their bio as @scottjenson apparently has could get it so ass-backwards. First, Mastodon drags their feet with features. Then they let one instance be like 1/2 of the network. Then marginalised people leave because moderation is poor and features are not there. And now you want to fix it for the AI bros? Come on.
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
@scottjenson Interesting reference to black twitter in regard of AI. You know there's a whole documentary about how blinkin' racist AI systems are?
Coded Bias it was called. Perhaps you should check it out. https://www.codedbias.com/about
Please don't use the term inclusivity with regard to AI people. I'd argue that welcoming AI people would make Mastodon less inclusive.
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@bogosian @scottjenson I’m not head of Mastodon! Have a good day.
@Gargron @bogosian @scottjenson nobody in fact. It’s from the people.
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
@scottjenson a few points to consider, I suppose.
1. What if the voices aren’t welcome because of what they say being antithetical to the values of the Fediverse?
2. Why is *more* always the goal? I have more human interactions on here with <10k followers than I do on other platforms with 100k+
3. Most people are welcome here, it isn’t pollution because there’s no algorithm to present those people to me. It’s far from perfect here, but is natural that smaller, more ideologically driven communities are more politically-minded, and prepared to stand on principle if they disagree with someone’s politics.
4. Journalists unquestioningly hyping a failing technology aren’t in journalism, they’re in marketing
5. Maybe that technology isn’t welcome in real communities because it is inherently harmful, built primarily on theft of our labour and creative output, and only serves to enrich the Big 4/5/6 etc. Many of us moved here to get out of their orbit.
6. I hope you didn’t just compare people not wanting to listen to corporate mouthpieces to marginalised communities being mistreated. Truly through the looking glass if so.
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@trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron fedi is like a big restaurant (https://www.esdin.net/post/the-restaurant-analogy-mastodon-the-fediverse)
and anyone can have their own community. That having been said, nobody is forced to be an audience for things they aren't interested in. Fedi has a culture, pretty diverse and inclusive of all who aren't obnoxious. Some people don't understand fedi culture when they come over from other more "obnoxiousness normalized" places, and can't handle the culture shift. Fedizens tend to be hostile to influencers and the ragebait that tends to be promoted on obnoxious networks. Fedi skews very anticapitalist and hostile as fuck to capitalist argument amplification and the "social networks must keep growing or lose relevance" mentality. Fedi is too big already, actually... The big instances are too big to moderate. People have said that for years. Fedi is like making real life friends. Remember that? Corp platforms try to make us forget human connection in favor of parasocial bs that keeps people from making real friends.Gross AI art isn't winning this any readers
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@TeflonTrout @Mabande @corbden @isagalaev @scottjenson @devlord @carnage4life Is this the post I saw you subtooting about? I’ve seen people making the “echo chamber” argument before and they basically want to spew bigotry without consequences. I thought that was what you were subtooting about. But this isn’t that. I feel like one of us has misunderstood something and decided to get really mad over it.
@MisuseCase @Mabande @corbden @isagalaev @scottjenson @devlord @carnage4life
Good looking out, but it is not. I'll try and find the original later, I got busy at work. It was a journalist type who posted the one I'm talking about. Thank you for checking though.
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Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.
I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!
@scottjenson I'm not sure what the problem is supposed to be here. The fediverse has about 1/10th the MAUs of either of the other two platforms, so 18k is a proportionately high number of followers. Lower engagement makes sense with fewer followers, but without more info, it's impossible to know if that engagement is disproportionately lower. And particularly given Meta's forays into AI bots, there's a good chance that more of Mastodon's engagement is authentic. If anything, I'd say that post speaks comparatively well of Mastodon's embrace of journalists. Our big sin is just not being as populous as the corporate platforms.
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@cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron This is a very rich ethics question hidden in a specific example.
Would you permit or allow any community with which you disagree to participate on a platform, even if you’re not forced to participate?
A shortlist of thought experiments, to broaden the perspective, some of which are already here, some not…
- The oil & gas community
- Forestry workers (logging)
- The cryptocurrency community
- Workers at a chick rendering plant
- The finance industry
- Adult content creators
- Religious communitiesIs there a litmus test for topics that you can or can’t discuss on the fediverse? Specific servers sure, but the whole fediverse?
Does that align with the values put forth by mastodon or the fediverse in general?
I don’t have the answers.
@trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron AI adult content creators at the chick rendering plant.
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@trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Not sure how a discussion of what is *allowed* is relevant here. AI talk certainly isn't forbidden.
@tarmil @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Yeah, we talk about AI every day here on Mastodon. For entertainment purposes only (to quote Microsoft).
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
anyone who unironically uses the word "engagement" to describe social interactions can fuck themselves off a cliff. their priorities are sick and their motivations are deranged, and workshopping ways to attract more content farmers isn't going improve anything
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Gross AI art isn't winning this any readers
@Officeplant I know. I agree. I didn't write it, I thought the article itself was well written despite the gross ai "art".
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
@scottjenson maybe don’t conflate “AI People” with marginalized communities you ignoramus.
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@scottjenson I’m not interested in following any “AI people”. That doesn’t make it an echo chamber. We don’t need equal amounts of people who love puppies and want to kill puppies, not everything needs to be equally represented.
@Gargron @scottjenson I used to joke that I'm just a perl script, and LLMs went and ruined the joke.
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@scottjenson it’s kind of what you said. Read what you said again if you don’t believe me. Black Twitter didn’t succeed on Mastodon not due to “gatekeeping”. But a failure of gatekeeping, at keeping the baddies out. E.g. racists or those not sensitive enough to recognize their racism.
@devlord @scottjenson current theory: scott is jake archibald with a stick on moustache
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
@scottjenson Which part of "federated" has your precious Apple-trained and AI-fawning mind not been able to wrap around? Go ahead and build a community of prompt fondlers. You can then all sit around and fondle prompts in your timelines. It'll be great. And the rest of this federated mess IS TOTALLY WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS to block your prompt fondling instance. Like we block nazi instances. And Trump instances. And whatever-the-fuck-else instances we don't want nothing to do with. It's FEDERATED. You not getting that in your head is your fault alone.
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@bogosian @scottjenson I’m not head of Mastodon! Have a good day.
@Gargron @bogosian @scottjenson Yeah, direct all complaints to John Mastodon
