Breaking the law of silence about the mental health crisis in Queer Fedi, and the Tech Mastodon clique that makes it so miserable.
This is a very long post, so I imagine few will read it (fair enough), but I felt it added significant value to fediverse discourse and haven’t seen it around, so here it is.
This is a lot of the problem that I see with social media as a whole. Doesn’t matter if it’s the fediverse or regular corporate social media platforms. The problem is users in echo chambers spouting a lot of things that don’t ever take into account the whole situation.
The “anyone who naysays anything I believe or say” crowd is alive and well on both sides of the political aisle and they use the same tactics.
-Anyone who has a logical problem with something I’m trying to do is a Nazi or a sealion.
-Anyone “who didn’t vote because they have a moral reason to abstain to show the political party that it’s not good enough to just not be the other guy anymore” is a Trump supporter or a vote for Trump.
- Anyone who brings up the fact that there are nearing 1 million homeless people in America in 2025 and only 1 in 10 homeless people actually have the opportunity to vote - is using whataboutism arguments.
What I’m saying is, it’s not just the transgender community seeing these problems and the problem is people on social media as a whole existing only in echo chambers.
The thing is, echo chambers are natural but they’re also divisive. The people that exist in them peer pressure each other and subvert every narrative, pitting people who are nominally on the same side against one another because they don’t happen to agree on one or two issues, or don’t agree on how to effect real change. And anyone who admits that there are problems that need to be fixed before we can move forward, or education that needs to happen in order for everybody to get on the same page and work towards a common goal gets alienated or excommunicated.
Believe it or not, this happens in every single community. And while I think it’s good that baseless reports were ignored in this instance, I don’t know that 1. This is happening everywhere, and 2. Every report isn’t baseless just because you happen to be on the side of the person who the reports are against.
The fact that baseless reports were not acknowledged or verified in the other instance is exactly the problem. Because the problem is people. So on the one hand, you have a homeless person being harassed for their politics because their real life experience negates the feeling some people in the platform have and those people reported her for it. And on the other hand you have a deranged individual actively weaponizing the report button in order to harass someone with intent and their reports are at best being phoned in by admins and mods who cannot keep up with the influx, and at worst are being viewed partially rather than impartially and allowed to victimize the user that was targeted, which was the intent.
The cognitive dissonance is happening on both sides of the aisle, and even though the way it manifests is absolutely different in some ways, the fact is, it is happening and it’s a detriment to any movement that organizes or attempts to organize.
wtf is this
Read the whole thing. Everyone involved in this, author included, seems to be batshit insane?
I’m about halfway through.
I didn’t realize Mastodon was big enough for so much fucking drama.
Although it wasn’t really specifically the point of the post, reading it’s made me think that maybe the whole idea of “universally” federated social media (even excluding the spam etc) is fundamentally untenable regardless of the technical protocol, and that treating it as the end-goal might not be the play.
I didn’t read the post (sorry, it was too long and I’m tired) but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.
but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.
I guess, yeah, but it has tradeoffs. Each island loses even more diversity of perspective (e.g., political echo-chamber, or building fedi tools that might work well for their island but make no sense for other islands), and making it harder to use as replacements for Xitter / reddit etc.
Like, a lot of discussion happens on topics like “how can we make Mastodon better for former Xitter users?” or the same thing but for lemmy and reddit. Maybe they’re fundamentally not the right questions to ask if the endgame state of federated social media is that it isn’t a direct replacement of centralized services.
I mean what are we arguing here? People fox holed themselves long before even the internet. People look for affirming information and topics. Its a psychological behavior you’d have to fundamentally design around which would likely result in just showing you shit you dont want to see.
But (it sounds like) you’re talking about voluntary grouping, where if you dump 100 people together at a party or networking event or whatever, theoretical-person Amy will vibe best with certain types of people, and so ends up chatting up Cleo, Ming, and Kiara because they share similar interests / humor / whatever – but there’s nothing actually stopping someone from outside of that from walking up and chatting with the newly-formed group. That’s kind of what (I thought) we had now in the fediverse, where for example I can go talk about Australian news on aussie.zone, jump to lemmy.world to talk about fediverse stuff, swing by redd.that to look at Unraid updates (all communities I’m part of), but then browse the incoming feed of everything coming into my instance and view a whole lot of communities which I’m not part of, most of which I never will be. It’s (nearly) all open-by-default. Yes, there’s some blocking / defederation etc, but the default state is that users on one instance can (whether or not they actually choose to) talk to other instances.
If a new user randomly picks any instance from the top 50 (of any fediverse software, excluding maybe Pixelfed since that’s probably the least interoperable with the others) to join up on, chances are very good (but will vary based on personal interest) they’ll be able to participate in like >=90% of the conversations that they want to in the sense that their instance is federating with all the people and communities they’re interested in.
What I’m thinking-out-loud-ing (“arguing” sounds a bit more assertive than what I’m aiming for) is that this might not be how ActivityPub would optimally be used; maybe just because ActivityPub could allow 90% of users to talk to 90% of users, it doesn’t mean that’s actually the best way to use it. Maybe it serves the user’s interests better if there are clusters of “sub-fediverses” instead.
As a grounded example: Beehaw partially self-isolates from the wider fediverse (it’s not just that users could communicate but don’t; the connection is severed) in an effort to better maintain its vibe and values. I had always viewed that as the exception to the norm, but maybe having (e.g.,) clusters of instances that only communicate with a comparatively smaller amount of other instances, say the other instances in its “cluster” plus a few other clusters only (as opposed to most instances communicating with most other instances) is a different – and potentially healthier – way to architect things. So I guess partial, selective federation rather than (what felt to me like) the current goal of “if it uses ActivityPub, we want to communicate with it*”. * with obvious exclusions for spam etc.
I can see your point. Alternatively, and I know this is precisely what people dont want to do, but you can just have multiple accounts. I do, and Jerboa makes switching between them painless. This grants me different “views” of the fediverse based on instance (as you said). I actually like this, as its more choices for me to choose what I want to see at what time.
well the safe island instances can all access discussions on the free-for-all instances and we all exchange ideas and learn from eachother and get along famously
Whoah
