On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience ‘place’ at the federation level.
On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience ‘place’ at the federation level.
The main issue with Mastodon is that literally every single last Mastodon newbie is being told (or at least implied to) during on-boarding that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Nobody learns upon joining Mastodon that Mastodon is not an enclosed network. That the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. That there’s non-Mastodon stuff connected to Mastodon and constantly pumping non-Mastodon content into Mastodon.
Why? Because that’s easier to understand. A network of tens of thousands of virtually identical Twitters is already much harder to grasp than one Twitter website. It’s basically the maximum of what most people out there, even many die-hard übernerds, can grasp.
Tell them that it’s ackchually a network in which lots of Twitters and lots of different Twitters and lots of yet again different Twitters and lots of Reddits and lots of Facebooks and lots of YouTubes and lots of Instagrams and whatnot are all joined, and that you can follow what amounts to Facebook users or YouTube channels or subreddits from what amounts to Twitter. And they’ll nope out. Whoosh. Too complicated.
At least every other Mastodon user at this point in time “knows” that Mastodon is alone in the Fediverse, that the Fediverse consists of only Mastodon. Many Mastodon users spend literal years believing that. Reply to them from Friendica or Hubzilla in a typical Friendica or Hubzilla way, and they’ll shit brix and block you.
Mastodon’s entire culture is geared towards a Mastodon-only Fediverse. It was basically defined in mid-2022 (which is why it doesn’t include any Mastodon 4.x features either) by those who had fled Twitter in early 2022 after Elon Musk’s announcement to buy Twitter out. None of them knew about a Fediverse outside of Mastodon at that point.
And so you have a Mastodon culture that’s all about Mastodon’s features (or lack thereof), and that at least implies that any features that Mastodon doesn’t have (and that isn’t craved for by the majority of Mastodon users) are bad. You know, like more than 500 characters per post. And yet, Mastodon users are trying hard to force Mastodon’s culture upon places in the Fediverse that are very very much not like Mastodon at all, e.g. Lemmy or PieFed or Friendica or Hubzilla.
This is also why mainstream media, including most tech media, keep hammering on the Fediverse being Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. For starters, the truth would be incomprehensible to their audience. Besides, the journalists themselves haven’t understood that either.
As for BlackMastodon, it was another Fediverse = Mastodon thing. At least, nobody there was really Fediverse-savvy worth mentioning. Blackzilla or Blackstreams might have been a success. If only anyone there had known about Hubzilla or (streams).