Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.
There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.
Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.
But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.
I don’t know how to word it, but what I really hate about mastodon is that the cancel culture is like 10x every other platform. As soon as you have a slight disagreement on something it’s because you’re a homophobe and a racist and an ableist and you hate autistic people and whatnot. If the word woke wasn’t so used by trump to mean not being a fascist, it would be reserved for this kind of people. Idk I don’t like that mastodon is basically full of self diagnosed neuro divergent people. There are two extremes on the political spectrum, there’s the facist and mastodonists. I understand why someone wouldnt want to stay on there, it’s genuinely not a good place to have discussions on
It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.
The kicker is, the population is still small enough that they could be easily overwhelmed and put in their place, but you need a real mass of semi-tightly networked people to come over and take over the space, and that’s… just not the way community migrations work. So they can fairly safely gatekeep the space.
Well, until Threads washes over everything. I don’t want to give shit to Zucks, but Threads will fundamentally change the makeup of the fedi microblog space in an instant, and that instant is growing ever closer.
You don’t understand why or how platforms like these got made, don’t you?
If enough people came in to “put them in their place”, the way you describe, this place would basically become Threads (or Twitter) anyway.
