Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
Not at all surprised.
I follow Alec on Mastodon and the vast majority of interactions over the past few months have been people aggressively "well ackshually"ing him or outright getting angry.
That isn’t to say it is all shit (I would like to think a few conversations I had with him were mutually pleasant). But his entire ethos is that he approaches problems from a practical “midwesterner” perspective. And that REALLY angers all the ideological nutjobs who are angry if anyone even suggests something that won’t advance their own pseudo-political goals.
And I’ve noticed it with a lot of other “celebrities” on Mastodon. The rest of us can have fun conversations while the shitheads stay to themselves. They are too high profile and the shitheads flock to them to make sure they understand why they are actually wrong and are a bad person for thinking something.
Mastodon is more for people who like to have interactions or conversations back and forth with other people, while the big platforms are for influencers/broadcasters and consumers/viewers-- any back and forth interactions there are more between commenters than with the influencer/broadcaster. Of course there is some overlap and exceptions to that characterization, but that’s how it generally seems to me.
So IMO it’s not a competition, there’s plenty of room for both types of SM. Depending on a person’s preference they may use just Masto, just big SM, or use both, each for different reasons. The problem is when people expect Mastodon to be just like xitter/bsky/threads and get upset that it isn’t. Relax and use whichever platform(s) you like.
When I want to have back and forth between people on a regular basis, I choose chat apps. Mastodon feels like it’s trying to be a poorly designed chat app.
Kind of a combination maybe? Since Mastodon lets you find new people with similar interests by browsing what’s on your local timeline or hashtags of interest, and you can still follow people of interest without any chatting. I don’t know much about chat apps but don’t you have to already know the people beforehand, or come across them via a mutual acquaintance or invite to a chat room?
Of course, Mastodon can be and is used for broadcast/consume interactions, but not as much, since most broadcasters want a huge audience with little interaction, which means a big platform, while the ones on Mastodon are probably looking for a bit more interactive experience with a smaller audience.
I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.
However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.
It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.
The amount of negativity on that thread alone is enough for me to realise that bluesky is not for me. I enjoy the positivity I find on the fedi and decided I wouldn’t use a platform that algorithmically rewards negativity when I was harassed off facebook. I am glad that others are finding it nicer than twitter but for me it seems much the same but without Elon Musk
So, unfortunately when I go to Mastodon these days it’s a bit of a ghost town. And I say unfortunately with sincerity - there are some things I really liked about the ethos behind it. However, the reason I’m posting this here is that I couldn’t put it there without getting instant shit. 🧵…
im confused. is it a ghost town, or is it full of people giving him instant ‘shit’?
“Ghost town” = Not driven to oversharing by algorithms.
“getting shit” = nobody wanting to listen to a youtuber’s outrage bait.
It must be confusing to log into the fediverse straight off of Youtube, though. “Why aren’t people compulsively clicking and subscribing to everything? How am I not being recommended radicalising posts by conspiracy theorists and terror organisations within five clicks?”
“Honey, this is Mastodon”
<switches to Blooskie>
“Ah, much better!”
Could be wrong, but possibly he’s talking about this about “getting instant shit”:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078
(look also at the reply)
My gut instinct is to think, this is just a dumb person being mean on the Internet.
But upon reflection, no one would say this on yt, twitter, Facebook, etc. because people are sharing actual bullshit on there. You would be dunked on so hard for complaining about yt videos or just ignored. There would be no point in complaining.
On one hand it’s nice that Mastodon doesn’t have ads, and people usually don’t share bullshit, but does that logically result in attracting users who shit on someone for sharing a YouTube video, because sometimes other videos on YouTube are bad?
I like that Mastodon has actual conversations but I don’t like this guy being dumb.
I’ve gotten an extremely similar comment on a couple posts I’ve made here on lemmy, in a video community no less.
Personally I just said something’s like “welp, sorry that’s not your preferred format.” and then just move on.
With how infrequent posts like that are, they don’t effect me at all, but It’d probably suck more if I was consistently getting negative comments like that,
I think he is saying that of the total interactions he gets he would expect a large amount of hostility to his opinion on Mastodon, and it is also a small population which is available to interact with on platform. Consistent, just talking about the experience and an objective measure. In my opinion Mastodon will be helped by Bluesky adding a paid membership. The worse it is the better for Mastodon, and honestly if people have already started moving out from Twitter to Bluesky they are not locked in yet so moving out again is easier, they already dropped Twitter but Bluesky is not solidified yet.
