So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.
I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.
But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.
Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"
I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.
That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.
If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.
Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.
This. Fucking. Sucks.
And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.
So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.
And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.
But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.
@TechConnectify This sucks... I hope we can find a proper solution :(
For the stacked notifications, I use https://elk.zone which works quite nice, but might be really hard at your scale. The platform is still very green, it needs a few more years to get to where Twitter was when we left.
@Emi@TechConnectify phanpy.social is also good for this. It is important to stress that neither Elk or Phanpy are instances you have to move to, they are just clients you can use in your browser.
Other than that I'm sorry about the abuse and issues. I, and many with me, really wants this to be a platform for the masses. But we need to find solutions to this.
merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and
block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches.
"block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches"
That doesn't match my experience at all.
I have had abuse occasionally, but my experience is that it was handled well by admins and did not carry on.
"merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and"
If it was personal abuse then that would usually breach most instance rules.
But it's difficult to know whether something breaks rules if you can't see it.
@feditips@TechConnectify the point is that there is a world of difference between abuse and merely receiving relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse and will not breach most instance rules but nevertheless crowd out meaningful interactions. Twitter has/had a quality filter specifically for preventing those replies turning into notifications.
" relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse..."
Again, it's sort of difficult to comment on this without seeing an example, even a hypothetical one.
However, with closed source filters you will never know what they are improperly hiding from you. There might be good stuff there which Twitter etc is preventing you seeing.
“eh, I'd prefer if all the YouTubers get out of here anyways. go to bluesky or whatever corpo bullshit.”
is probably a pretty good example of the sorts of comments / sentiments that don’t add value to a conversation, but aren’t abusive and don’t deserve to get equal priority ranking with those from people who actually follow & want to engage with someone.
@feditips@interpipes I would like to not see it. I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it
If that's too spicy a take, so be it. But that's how Twitter's Quality Filter worked and that's why I could exist there with 90K followers but being here with 30K followers is really starting to suck.
And please don't say this is a problem I need to solve. This is a culture issue the platform needs to work on
This is specifically about replies. There are currently no consequences for bad behavior on Mastodon unless the OP takes action against someone.
That's just not tenable for accounts like myself to engage in. I want a filter on my replies - I don't care what people say about YouTubers in their own spaces, but as far as I'm concerned, I should have at least some modicum of agency over discussions that I start.
There is too much for me to report, and much of what I experience that is irritating isn't likely to be deemed abuse anyway.
People are just rude, or mean, or pedantic, or arrogant, or snarky, or insulting. I wouldn't report them for that anyway, but I still don't want to have to see it.
Everyone here is allergic to automated anything but guess what? I think it's needed.
@TechConnectify It's so painful to see / hear this. It's even more embarrassing to see that some people don't even have the slightest social decency to at least not be hostile in this very thread. Mind-boggling.
I can't speak to how this compares to Twitter, how bad the situation is for accounts with more followers, let alone have any solutions. It's just a shame to see that people have a bad time on the platform that I personally generally feel at home. 😔
@lschuermann It pains me that I need to keep saying this so often. It has been a struggle simply to be believed about this, honestly. But I can understand that as a mighty-privileged person my concerns are (rightly) a low-priority.
I appreciate your thoughts, though. And I'm not going away just yet.
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