Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person@instance) and groups (!group@instance), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren’t any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
“Mastodon” is a program. It has absolutely no agency whatsoever, and without agency there is no responsibility.
So now you’re probably really saying “Mastodon’s developers” have responsibility.
Good. Pay them. Writing software is a huge job, and getting your software suddenly stress-tested by millions of users abandoning a sinking ship is a good way to get overloaded and even burned out. So you think they have responsibility for something? Help them get it done. Beginning with paying their foundation so that they can hire more people to do it.
Coming in and writing a huge rambling set of demands is not how you’re going to get anything changed.
@ttmrichter
Yes, donating helps them develop the project, which is great and I encourage everyone who can to do so, but it doesn’t change the direction of the development. Mastodon is ultimately people powered, making spreading sentiments a reasonable way to change this, if you’re not going to develop the project yourself.
Making statements is as much bullshit as “raising awareness”. If you don’t have skin in the game–as a developer, as a funder, as part of governance–your bleatings are as valuable as the bleatings of anybody else commenting without cost.
Get involved. Get skin in the game. Participate in the process of making Mastodon. Hell, if you absolutely must bleat without working, at least bleat in the right place: the actual project’s communications channels!
Bleating in Lemmy that Mastodon must change is just performance art.
Developing is not for everyone.
And I posted this in microblog format via Friendica specifically so that it would also (primarily) reach Mastodon. It’s got 27 boosts, which is quite alright for such a long post!
I’d like to add that the developers’ communication channels is a very inappropriate place to complain for someone who is uninvolved with the project.
(And you can tell that this is primarily directed at Mastodonians because the title is also the first line, because of the seemingly excessive explanation of how this place works and because of the hashtags and the mentions in the end of the post. Also, why would I specifically write to fedi tips if this was just a Lemmy post?)
“Reaching Mastodon” is still just gum-flapping. Reach Mastodon developers. Use their issue tracker. Address them directly. All you’re doing here is beating a pot with a ladle while parading around the house.
@ttmrichter
Well it’s not an actual issue; it’s just my ideas of what would be better. If only I think it, why should they do anything? What I’m really trying to do is to see what people think and spark some thoughts.