[tptacek]

I read this thread and it's not really clear what it's about. It seems to be about the need to mute and block people explicitly. I haven't had to do that much with Mastodon. I had to do it a lot on Twitter, and by all accounts it has gotten much, much worse.

I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.

My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

[johnnyanmac]

>I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.

I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.

we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.

[PaulHoule]

Personally I couldn't stand to use Mastodon without a lot of keyword blocks and blocked users.

There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.

There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...

and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.

[tptacek]

I have never had that problem, nor have I personally seen anyone have that problem.

The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.

I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.

[tedunangst]

It's funny. We yearn for the days when everybody had a quirky website at ~username on their university server, but all those sites disappeared when you graduated.