That does not mean the audience segmentation should match other places. Those other places have their own biases skewing their own audiences. I sure as hell don’t think mastodon ought to have the same representation of fascists as twitter does “to be fair”, for example. That place grows those, we do not.

There's a certain "type" of post that gets boosted a lot. It's hard to describe but it's a style that runs across the US spectrum but it isn't particularly relevant to me.

"Being inclusive" is like being "ethical" it only matters when things get hard.

https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116206693774408287

Of course there are no technical reasons this can't happen. My original post wasn't about technology but culture. The Mastodon culture (for complex reasons) chased away black twitter. It's doing the same with AI and my biggest worry, many other topics that "don't fit".

There *is* a culture to Mastodon outside of the tech and I'm suggesting that it is too exclusive. This ultimately hurts us.

But other folk have to want to listen to whatever they are saying. Servers and individuals can just decide not to. No one is guaranteed an audience, just the ability to speak.

As technologists we need to do more to smooth those junctures and make them less of a barrier. I hope in a few years when @carnage4life looks at his network, it feels more integrated and less separated.

What’s the definition of ‘thrive’? Federation means de facto, traditional metrics like ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’ won’t ever be on a scale like a monolith like Twitter/Bsky/Threads.

Mastodon is as open as it can possibly be… in fact, it is SO open, the scale of reach you can achieve with those other platforms is literally impossible. Millions of intersecting communities, at a more human scale.

the ai community needs to have a reckoning with the fact that the politics and the technology are deeply entwined to the point of being inseparable

this isn’t “oh we don’t like it and they do,” this isn’t about matters of taste and preference; this is “we attempt to recognize the full extent of the politically, environmentally, and socially problematic nature of this project while they don’t”

Mastodon is a system which attracts certain audiences because of its values and choices. Those are different to other systems. That’s perfectly fine. That’s good.

We don’t need to seek an audience with the same make up as other services. We need to work on systems that have the values we care about. Nothing more.

The biggest one is this: all three platforms that @carnage4life calls out are connected via ActivityPub. They are on one inter-network.

In theory, he should not need three different accounts, with three different follower groups. He should have one account, and all 103k followers (minus duplicates!) could be part of the same conversation, on whatever server platform they use.

In practice, few people do this today.

Based on your replies (including the founder of Mastodon!) I'm not optimistic that this platform will ever grow beyond niche microblogging for losers.

Would you permit or allow any community with which you disagree to participate on a platform, even if you’re not forced to participate?

A shortlist of thought experiments, to broaden the perspective, some of which are already here, some not…
- The oil & gas community
- Forestry workers (logging)
- The cryptocurrency community
- Workers at a chick rendering plant
- The finance industry
- Adult content creators
- Religious communities

Is there a litmus test for topics that you can or can’t discuss on the fediverse? Specific servers sure, but the whole fediverse?

Does that align with the values put forth by mastodon or the fediverse in general?

I don’t have the answers.

If you're all about the likes, boosts, and replies, I'm not here for you and won't follow. Same if you boost/post excessively to get attention.

If you're here only to drive traffic to your website, there's a good chance I'll mute or block you.

If you'e not using hashtags, I'll have a hard time discovering you.

If you're posting to start a discussion and participate in that discussion, you've got my attention so long as I find the topic and discussion interesting.

Most of us just don't want to follow them because it's tedious.

@Gargron