@scottjenson@social.coop @carnage4life@mas.to

From my experience, it's a phenomenon far from just Mastodon.

As a bit of context, I mostly interact (or at least used to until a few weeks ago) with other Fediverse platforms such as those comprising the threadiverse (e.g. Lemmy, Piefed, MBin, etc.) as well as Mastodon and others, having been settled on a Sharkey/Calckey instance as my Fediverse daily driver. I got accounts across a few different platforms such as PixelFed (where I mostly post my own arts) and Mastodon (which I mostly use to federate my posts from both platforms).

I'm also quite eccentric, I don't really have a "tribe" or circle because I don't really fit labels. If I were to label myself, I'd be a rebellious, solitary Lilith-centered occultist because that's exactly who I've been lately (since roughly 2 yrs ago). This context is important bc what I'm recounting about my online experience may be biased due to this eccentricity of mine.

This said, the part of the Fediverse I've been slightly "successful" in interacting with is the threadiverse. By "successful", I mean threadiverse is where I tend (it's far from a certainty) to afford the most conversations (albeit extremely limited to the scope of the thread).

Outside the threadiverse, my experience is a complete vacuum.

My PixelFed posts, for example, got absolutely no replies whatsoever. At best, "numeric reactions" (upvotes and reposts), which feels hollow for someone whose (artistic and/or ritualistic) content tries to actually talk to people (you can quite notice that on this very reply I'm writing, in all of its length and verbosity), hoping to find those who hold similar beliefs (because the religious/esoteric aspect of my existence have been extremely meaningful to me).

Mastodon used to have a global feed where I got to see and to be seen from outside my "solipsistic bubble"... until mastodon.social suddenly decided to turn it off. To illustrate its importance, your post, for example, reached me through global feed (Calckey's). So it's not a bad thing as I hear people saying about the global feed sometimes.

A year ago, I used to have a Bluesky, too. Something similar used to happen: few (if any) textual interactions, higher numeric reactions, something that led me to delete my Bluesky account. Other social platforms I (used to) use (were/)have been even more devoid of the "social" aspect.

In the end it feels like the entire Web is turning into some kind of "Dark forest" from the "Dark forest hypothesis", the one that states that we don't see extraterrestrial civilizations because they're hiding themselves amidst the cosmic darkness and silence, out of fear that other civilizations would be hostile. Perhaps there are still humans on the Web, but they're too afraid of what they'd find at the other side of the online connection, so they end up retreating: that's Earth, that's us, the Pale Blue Dot fading into radio silence amidst the loud screech of our machines.