I saw a post that said something like “I love mastodon … “ & listed good things about the fediverse & mastodon in particular: ad free, decentralized, not amped up on manipulative algorithms— but in that list was “there’s a learning curve to the tech that will filter for people I relate to—“
Don’t get me wrong,nerds, I probably also have more in common with people who can deal with tech barriers— but I don’t find this valuable. I learn more from those who excel in areas where I’m a disaster— 🧵
And here is this person making the subtext I’ve been dreading text. Yeah it’s confusing to get on the fediverse but this isn’t a bug it’s a feature— a filter.
Well yeah I can see that. There are hardly any working class people, people of color, people over 50 who aren’t computer people.
This isn’t good. There are lots of places to chat with tech people— IRL and online. It’s nice. It’s limiting. IDK is this the real philosophy? What do *you* want to see?
Communities often lose their appeal when they become larger. This might be a (rather poor) reaction about attempting to limit growth.
Let's assume growth is inevitable in this case. The question then is what kinds of incentives one can create around joining to retain/gain properties of the community one cares about. Having joining require inventiveness surely promotes inventiveness in new joinees (and usually adds other requirements that are orthogonal to that, like amount of free time). However, technical complications _in the area of software_ do not really promote inventiveness or curiosity nearly at all past some critical point, because they can always be surmounted by following a guide. So, that creates a bias in the direction of more free time and some lower bar on patience -- neither of the two seem to me to be related to properties of the community one might wish to retain.
I would like to retain e.g. anti-outrage and gain more curiosity in this whole community. I don't expect technical hurdles to actually act in that direction, _even if they used to when the network was smaller_. Sadly, I don't know of any ways to actually promote them other than by example~
