So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.

I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.

But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.

Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"

I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.

That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.

If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.

Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.

This. Fucking. Sucks.

And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.

So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.

Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.

@TechConnectify I understand where you're coming from, but I think that's less a problem with Mastodon and more a problem with humanity. It's a direct consequence of the freedom that decentralized platforms give you. It's the same with phone calls and emails where you get spam and can't do anything about it. It's either that or a closed, moderated platform.

Yes, it sucks, and there's not much we can do about it besides changing humanity. But it's freedom.

@can I don't have to answer spam calls, and it's really easy to ignore an email.

It's less easy to get a notification of someone responding to your post, which you might be excited to read, or you might end up feeling like crap.

The social parts of this place are the problem

@TechConnectify @can

Is the difference between fedi and email for you mostly a matter of expectations, or does volume of unwanted messages also play an important role (given that you don't publish your email in a very obvious way, I'd expect the volume to be much smaller for email, but maybe I'm way off)?