Some thoughts on Mastodon culture, server rules, diversity and inclusiveness
I've been enjoying this space, and hope that everyone else can find a place they enjoy. I've been trying to think about how others would experience different corners of Mastodon. How diverse are the people in these corners, in all the meanings of diversity (gender, ethnicity, orientation, nationality, wealth, ability,... )? Does it seem comfortable for me because there are a lot of people like me around? If we make servers that are e.g. only for talking about one particular topic, what kinds of people will we find there? I personally don't just identify with one community, have never in my life found a single community where I feel like an insider. I appreciate that the server I am on allows me to show multiple facets of my personality, but I also appreciate that other people might only want exposure to one facet of random internet people's personalities. Anyways, I don't know what the right answers are, these questions are complicated. But, as we all make new servers with new rules, I hope we can think about who we are implicitly including and excluding with those rules.
Some thoughts on Mastodon culture, server rules, diversity and inclusiveness
Compuserve was a social network before the term existed. It was organized by forums by topic. A forum had several rooms for more specific areas in the topic. It worked well until bought by AOL where it withered and died. It was easy to check out other public forums. (Some were private.) This was before diversity became a factor, so I don't know how diverse the system was. I suspect not very diverse.
The forum I visited most would have welcomed anyone, I believe. Our moderator prided himself on never banning anyone except for a few guys who were known to disrupt discussions and one woman who would post absolute gibberish when off her meds.
My guess is for Mastodon, it would depend on the administrators of the servers and those in the community. The larger issue would be the responses from the federated feed.
Meta Mastodon Thoughts
@kristinmbranson, I think that is a really interesting point that rings true for me too.
I do think Mastodon is making me more agreeable. I would previously mostly mute viewpoints I weren't interested in but the only people/places I have silenced are ones that are explicitly hateful.
It’s nice to look at the feeds of more focused instance when I want to gain exposure to a specific topic, but more variety in my feed is want I want usually!