@SymTrkl I am trying to make clear in a direct way that in order for me to stay here, shit has to change.
And I am tired of being told I need to change clients, change instances, use Arch, or whatever the heck.
I don't know what specifically makes this place so uniquely irksome, but a lot of it is how the userbase chooses to respond to things. And that's in no small part encouraged by the way moderation is put entirely on the receiver.
@SymTrkl I have argued many times, and will continue to do so, that one of the biggest problems Mastodon has is that other people cannot see a lot of the crap that I see, AND there aren't any effective ways for the crowd to reinforce good behavior and discourage bad behavior.
Until people sit with that reality, this simply isn't a functional social media tool for me.
@TechConnectify @SymTrkl "There aren't any effective ways for the crowd to reinforce good behavior and discourage bad behavior."
This is a really important thing. For federated social media to function over time this needs to be solved. Unfortunately, I don't have any real insight on potential solutions.
@aeischeid I have an idea of how it could be achieved, but it runs contrary to the primary objective of most social media users, so it is unlikely to be widely adopted.
The root problem is people feeling entitled to access to other people.
A denylist approach only reinforces this dynamic.
In order to build functional social media, we need deliberate networks of shared values, rather than the current spaghetti+wall method
(removed techconnectify from reply for sake of their sanity)
Do you see any obvious problems with a stronger version of "no DMs" where one doesn't ever see any posts that are not public?
@robryk A lot of these problems are rooted in a fundamental assumption that, for any particular problem, our options are limited to dealing with it, or appealing to higher powers to solve the problems for us.
I don't think these deeply rooted problems on fedi can be meaningfully mitigated or addressed except by intentionally operated communities which build and maintain their own tools.
@katanova @robryk @SymTrkl "intentionally operated communities" is not what I think most people using social media are expecting or maybe even wanting. Maybe certain Mastodon instance can really pull that off, and that is great, but for any kind of broad appeal there need to be instances for more casual users. Being a casual user should not have to mean being exposed to harassment or whatever
@aeischeid I'm not particularly concerned with what is beneficial to fedi as a whole. I'm more concerned with what's materially beneficial to the people who use fedi.
Maintaining the system as it is, isn't particularly beneficial to anyone's lives.
We need a different approach if social networks are going to be anything other than a drain on people's time, attention, and energy.
@aeischeid "Broad appeal" is what eggheads like Website Boy care about, as a metric of their success.
Being a casual user means being detached from moderation and operation decisions
So long as we feed that detached, entitled dynamic in how our tools and systems are shaped, we're going to continue to deal with systems that fail to meaningfully fulfill us in our lives
Yes, I understand that most people on social media aren't looking for fulfillment
Maybe that's the problem.
I wasn't suggesting appealing to higher power. The change I described is a purely client-side one (and is probably similarly confusion-engendering as the "ignore DMs" switch some people enable).
@robryk I think any solution that relies on the users continuing to send up prayers to Website Boy for relief are doomed to fail.
We've got to build our own solutions, or else we just continue to rely on other people to solve the problems we don't think we can solve ourselves.
So in short, I dunno, that's up to individual communities to implement.
I strongly support modular and extensible projects like Bonfire for this reason.
@aeischeid @SymTrkl