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+++ title = "mainstreaming mastodon" summary = "[...] one of the replies was something along the lines of how we should be "turning Mastodon from a small platform for the fringes and oppressed minorities to a platform that welcomes more mainstream members" and i legit shuddered while reading that. what a terrifying thought." date = 2023-02-02T03:17:00-06:00 source = "https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/109794389005775846" +++
the shit i see on the mastodon issue tracker is driving me to just build my own thing because i honestly think whatever good culture mastodon has is quite possibly not long for this world
some people literally just walk in and ask "why is this not like twitter" and demand that it be changed to suit their whims. and i feel like gargron is starting to take their side because gargron just wants More. old users be damned, they're just a vocal minority now.
i mean, i wanna be wrong, but i don't actually think there are any guiding principles behind mastodon except "whatever gargron wants", so it is at the very least a possibility, if not a credible threat
there was a post i saw earlier yesterday about something like, idk, i think biz stone said he was advising gargron, and one of the replies was something along the lines of how we should be "turning Mastodon from a small platform for the fringes and oppressed minorities to a platform that welcomes more mainstream members" and i legit shuddered while reading that. what a terrifying thought.
on some level, sure, it's probably cool for "mainstream" people to have something healthier than corporate social media. but i'm really concerned that they'll ruin it for the rest of us, exactly those "fringe and oppressed minorities" who were here for years. years ago we talked about the sort of "detoxification cycle" that new users would go through, and with every new wave, people acclimate less and less. they import more of their old behaviors uncritically.
ultimately? i think things will probably settle in at a point that's better than others but worse than it could have been.
this exact kind of mentality by newcomers who feel entitled to influence
you don't owe the top of the pyramid jack squat. The early movers need you more than you need them.
if i may be so frank, can i just say: we don't "need" you at all. our experiences are rich and valuable and span over half a decade. you're certainly welcome to be around here, and you're welcome to use this software, but you have no right to demand we center you above ourselves.
also the idea that there's some sort of "secret mastodon development cabal" is ridiculous. for better or worse, there's gargron, and i guess in some ways there's claire, and that's about it. everyone else is simply acting independently in their own interests and on their own agendas. the entire reason i worry can be summed up by the fact that gargron has unilateral decision-making power and final say. but, to his credit, he does consider the consequences.
anyway, anything i say is with the disclaimer that i am not a representative of anyone else, but perhaps i should be more overt and assertive about it. when i say something "without 100% certainty" i am not implying a vague recollection of events, i am only indicating that i have no decision power.
tangentially, the real problem with these design decisions in mastodon is that they're inconsistent, precisely because it's all on gargron, and gargron is not strongly in favour of these decisions. it all depends on the feedback and advocacy of community members to convince him to do anything, and then he'll do it however he wants to or ends up doing it.
real consistency? we'd not have numbers in explore/trending either, nor on detailed status views, nor in api. no "1+". it'd probably be some boolean like has_replies or something, which translates to an icon indicator to show the thread.
but doing it that way takes commitment. it takes decisiveness. and that's simply not there.
there's a lot of these scattered around the project codebase -- places where gargron wanted to do something one way, a lot of the community had to vocally disagree, and we ended up with a half-measure
there was a similar case around hiding your follower counts, where gargron decided to only allow hiding the contents because he thought follower counts were important signals of account quality. even though the counts can be faked (and they have been!)
once again, though... you have to give the guy credit for not rejecting all this outright. it's the only reason we ended up with anything better than twitter instead of Yet Another Twitter Clone.
to quote someone anonymously:
i don't like a lot of the decisions mastodon makes but i god damn respect "we have a philosophy and that's why we are doing it that way" in particular if the philosophy is thinking carefully about how decisions affect the minority