@8r3n7@mstdn.ca I think what Mastodon has is the opposite of diversity. There's a very sharp winnowing of who is willing to jump through the hoops to be here and who is motivated to be here in the first place.
Of course there are sub-communities but you can only make a sub-community out of the whole and the whole is different here.
I'm far from the only person to have issues. I just keep hoping it will get bettter and I'm getting pretty close to the end of my tolerance.
@susankayequinn@wandering.shop
I won't disagree or contradict. But we should be hesitant to draw conclusions from our anecdotal experiences. How much of "Mastodon", the epi-phenomenon, do we individually know?
@susankayequinn@wandering.shop
Do you believe that, if you started over from scratch, following only people who made interesting posts in the trending timeline, that your experience would be more-or-less the same as currently? That, to me, is a more reliable test of the universality of your experience.
Not to dismiss your personal experience. I just think it would take some careful research and data collection to extrapolate it to everyone.
@susankayequinn@wandering.shop
For me, the infuriating thing about all online "communities" is that they are free-floating fragmentary societies where people only bring parts of themselves. Worse, they have little or no real history or continuity. Even those that seem to be stable (like, I don't know, Twitter) are extremely fragile—far more so that IRL cultures.
Then again, IRL cultures are also growing more ephemeral, in proportion to our ability to join and leave them.
Maybe the benefit of a larger online forum, like Bluesky, as long as it still has sane people in charge—or at least in the majority—is better moderation, whether official or otherwise.
It's all a bit "experiment", except it has no controls, no supervisors, and no real experimental goals…
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