Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?
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@bp @scottjenson and that’s completely fine
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@dgodon@mastodon.online @scottjenson@social.coop @Gargron@mastodon.social I would suggest against using "protected class" in general community discussion. I understand you mean it as a shorthand for various marginalised communities, but "protected class" is a legal term and makes your concerns sound more legalistic and dry than they should.
@flesh @dgodon @Gargron @scottjenson
I think the time spent suggesting this would have been spent better by suggesting Scott not say "This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022" because it's absolutely not.
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@scottjenson @Gargron I just came back to my Mastodon account and one of the first things I see is people who have an interest in something being compared to puppy-killers by the "head" of Mastodon.
<turns it back off again>
@bogosian It's interesting how that is your major issue in this thread, not the "Product Strategy Advisor to Mastodon Core team" unironically comparing AI bros to Black Twitter. (That comparison just makes me want to puke. My advice to the Mastodon Core team: Do not consult tone-deaf douche bags.) Anyway, bye!
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@ben @scottjenson So, a little context from a former journalist: I asked my boss if I could start and manage a mastodon account for my publication, and she advised that we would have to conduct a study to justify the use of my time - a company asset - by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it and I ended up deleting the account I had already started. It's often not a matter of the journalist's lack of imagination or excess of ego, but their need to meet metrics.
@spiegelmama @ben @scottjenson
If you have to use 2 units company time to evaluate whether the 1 unit of company time you're using is being well spent, there's already a problem
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@JMMaok @spiegelmama tbh it does not seem tooo hard to me to measure "engagement" atleast for the number a link is clicked (which could be used as a measure on how much "traffic" a presence on masto brings you).
You can do analytics like this in a very unintrusive way not even much needed.
A german publication and NGO that fights fake news uses a simple UTM parameter in the links they share here by attaching "utm_source=mstdn" which could give you a hint on where visitors are coming from when they click a link. Should not be to intrusive tbh. And analytics software can track this.
> by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it
So tbh this seems more like a skill issue more than "there is no way to track this stuff". using a simple parameter is not intrusing privacy all that much tbh and may be deamed acceptable.
Obviously a discussion with the community of where the account posts if this is fine.Yeah but fedi also has a disproportionate number of people who are going to use tools that remove tracking parameters from links...
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@scottjenson @carnage4life when I post about tech, I get the most engagement in Mastodon. And I write in Spanish, go figure. Much much more than in Bluesky, where you seem you can only talk about politics. But you have to know what to say and the kind of people in here. People in here seems to have more deep tech and programming expertise, are more open source savvy and won,t give all their data to the big tech "a la mode" in a given time. And we (I myself included) are quite skeptic about AI.
@scottjenson @carnage4life not about the AI that has been in use for decades in R+D (good), but with the generative one, that has caused many creative people to loose it's job. Also with Copilots, GOTs and things like that, that are also seen as gotos for people that want to ask a machine everything in their life's. Acritically. Also about the LLMs and systems backed by companies that are hemorrhaging money and have caused a RAM and SSD shortage, apart from the energy consumption.
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@scottjenson seems like now you're shifting the goalpost. are we talking about "people don't like / fave / reply as much" (engagement) or "people actively tells me they don't want my content here" (and again, on which server are they? that's always an important aspect too)
ironically this thread and related posts of mine have seen a TON of engagement today. clearly the #monoculture agrees with me...
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@scottjenson your fifth point, comparing prejudice against "AI people" to prejudice against Black people is, frankly, shocking.
Evangelising about AI is a choice you make; you're willingly embracing an industry that's destroying the planet and the internet, and enabling an increasingly fascist capitalism.
I will judge that, I will call that out, and then I will block anyone doing so.
"AI people" are not a "marginalized community", and pretending that "this is just like racism" is a false equivalency which misappropriates and trivialises the centuries-long battle for racial equality and justice.
Get a fucking grip, actually learn something about social justice, and stop thinking that being called out for something is in any way comparable to the oppression that Black people face on a daily basis.
@scottjenson and if you're specifically talking about the "Fedi is a HOA" argument that Black people were making, you're fundamentally misunderstanding it.
It's not that having cultural rules and norms is bad, it's that they can be structurally racist. Perhaps the example most often given was the Fedi norm of "please CW racism", which might look well-intended and evenhanded to a white person, but has the structural effect of shifting onto people of colour the responsibility to subtly police how they talk about their own oppression, and shifting away from white people the social responsibility to confront accounts of racism.
We don't need to enforce our norms less, we need to be aware of racial prejudice that might be encoded into them.
So let's look at AI, specifically. Will shifting Fedi culture to allow AI-positive accounts to thrive here make us less racist? Absolutely not! AI is, itself, a force for racism, typically trained on model sets (including the entire internet) that encode existing social prejudices. You can easily find accounts of AI systems that encode systemic biases against people of colour. And increasingly, AI systems are being employed as a digital "blackface", allowing white-run accounts to generate Black-seeming voices and faces for their own profit.
In summary, and I can't believe I have to say this, making Fedi more AI-friendly is not how we solve our racism problem.
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@scottjenson @carnage4life not about the AI that has been in use for decades in R+D (good), but with the generative one, that has caused many creative people to loose it's job. Also with Copilots, GOTs and things like that, that are also seen as gotos for people that want to ask a machine everything in their life's. Acritically. Also about the LLMs and systems backed by companies that are hemorrhaging money and have caused a RAM and SSD shortage, apart from the energy consumption.
@scottjenson @carnage4life add to that that in Europe many of us are trying to keep apart as much as possible from new tech from USA, given political and security atmosphere. But these are also some issues we have with AI here. With tech we have nothing's. I have been in endless discussion just last week about open source models, office alternatives to USA ones, cloud computing, quantum, cryptography, and so on.
Ah, we also don,t like cryptos and in Europe love digital sovereignty. Like, a lot. -
@patrick_h_lauke So is the only alternative "number go DOWN" metrics? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to find a way to have both be possible: how can we keep our soul but still have a diverse community.
My concern is that your comment uses the "we don't want a number go up mentality" argument to hide the fact that our community is a mono culture.
The short answer seems very strongly to be "it's irrelevant because that's not what people here want"
Mastodon and fedi in general are very much countercultural. Most people who come to these platforms do so to get away from other platforms, many of which are more inclusive of mainstream voices.
So by its very nature, mastodon has a selection bias for people who do not want inclusivity.
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There's "communities" for nearly everything on the #Fediverse. It is a strange misconception that a server software like Mastodon was something like a centralized #server #instance that was required to "allow" for anything, or could "prohibit" it, for everybody.
On the Fediverse, your server instance can allow or prohibit anything, just like any other instance. When your topic is hated on most other instances, there might be good reasons for that, though.
Still you can even run your very own instance fully dedicated to ShittyTopic
. It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you, or to say friendly things about it, or to never block your instance."It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you"
I think it would be great if we could all agree on this.
Don't like someone? Block them. Don't like a community? Block their server.
It's when people try to actively police members of other communities they don't belong to when things turn nasty.
I think this is something moderators need to clamp down on.
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As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
@scottjenson this is the magic of the Fediverse. If nobody likes the talk, nobody will follow, boost or like.
It’s the people’s algorithm hehe
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@scottjenson @carnage4life add to that that in Europe many of us are trying to keep apart as much as possible from new tech from USA, given political and security atmosphere. But these are also some issues we have with AI here. With tech we have nothing's. I have been in endless discussion just last week about open source models, office alternatives to USA ones, cloud computing, quantum, cryptography, and so on.
Ah, we also don,t like cryptos and in Europe love digital sovereignty. Like, a lot.@scottjenson @carnage4life so yes, here we move a lot of information about tech, programming, open source, tech done in places that are outside USA, news systems, and so on. Just one thing: mainly, people in Mastodon is not interested in GAFAM, propietary tech from USA or things like that. We don,y like mainstream "tech" very much. Or "tech" done to keep jobs away.
The more the tech savvy and literate we are, the more we have this attitude. -
"It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you"
I think it would be great if we could all agree on this.
Don't like someone? Block them. Don't like a community? Block their server.
It's when people try to actively police members of other communities they don't belong to when things turn nasty.
I think this is something moderators need to clamp down on.
Thank you! That's exactly was the point I was trying to make. But clearly the delivery got in the way of the message.
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@scottjenson @carnage4life so yes, here we move a lot of information about tech, programming, open source, tech done in places that are outside USA, news systems, and so on. Just one thing: mainly, people in Mastodon is not interested in GAFAM, propietary tech from USA or things like that. We don,y like mainstream "tech" very much. Or "tech" done to keep jobs away.
The more the tech savvy and literate we are, the more we have this attitude.@scottjenson @carnage4life So no, Mastodon is not bad for sharing and talking about tech, is not good for mainstream "tech". And there is a lot of tech, and quite alive tech, that is not mainstream. This moves here like a ton. And the engagement with other users about a particular issue can last for, like, days.
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@CStamp my point exactly
@scottjenson @CStamp OK, but genuinely why is it a problem for you that "AI journalists" aren't welcome? Why are they owed attention/welcoming eyeballs?
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Yeah but fedi also has a disproportionate number of people who are going to use tools that remove tracking parameters from links...
@pixx @spiegelmama @JMMaok that is an obvious flaw with unintrusive tracking but so be it. Never said it was the most reliable method anyway.
Though I would argue thats more of a "desktop browser"-problem.
As much more traffic is mobile even on fedi pretty sure this might be less of a problem than it might seem?
But you will surely have to do more work to determine if fedi is "worth it" or not, like looking at other forms of "engagement", like comments, boosts and favs as well.
Like doing actual analytics work.
In the end I don't know too much about the professional side of this anyway
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@wizardponderingorb @scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke I have heard that like two dozen times in the last three years, but hey, here we are yet. What a mystery.
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@scottjenson @carnage4life so yes, here we move a lot of information about tech, programming, open source, tech done in places that are outside USA, news systems, and so on. Just one thing: mainly, people in Mastodon is not interested in GAFAM, propietary tech from USA or things like that. We don,y like mainstream "tech" very much. Or "tech" done to keep jobs away.
The more the tech savvy and literate we are, the more we have this attitude.@Argyle13 I agree with everything that is important to you. I'm totally for you to have whatever community you want.
My only point (but clearly poorly worded) was that I think Mastodon could offer a bigger tent. If you don't like someone, don't follow them, block them, filter hashtags, whatever.
But I think that actively chasing people away "you don't like" is culturally very dangerous.
I say this GENERALLY, with no intent to boost or support AI, that was just an example that is a hot button here.
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Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.
I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!
@scottjenson @carnage4life Point 3 of cargane4life's post is simply bizarre. The AI hate part is true (I like to think it's because Mastodon uesrs are more discerning), but Mastodon is also chock full of both tech posts and politics. Not sure how you missed them.
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