Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@katzenberger

I did, it's just some dude comparing responses to him talking about "tech news, AI, and politics". Not sure how we got to discussing "fascism, pedophilia, misogyny".

Pretty huge jump.

@scottjenson

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 @pmdj @dalias I'm with ya bro. Don't hear anyone complaining about ai application in the science fields. People are just focused on the slop side of things, not the tangible.

[edit]
Came back to posit a real world example.

Simulating ALL 100 billion stars in the Milky Way for the first time (with the help of AI?!
- Dr Becky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFpW5W06kV4

@scottjenson @Veza85UE @CStamp first, there's a difference between welcoming people and welcoming topics. The big tent analogy is about people, and indeed, all people are welcome in the fediverse if they adhere to the rules of engagement set by their servers. Individual servers set terms that make sense for the communities they want to foster.

The analogy doesn't extend identically to ideas. We ban ideas like "some people are morally superior to and more valuable than other people". Not all ideas are welcome, and that's a feature, not a bug. If you're set on finding a community where [fill in the blank opinion] is welcomed, you can find one, but you have no particular right to change the way all of mastodon works to make that default, nor do most of the rest of us want that.

I worry about the framing of this as "cultural suicide" for two reasons. One, it presupposes what culture should be, what its natural or optimal form is, and as you've noticed, people here are by and large choosing to curate something different. The fediverse, and more specifically mastodon, also isn't the only form of communication or community that exists. It's okay to make it what we want.

Two, you surely know that "diversity of thought" has come to be a dogwhistle for lack of diversity of people, in a very intentional way. Creating spaces where people are welcome and safe and enjoy being here results in some ideas and topics being over- or underrepresented. Which is okay because they're ideas, not people. If the fediverse has 40% less discussion and appreciation of the Roman Empire compared with X (completely made up), that's a neutral observation on its own, and not a cause for alarm.

I have thoughts on your other points but I think this is the root of our disagreement and the pivot point for all the rest.

@mastodonmigration I don't think that applies to @carnage4life though. He's got a popular Threads account, and works for Meta.

@De_Minimis @scottjenson @pmdj I'm not going to click on the clickbait, but the claim is obviously not plausible and either she means something else and the title is just clickbait, or she's drunk the koolaid.

@scottjenson @dalias @pmdj that's the thing about power on a federated platform. nobody gave us that power. nobody can give us that power. we found it for ourselves when we realised that nobody, and no algorithm, is forcing us to listen to abhorrent opinions.

anyway, this post is a rehash of every frozen peach's shitty arguments from the year dot. honestly, they're beneath someone who's presenting themselves as an advisor to the Mastodon board. the only thing you could have done to make it more stereotypical is dip into incorrect Latin.

@scottjenson @dalias @pmdj I think what you’re talking about is called “talking to each other about our problems and working it out”, which is the only option left to us when we have no technical means of preventing different types of people from joining in on a community.

Unfortunately, some people are not going to agree with you. Nor are they required to. You can’t control them or ask them to behave differently, quite frankly. You can only control yourself and how you deal with it.

@stefan

You're cherrypicking again.

My sequence was:
fascism, pedophilia, misogyny, promotion of "AI".

@scottjenson

@dalias @pmdj

I'm making a post on my timeline that you can ignore. There is a BIG difference to getting in someone's mentions and correcting them.

This is my whole point. We are each on the fediverse and we say what we want. You can like, ignore, whatever.

I'm NOT getting in anyone's mentions, I'm not scolding, I'm ASKING that we are more inclusive because it's the more humane and helpful thing to do, but hey, you can disagree, that's cool.

@katzenberger

I feel like we might be having trouble staying on topic, and I apologize if I am contributing to that.

Going back to my own first message in this thread, I argued that if you see a post about a topic you don't care about, you don't have to engage with it.

If it's something that actually breaks the rules of your community, you can report it.

You said:

"It's just that nobody is obliged to listen to you"

And that is fair! If we could just ignore each other, the world would already be a much better place.

But does everything require a response? This seems to be where we mainly disagree.

You want to tell a nazi off? Yeah, sure, I guess. Still good to report them.

@scottjenson

@leadore

Have you read the replies to my post? People are actively, joyfully stating that AI should not be here. That is my cultural point, that instead of using the tools of federation to get the feed you want, people are actively chasing away people they don't like.

To be very clear. I"M NOT ENDORSING AI. I just used it as an example of how sensitive people are and how willing they are to go after people they don't agree with.

Why is asking for 'a bigger tent' seen as such a negative thing?

@dalias @pmdj

I'm making a post on my timeline that you can ignore. There is a BIG difference to getting in someone's mentions and correcting them.

This is my whole point. We are each on the fediverse and we say what we want. You can like, ignore, whatever.

I'm NOT getting in anyone's mentions, I'm not scolding, I'm ASKING that we are more inclusive because it's the more humane and helpful thing to do, but hey, you can disagree, that's cool.

@evan @carnage4life

Agreed. Certainly many people have decided to accept these TOS terms. Just saying that for a lot of people here it is a valid reason not to be on those platforms.

When you raise concerns about cross platform interoperability, there are legitimate reasons, other that cultural, to decide to avoid the corporate platforms.

@scottjenson @leadore Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Mastodon is a tent. Twitter is a tent, bluesky is one.
Mastodon is more like a campground full of many small tents.
It is just fundamentally different.
If you just post stuff, nothing is going to happen. If you want engagement on here, you have to actively engage with people.

It is just a totally different paradigm, and that is ok. There are already enough corpo engagement farms. Do we really want to become another one?

@dalias @scottjenson @pmdj She's an Astrophysicist and you're an idiot.

@leadore People are actively telling me to leave mastodon. They are making ad hominem attacks. I'm living the point I was trying to make.

My point wasn't to compare the other platforms and I certainly didn't intend to endorse AI (or that particular account).

My point, which has been proven by the reply I got to my post, is that a small group of people here are seen as "cultural enforcers" and actively attack people they disagree with. To the point of CREATING a disagreement in order to be angry (for example calling me rascist)

Now to be very clear. My original post was very poorly worded and I made a mistake. I've owned that and apologized. There is just so little room in here for grace.

@scottjenson I think the biggest stumbling block to increasing inclusion here is technical, not cultural. I'll use myself as an example:

I joined my first instance in 2017, and the biggest issue then is the same one I face in 2026, and that is finding people to follow, and following them.

My method was to find someone who already seemed to follow users I found interesting, and see if I wanted to follow any of them myself, but that would often mean having to load the remote instance first just to see who they follow, and then copy-pasting usernames into my own instance to add them, or otherwise having to reinvoke my own instance from theirs every time I want to add a new follow. That's already more work than the average user is going to want to go through just to branch out of their own instance, assuming they understand how any of this works when they first get here.

It's not race or gender or politics or AI interest that consistently keeps people off Mastodon; it's that Mastodon works differently in a way that no other social network overtly seems to work, with no real explanation of this to a casual user, and makes one of the most fundamental features of a social network -- networking with other users -- one of the most complicated parts of the process. Most people think it's reasonable to assume that, if they see a post they like and want to follow the person who posted it, they'll have to click one, maybe two buttons to make that happen; that is not a foregone conclusion on Mastodon.

It's like if I had an email address, but out of the box could only see how to email other users on the same domain, and there are six other steps to follow to JUST EMAIL MY DAD on a different domain, and nobody mentioned those steps or made them easily accessible.

I like to tinker and have some technical skill with computers and a great deal of patience. That's the kind of person you get on here with barriers like we have. To broaden the spectrum of users, the ability to more easily and seamlessly connect users across instances would need to exist.

As it stands now, the reason you feel like you're in an echo chamber may be because the distance between chambers is still too high.

@katzenberger Telling someone that their vibe coded calculator app got your friend fired...I mean if it actually did, I get it's personal.

But it just sounds like you're venting to a complete stranger.

And like you said, nobody has to listen to you. So why @ them then?

@scottjenson

@stefanie @leadore

"If you just post stuff, nothing is going to happen."

STRONGLY have to disagree with you there. The whole point of this conversation is that when you post, if you say something outside the norm, hordes of people swoop in, tell you want you're doing wrong, and if you disagree tell you to leave and 'return to twitter'.

Whether this is AI or content warnings or (waves hands) it's part of the culture here to get into your mentions.