Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@Gargron That is a personal choice and one which I totally respect. But I do think Mastodon should be big enough, and open enough, to allow an "AI community" to form, even thrive.

Too many people in my replies don't seem to agree with that.

@pixx @scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke

I dunno...I have a nuanced and not entirely negative view of AI, and I don't have a bad time here.

Having my ideas challenged isn't "a bad time"...and if I really wanted to, I could find people who did feel differently. There's over a million people on here, not all of them feel the same way.

That said, I have never seen the harassment you speak of, and certainly I cannot imagine that someone would be harassed for "normal" actions and opinions.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

@scottjenson idk, I think AI boosters can go fuck themselves all the way back to Bluesky, where they're welcome to hang out with the rest of the AI venture capital echo chamber. Simple as.

@lispi314 @dalias @pmdj @scottjenson I miss the days where children where seen and not heard.

@lispi314 @dalias @pmdj @scottjenson You're too young to be a psychologist. Go clean your room, kid.

@scottjenson after sleeping on it, I am choosing to respond because I cannot let your narrative go unchallenged, since you speak as a "Product Strategy Advisor to Mastodon Core team". Your intentions are probably good, but the words you chose to publish read a lot like unexamined privilege and a deep misunderstanding of lived reality of many people in this federation:

• equating the experience of mass harassment on minorities to "journalists not getting engagement" is a slap in the face to both the victims of harassment and the volunteers (operators, moderators and developers) who keep this federation running. This reads extremely tone deaf and patronizing, and you antagonized a lot of people with that comparison

• engagement dynamics being different than on mainstream parasocial platforms is not a bug, it is the main feature! Many (most?) people are here seeking a refuge from the exploitative attention economy and prioritize mutual connections above the parasocial one-way audience management that most journalists have been trained to seek out. I would not say that journalists are not welcome per se, but their usual methods definitely are

• your example of "AI journalism" was very poorly chosen and contributed to the polarization. GenAI is NOT a neutral technology: it is the technological arm of an anti-social, parasitic and regressive societal project. This societal project is built on "values" that are the polar opposite of those that most instances in this federation uphold and is destroying countless lives, including those of people who are the rockbed of the Fediverse. Your replies minimizing this harm "because they're not nazis" read at lot like unexamined privilege

• "big tent" attitudes are a red flag to many of us, because they usually end with marginalized people being pushed away while "the good gents" look away from the violence. Tolerance is a social contract, and people who promote anti-social views don't benefit from that social contract

The Fediverse is the opposite of an echo chamber! I picked up sewing and tried crochet, learned about insects and wild birds. I learned about the lives of people with chronic pain, several forms of neurodivergence and am following several blind authors. I read 10 thousands pages last year thanks to many book recommendations. It is one of the very few places that still feels human, and you are rubbing against people who fight to defend that.

I recommend you seek out feedback about this thread from several women and think about how you can come back to the conversation with a less antagonistic and tone-deaf attitude. We need people like you, but we don't need the "big tent" attitude you exhibited on this thread.

@iris I agree with everything you're saying. This conversation has become far bigger than I intended. All I wanted was to say "it would be nice if we had a bigger tent"

The people that reply "you can just spin up your own instance" are missing a key point: people actively hunt down and harass people they don't like. I *can't* just spin up an instance if I'm getting harassed.

And to be clear, his has NOTHING to do with AI. But 'asking people to be nicer' is somehow seen as, I don't know, promoting pedaphila (I was *just* accused of this)

It's this toxic misunderstanding, and the need to chase people away that I'm taking issue with. Not your more reasonable "people vs ideas" point (which I agree with)

@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.

@lispi314 @dalias @pmdj @scottjenson What is your objective here?

@cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron nobody has to earn their place on the Fediverse. Access to free and open social networking is a human right. You don't get to gatekeep this network.

@codinghorror You're absolutely correct. Part of my method (which I'm fairly transparent about) is that I make these provocations just to test the waters, see what people say, and how the conversation flows. It's basically research for the blog post.

I've gotten some extremely thoughtful comments that have made me rethink several of my original points.

I've even been accused of "baiting" some people which isn't entirely unfair either. It's helpful to 'poke the bear' occassionally

@scottjenson @vfrmedia @mattwilcox It is my opinion that ALL AI is inherently evil. It is built on stolen material, using massive amounts of energy, increasing energy costs, worsening climate change, and 90% of its usecases are harmful to humanity.

And MANY people share this opinion. That is why AI is not offered, but FORCED into everything. You won't get that here. Do your thing on *your own* timeline, but you don't have any right to *my* timeline.

@evan @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Its a human right to have a livable world, with water to drink and food to eat. "AI" datacenter building crazyness is endangering life on earth.

@dianshuo @scottjenson @pmdj @dalias

Sorry, but I'm kinda confused. If you meant to reply to me (which you did, but I'm very unsure of why???) then you must have misunderstood me. I do not want to build influence, and am baseline rather suspicious of anyone who does follow me .

My idea of community is people who I share interests with, who I interact with, and who I can build trust with. Mastodon has been working for me to do so fairly well so far.

@octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron

that is what they cannot cope with, that and being held accountable and have consequences to what they say....

@DiogoConstantino @scottjenson @pmdj "Polite and respectful" are not ideals to aspire to. Fuck no to tone policing. That you've lumped "naysayers" and "assholes" in the same group says a lot. In this domain and in lots of domains, the assholes are entirely the boosters, not the naysayers.

@stefanie before we even debate LLMs, consider that ‘AI’ is a lot more than that. Image recognition, speech recognition, neural networks etc. Hell, even NPCs in video games. So saying ‘All AI is evil’ is quite a claim, and it’s simply not true that AIs use copyright material, as a general statement. @scottjenson @vfrmedia @mattwilcox