Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@dalias @pmdj

This is the curse of the fediverse, a small cadre of usually old white guys that feel the need to "Educate" everyone around them. This is their duty, the world needs them and will eventually thank them for purifying the timeline of heretics.

@devlord don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say that. I'm asking for more inclusivity. I assume you don't think that is horrible do you?

@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.

@skyfaller for individuals, an hour of flight can emit about 1kg CO2. An hour of LLM use on a dirty grid emits 0.01kg of CO2.

@mattwilcox @Gargron But that is a slippery slope. I realize this might seem contentious but I believe it's is exactly the same mechanism that chased away black twitter in 2022. If we celebrate our culture, to the point that we are happy we are excluding others, it can cut both ways.

"Being inclusive" is like being "ethical" it only matters when things get hard.

@scottjenson @iris Yeah, Framework, the laptop maker discovered what happens when people talk about the ‘big tent’ when it endorsed software from a white supremacist. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/

It’s a really bad look. The trouble with letting fascists into your tent is that it puts everyone else in the tent at risk.

@scottjenson 2/n this discussion. Which is a shame. Reply guys are a problem, alt text berating is not quite constructive. So I hope that something can be done, and there’s lots of room for improvement. Personally I want more journalists here. And more marginalized communities. And constructive discussions outside my bubble. While also have the opinion to conveniently ignore for me e.g. AI evangelists, Trumpists and fascists.
And death threats and insults are never cool. HTH & GL

@scottjenson @iris Yeah, Framework, the laptop maker discovered what happens when people talk about the ‘big tent’ when it endorsed software from a white supremacist. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/

It’s a really bad look. The trouble with letting fascists into your tent is that it puts everyone else in the tent at risk.

@scottjenson @Gargron As others have said, nothing to stop the "AI community" from spinning up a server. But they're not entitled to my attention.

Why is this difficult for AI evangelists to understand?

@gavin57 and I'm still salty about Framework. I was 100% going to get one of their computers in the next couple of years and now I am 100% not going to, and there's no good substitute, and why can't we have nice things??

@scottjenson Isn’t it fun to try and talk about nontrivial things on social media?

@evan
@skyfaller

this is whataboutism

Air travel is a relatively mature industry, but putting "graphics" cards in data centers, and not just graphics cards but the highest end ones that use approximately All The World's RAM is quite new in comparison & whose growth is being flogged at the highest levels.

so, that 0.3% is an addition to our carbon use. I doubt airline carbon use has grown anything like that in a similar time frame.

@wizardponderingorb

Having never interacted with none of the people in this thread outside of it, that seems like a dick way of putting things.

Even if someone has ideas that you don't agree with (and which will never get approval of majority), just talking why the experience/opinion exists may lead to other improvements.

[This of course barring stuff that can be seen as a threat to safety. Fascists and the like.]

@scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke
When Twitter went full Nazi Bar, a lot of writers and journalists I followed there came to Mastodon, where I duly followed them.

Within a month, virtually all of them went silent here, but post regularly on Bluesky, where I maintain an account primarily to stake my username.

Since posting on two or more sites is a cut&paste exercise, I don't understand their behavior at all.

When broadcast media was invented, the only way to know if people were listening, then watching, was by sampling surveys.
Now, it's follower counts, or god forbid, boosts and likes. I do *read* print columnists whose opinions I don't like, and I often skip reading ones I do like if the topic holds no interest for me.

Accordingly, I follow a lot of people here, but get more from the posts *they* boost, from people I don't follow.

So there's really no metric feedback for hundreds of posts I read every week, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be publishing here.

I do often boost items I like, but receive virtually no feedback from my small population of followers, whose change in numbers I don't track, but assume if they're still following me, they appreciate, or at least don't hate what I boost. My own posts are mostly whispers into the void (per the feedback), but that doesn't stop me from making them, and I assume they're glanced at the same as I do with what scrolls through my home feed.

@RYStorm @scottjenson I think what you are describing is an ActivityPub relay. They do already exist.

OK, this is going even MORE sideways so I need to make a few things clear:
1. I took a complex point and made it poorly
2. My goal was to ask for more inclusiveness
3. I am sickened by what happend to BlackTwitter and I don't want it recur
4. But I can't speak for BlackTwitter nor should I
5. I apologize to black mastodon users for making such a poor comparison
6. I'm not endorsing "AI Slop" they were a foil to make my point
7. I'm certainly NOT trying to compare AI bros to Black twitter (but, as I said, I can see how people made that connection. I'm trying to correct that here)

@pmdj @dalias
First, I'm using AI as an example, I'm not endorsing AI at all.
Second, and only as an example, there are open source people working on ethically trained local small language models. Again, I'm NOT endorsing them, but I can pretty confidently say that they would NOT be welcome here.

The same applies to journalism, there are VERY strong emotions here, basically telling them to fuck off (their words, not mine)

My point is that there is a pattern here: there are topics this community actively hates and "patrols" against. If that's what the community wants, cool, I'm not here to dictate anything. My point is that it might be nice to have a slightly more open way of sharing ideas: Follow, block, filter. You have the tools to make the feed you want (there are clearly more tools that would be helpful)

I'm just saying that focusing on your feed seems more healthy that attacking people whose opinions you don't like. Here, let me me give you an example of what I got 10 min ago

@pixx @scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke

As for Fedi being unfriendly to "normies" ... I've seen conversations here explicitly discussing how to be welcoming to new people from other platforms.

But there is an inherent complexity to a distributed network that simply doesn't exist for a centralised corporatised network.

I do think that people will find a difference here between the intentionally algorithmically addictive feed from Twitter vs. the chronological feed here, just as any addictive experience is different from a neutral one.

@emittingstate @skyfaller it's not whataboutism. We are in the middle of a real climate crisis. The things that are causing this crisis are not AI -- they're gas cars, red meat, rice cultivation, cement production. Telling people that AI use is singularly unacceptable because of its effects on climate change, but accepting all these other behaviors, is a lie.