Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@scottjenson @Gargron There is nothing, absolutely nothing, stopping anyone from creating and cultivating an AI community on Mastodon. Start a server. Knock yourself out.

But expecting to *farm acceptance* from a group of people, one which most members vastly dislike AI, is quite the hubris.

But sure, the community at large is the problem.

Clean up your kitchen and maybe folks will join you for a meal.

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 2022

Yes, 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.

@cutesobri @scottjenson @pmdj Those aren't really problems you can solve with "better models". Debiasing text is tractable by removing markers that could be proxies for characteristics that shouldn't be used is tractable, but for images it really isn't. And no model can gather *intent* information from the author that isn't recorded anywhere.

@scottjenson @carnage4life Errr. I don’t see a problem with this at all, frankly.

No. I don’t particularly want them here. I don’t mind if they are, but I won’t see them. This isn’t a space where I want the typical stuff that I can see anywhere and everywhere else. I like here for precisely what *isnt* here. No chasing clout, no engagement farming, no monetary driven agenda. But nothing is stopping such people from being here except *it doesn’t work well here*. And that’s good. IMO.

@scottjenson Respectfully, Mastodon is less of an echo chamber than any social media on earth presently. That's exactly why people bounce off of it. There is absolutely nothing built into the system to shepherd you into a "good" experience. It's just humans. Love 'em or leave 'em, but if you stay it's on you to curate your experience. A lotta people don't like that, and that's OK. All Mastodon users ever asked for was the option to exist in a space they owned. Not for Threads, Bluesky, and Twitter to all shut down and everyone to be on Mastodon.

@marshray @neoluddite @deFractal
Nah. That's just normalizing horrible people. That's all they want. They want to hurt others and still be respected. Rub in. That's all.

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

If you want this network to be more inclusive, you will need to start from a place of inclusion.

Your words were entirely the wrong way to try to make this place more inclusive. You launched the conversation by attempting to label critics and assholes with the same category, you presented your prescriptive solution instead of asking the folks who don't like ai to hear their concerns.

Share your perspective, sure, but start off from a place of curiosity, not dictating change.

@neoluddite @deFractal
> Why should we tolerate that?

Because once you’ve driven away all the generative AI users (e.g. the great majority of today’s students) you won’t even be part of that discussion.

This has pretty much already happened on my feed. Constructive discussion on that topic is nearly impossible.

@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.

@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

@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.

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias two thoughts on the topic. AI is forced upon people on the Internet everywhere. Thus, it is disliked and hated, as it is no longer a choice. This triggers an emotional response and gets in the way discussing the technology in a more rational way. This is especially the way when using AI as a term without qualifiers, as it is understood as Tech Bro AI alias OpenAI, Microslop and even Anthropic.

Beside that 1/3

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias you can have a discussion (as in not screaming at each other) on technical topics around AI, but better do not use AI as term, as it is unspecific and encompasses neural networks, language models and spreadsheets all alike.

As a large account with many followers, it could, however, happen that you attract with any comment a large crowd and within, those who oppose your opinion, will be the loudest. Here muting people could help.

That said, having some general 2/3

@pmdj @octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Well fedi doesn't make you hear the bad opinions of people you chose not to follow by algorithmically putting them in your feed to make you mad and drive up engagement.

So that means you don't see the AI propagandists on here except when someone you follow is debunking them.

@scottjenson @pmdj No, we absolutely should NOT be "welcoming more opinions". "Diversity of thought" is NOT a value. Some opinions are wrong. They may have a right to exist, as long as they're not nazi opinions (those have no right to even exist), but that doesn't mean we have to welcome them. It's perfectly fine to tell people off for having bad opinions, to shun them, to let them share those bad opinions only with whoever is willing to listen to them and not in our circles.

If that causes them to leave fedi, that's not a bad thing.

@stairjoke @thibaultamartin I'm happy to get comments like this. It's bit frustrating that there do appear to be two camps here, although I'm not surprised.

Part of the reason I "bait" these conversations is to at least bring this discussion into the open. We must realize that our culture *is* the driving force behind our success (or failure)

@marshray
You're conflating “AI” boosters into “AI” users.

It's the boosters that are not welcome.
A user might generate themselves i.e. a legal document to save their ass.

@neoluddite @deFractal