Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@AccordingtoWouter @scottjenson

Case in point: your average mastodon user sees a star of David, and that awakens in him a deep, ancestral memory of inking judenschwein and issuing blood libels.

@scottjenson I do not want mastodon to become more amicable to right wing ideas. The more hostile this place is to Nazis and AI and the manosphere etc the safer it is for people like me. See the parable of the Nazi bar etc. This is an inherent concept to queer spaces. You cannot make a space safe that welcomes both sheep and wolves. Keeping the wolves out is a feature not a flaw

@patrick_h_lauke The metrics are clear, people are leaving mastodon, our daily actives are going down. I agree that pursing follower count is not what Mastodon should be about, we likely agree on many points here. I'm just trying to say 'being more welcoming of other points of view' shouldn't be controvertial. Yet so many replies have been "we don't want them here!" which feels very head-in-the-sand to me.

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!

@sfabel The conversation links two different but related issues: the historical problem with Black people's safety needs not being valued enough to be worked on at Mastodon HQ, and Scott feeling that "AI people" face a stigmatisation here that could be solved with the same tooling Black people asked for years ago.

IMO Mastodon needs moderation tooling like shared block lists. Mastodon is tech, not a shared "town square".

Scott though seems to want to change people's behaviour.

@scottjenson

@cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron
No value at all. Or infinite value. Does it even matter? Nobody has questioned the need for otaku communities, NSFW images, or birdwatching groups. I don't know — I just don't share that kind of utilitarianism.

@toddsundsted @dgodon Too many people thought I was *defending* the entire AI industry and worse, comparing it directly to Black Twitter. Hey it's social media, posts are short, it's easy to connect the dots the wrong way.

My poor writing skills aside, my point was what I think you both are saying: it's a slippery slope. It's no secret that black twitter was not made welcome here (it's a very complex topic but there is some truth to it).

My point wasn't that techbros needed support or coddling but the idea that we "allow" people to be here based on some type of ideological purity test is guaranteed to bite us in the ass. Too many people here get holier than thou and feel morally obligated to harass people. It's short sighted.

@sfabel (I'd also say I haven't seen any actual dogpiling on AI related accounts, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening, I just may be on a nice Instance instead of a crappy one. IMO; give people the tools to help moderate that themselves, and also do a better job making users aware that Mastodon has filters to help you avoid seeing things you don't want to see) @scottjenson

@scottjenson Inclusivity:

Include: people who like nazis or are okay with nazis so we can talk about it

Exclude: people who wanna interact with posts via accessibility features.

You're amazing.

@danirabbit @scottjenson This. I do not think it's even slightly an exaggeration to say that AI is, in its present and marketed form, fascist. It is good when fascists aren't allowed in the room, actually.

@danirabbit @scottjenson This. I do not think it's even slightly an exaggeration to say that AI is, in its present and marketed form, fascist. It is good when fascists aren't allowed in the room, actually.

@mattwilcox
I'll keep repeating the same thing (over and over)
* I want Mastodon to be more welcoming
* I'm disappointed people feel this is a bad idea
* It doesn't mean I want Nazis in here
* It doesn't mean I love AI
* I used AI an AN EXAMPLE of a community that is not welcome
* THere other other communities that have had trouble
* I'm *NOT* comparing these communities
* I certainly don't want any community to get special treatment

Everything else is a strawman. Can you criticize me for being unclear? Sure, guilty as charged. But please don't put words in my mouth and then be outraged.

@sfabel

@scottjenson @carnage4life "lukewarm to politics" isn't at all my perception of Mastodon, quite the opposite.

@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

- We can't change people's behaviour or feelings. Mastodon HQ can make tools.
- "Mastodon" isn't one room. That is the fundamental difference to all other social media. You can't talk of it as one group.
- "The AI community" (or any) not being welcome is a thing you're leaning on, but I haven't seen that in my experience here in *my* Mastodon. And I don't class "lack of engagement" as hostility.
- Your second bullet point is, frankly, putting words in mouths yourself.

@sfabel

@xgranade @danirabbit @scottjenson
Exactly. AI harms marginalized and protected classes the most, including the environment and life itself. It’s not unreasonable to decide to not invite death to dine with us. It is poisoning the food.
It is literally a life or death decision people are making for the world to suffer or survive under. People need to take responsibility and have consequences for their carelessness to community. AI is anti-social in its current form. It must be stopped.

@scottjenson I do not want mastodon to become more amicable to right wing ideas. The more hostile this place is to Nazis and AI and the manosphere etc the safer it is for people like me. See the parable of the Nazi bar etc. This is an inherent concept to queer spaces. You cannot make a space safe that welcomes both sheep and wolves. Keeping the wolves out is a feature not a flaw

@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

@JoBlakely @xgranade @danirabbit @scottjenson

“In its current form” is the key phrase.

Reflexive rejection of emerging technology in its totality is self-defeating.

We need a mass political movement to shape it toward pro-social ends. That means steering it toward scientific and research use-cases, stringent regulatory guardrails, and hardcore trustbusting.

It’s only a fascist technology if we let the fascists control it.