Agreed - I run an AI-focused instance, but our FAQ explicitly states it's fine to post about non AI stuff. It's more about making a community that shares the interest rather than forcing all conversations to focus on that one interest.
From my experience Mastodon is more obsessed with creating bubbles than Reddit hypermodding.
So it's great your FAQ says that and your topic is non-controversial and niche. But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. Nothing wrong with that. Niche forums are perfectly fine.
But lets not pretend that's a social network anything like Twitter, or FB, or Reddit circa 2012. Popular Mastodon servers ban hundreds of servers where users may have signed up but not known the extensive rules list of each other sub server (in addition to the [n] amount of moderated content).
> But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles.
We don’t exist in mastodon bubbles. we go out with friends. we visit families houses. we visit friends families. we visit dozens of other web sites. we interact with countless numbers of people every single day. we go to work. we go to school.
this “you’re going to live in a bubble!” panic is wild.
You can't permanently silence/exclude random people's opinions at social events or a family dinner with the touch of a button. So even that's not a good example of an ideological bubble of ideas.
I also said there's nothing wrong with niche forums but social networks were a new phenomenon circa 2005+ and hundreds of millions of people like the idea of public information networks... for the same reason why newspapers, broadcast news, and cultural TV shows are so popular, but now with more direct participation.
So if you want to toss aside the new concept of public platforms for discourse and culture then that at least be honest about it. Don't pretend it didn't exist.
> You can't permanently silence/exclude random people's opinions at social events or a family dinner with the touch of a button.
thats my point. we don't exist in bubbles. and while you didn't explicitly say this, i disagree with this notion that people keep panicking about, that mastodon or any other social media is creating some terrifying horrible "be very afraid" bubble.
again, we don't exist in bubbles, we exist in the real world where there are all kinds of different ideas. if i choose to spend my freetime online with people i get along with, this would be absolutely no different from spending my freetime in the real world with irl friends that i get along with--its no different. whether its mastodon or discord or going out to clubs with friends. if i go out with friends, its not some "be very afraid" bubble just because we don't have racists or homophobes out with us.
even if i were to start a mastodon server tomorrow and curate the users, this is no more a terrifying bubble than if i owned a music club and curated metal-heads or gothkids or whatever.
i'll say it again: it'll be ok--we don't exist in a bubble. we'll be ok.
Cool... niche forums and social groups are a good thing but the world is increasingly lived on the internet and that has a big ripple effect even in real life.
The people who are raised on hypermodded Subreddits (and a hypothetical world where super constrained Mastadon servers replace Twitter/FB/<=2012 internet forums and comment threads) are not being taught to tolerate other opinions in their family, workplace, at universities, and high schools. And today much more broadly to newspaper columnists, blog platforms, Patreon accounts, Paypal/Mastercard merchant accounts etc, etc.
This isn't merely about which communities you opt-in and choose to follow. The market options to opt-in to are continually constrained and limited.
You see these same pressures exponentially being applied to everything, not just niche opt-in communities. It's a new culture of intolerance for the greater good. Guilt by association and zero nuance outrage campaigns.
Our culture is developing a zero tolerance policy to dissent and anything outside the Overton window. The only people I see how have no problem with this are people who:
A) have boring non controversial opinions or simply don't care
B) their ideologies happen to fit squarely in the overton window
C) generally don't participate in public discourse and are unaware of recent cultural developments... Or are simply naive they can't see the danger in slippery slopes where increasingly more moderate ideas get treated like Gaellio and blasphemy against God, but the mainstream safe culture is the new religion.
The "push a button to silence dissent" thing is what is expanding everywhere. Family dinners and IRL parties are one of the few bastions of tolerance but even that won't last long if the current culture continues.
from what i see, we (the US) have more tolerance than we've ever had. there is of course a very loud tiny number of people crying about that exact tolerance and doing their best to destroy tolerance, but they've always been here.
you're gonna feel the way you feel, but i personally think much of this is similar to the "kids these days don't know good music. its not rock like zeppelin!" type nonsense.
the kids are alright. kids spending their freetime with like minded friends online is not terrifying, its not nefarious, its not spooky. i just listened to a podcast that was discussing the early days of dungeons and dragons. apparently adults used to spaz out that kids were playing dnd. it sent the parents into a weird type of satanic panic--they were convinced that if kids spent so much of their freetime playing dnd with their friends it was going to turn them into murderers or something. some of the recordings of the parents were wild. they were fully convinced this activity would turn little johnny into a satanic flying demon or something. it was just kids spending their freetime time with like minded friends (a dnd bubble if you will).
> The "push a button to silence dissent" thing is what is expanding everywhere.
this is no different from someone turning and walking away from the racist nutball screeching on a street corner. its the literal same outcome. there is nothing wrong with being able to walk away from a quack screaming at you on the street, just as there is nothing wrong with pushing a button and blocking the racist nutball screeching at you online.
it doesn't even have to be a screeching nutball on a street corner. there are a million reasons why we may just not like another person. when we don't like someone, we just turn and walk away and go find our friends. this is normal. this is totally normal.
