Comment on Mastodon Exit Interview
rglullis@communick.news 1 week agoif all you want is to recreate the corporate social media 1:1 then indeed Bluesky is the better place to be.
What a lame, lazy and self-righteous cop-out!
I am not talking about “recreating corporate social media”. I am saying is that the culture here is completely broken. It is dominated by this loud reactionary group of people who think of themselves of oh-so-welcoming and oh-so-progressive, but that takes any newcomer and shoves them away at the slight deviation of the current norms. And now that someone has come and writes an honest critique, your defense mechanism is to call them toxic.
Infrastructure does not magically appear, and the Fediverse does not have deep VC funded pockets to just make it so.
If only we managed to be just a little bit more appealing to the masses, so that we could have an actual ecosystem with a healthy economy then we wouldn’t need to depend on VC pockets and we would be able to serve everyone. All we need is to find a way to attract some of those who looked our way and we can then show how we can have a fun place without depending on Big Tech, right?
But no, apparently the “right thing to do” is to create division over the most ridiculous things (bots posting every 14 minutes! To an instance of 12k users! Blasphemy!) and further pigeonholing us into the “The Fediverse is only for weirdos and social pariahs” territory.
I am not expecting you to have a full “are we the baddies?” realization, but hol-li-eey shit when I find myself in arguments like these I lose another slice of hope on the Fediverse as a healthy universal alternative to the web.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
Sorry but lets agree to (fundamentally) disagree.
People coming in with this “who cares what my fun does to others” yolo attitude that assumes volunteer run public services are some sort of free resource up for the taking, are fundamentally at odds with what the Fediverse tries to achieve and extremely toxic to it. This is not a lazy cop out, that is clearly telling people at the door that they seem to have the wrong idea what this is all about. And no, this isn’t only about those nearly 100 bots polluting the local timeline… its about having clear rules against such abuse and not making exceptions because someone thinks their specific bots are harmless.
And you are completely wrong if you think this effort can be funded by being “just a little bit more appealing to the masses”. The opposite is the case. This leads to burnout of the volunteers, over-streched infrastructure and people that soon leave again because someone lied to them about what the Fediverse is. You can’t put a Mc Donalds sign in front of a farmers market and expect that will magically bring customers and solve all of the farmers market’s funding issues.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
You don’t need to tell me that the community-funded model is broken. I’m saying that for years already.
But there are two separate forces at play, here. Yes, there is this aspect of not having enough infrastructure and not enough manpower to support a larger group of users (which I agree, though I think it’s entirely self-inflicted) but there is also this strong cultural aspect of Fedi that equates being on the fringe as “cool” and that actively pushes Fedi to be a tiny, niche space that should be treated as some sort of secret club to keep the plebs away.
For this crowd, even if OP was running the bots on their own server, they would still be met with scorn because “they are using a microblog to send notifications”. It’s this culture that is pathetic. It’s this culture that pushes “normies” away, and if we don’t change the this culture then there is no amount of funding or goodwill that will make the Fedi a nice, fun, place.
This here is not a farmers market. I wish this was a farmers market. People don’t go to a farmers market and tell the farmer they only need to cover the cost of the feed in order to get a whole chicken like people do here.
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
To quote from one of your links:
Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.
If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.
You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
You’re arguing with a right-libertarian, FYI. This should explain some of their positions and arguments better.
rglullis@communick.news 1 week ago
I once had this conversation with some other “indie entrepreneur” who was arguing something along the lines of “I don’t care about VC funding because my competitors all come and go, and my business still endures.” When I asked “Does this mean that you can make out a living out of your business?” and his response was “no, but I have a full time job, so my business is default alive”
He wasn’t too happy when I pointed out (a) he had a hobby, not a business and (b) cockroaches are also optimized for survival, but outlasting your competitors mean jack shit if they are playing a different ball game. He spent all this time pretending to have a business while his competition was actually out there fighting for customers.
All of this to say: there is no consolation in being “right” in my death bed. I am not interested in something that “takes time” if in the mean time my kids are growing up in a world dominated by Big Tech. Anyone who understands how bad Big Tech is bad for society should be rushing and actively accelerating to build an alternative.
It’s is basically impossible to create a monopoly around FOSS services. It’s a commodity with high R&D costs but zero cost to distribute and replicate. You can only jack up the prices of commodities if you collude with your competitors or create a cartel.
The main thing holding back the development of a healthy cottage industry of hosting providers, consulting services, app customization, etc is not the Big Tech players, but precisely this “culture” of people expecting services for free.