So lemme get this straight, recent big things for Mastodon:
- Opened up to Facebook who literally helped genocide happen and censors certain posts on their platform, after closed door meetings
- Added AI bro and crypto fucker Amir Ghavi as a board member
- Added a cofounder of Twitter as a board member.
It is becoming reasonable to question if there is a current goal to ensure Mastodon becomes less attractive to its core userbase. Almost like it's being sabotaged on purpose.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s.-non-profit/
Tumblr has always had a large base of queer and neurodivergent users that love the site. Logically, trying to make changes to attract even more of those users and make those there want to stay is a good strategy.
Instead, it was chosen to try and make it look and run just like everything else to make things easier for new users and to try and tempt people using other social media to switch to Tumblr. Which resulted in Tumblr bleeding loyal older users who loved the place while not attracting the new audience who were never interested in Tumblr in the first place.
A blunt warning to you @Gargron, while the work and sacrifice that has gone into creating this platform is obviously appreciated, it has become filled with people who deeply care about issues facing them. The kind of users who will 100% abandon ship if you keep making these bad decisions, destroying all that effort you've put in if you continue down this road.
Lean into what makes this place different. Embrace those who are interested and don't worry about infinite growth. Or Mastodon will just end up another footnote in social media history.
P.S. This is especially easy to have happen since this open source stuff has this neat lil thing called forking you likely know about. So seriously, consider if you and your tiny team want to lose everything you have to queer and radical programmers fucking sick and tired of all this fucking shit who could probably add features everyone has been begging for faster than you ever could simply thanks to being fueled by spite.
@damon This is the point. People will switch en masse if things keep getting shitty and it will lead to loads of confusion because unfortunately, the media and many other places think Fediverse = mastodon.
And now a ton of big name rich assholes keep putting skin in the game to make this place worse... It's almost like... It could be on purpose?!?
I know I can switch! Others do too! It doesn't mean we want one platform to become a shitfest we all have to avoid.
@hackbyte Thankfully, you're very right. I hope the folks who want mastodon to keep existing in particular figure that out fast.
@literalgrill
At least there are other fediverse platforms. Speaking of which, I need to find a new instance
@literalgrill@sakurajima.moe Good that we have software options in case things hit the fan. But since too many people are on Mastodon and they don't know about the rest of the Fediverse, this isn't looking good.
@literalgrill@sakurajima.moe It really scares me how compromised Mastodon as a project is becoming. I don't like it as a Sharkey user, but most of Fedi depends on it looking out for its users above all else. Supporting people who at the very least have lost their trust (Facebook being Facebook, Ghavi supporting cryptoshit, Twitter co-founder helping build one of the internet's worst communities) would only stifle Mastodon's potential to be great for the people building communities with it.
It's promising to see the rise of many other Fedi projects, though. Pleroma and Akkoma have made server deployment easier, and Misskey and Sharkey have numerous features that make things truly fun and not just addicting. After all, Fedi was designed in order to empower the many and not the few, and that should include what software will work with it.
@literalgrill @nonlinear Mastodon didn’t “open up” to Facebook or anything else. Mastodon is part of the fediverse. There are many other things on the Fediverse, including Threads, which is Meta’s take on Twitter. The *entire point* of Mastodon is that there’s no central control.
You really should take a moment to understand a little bit about what you’ve chosen to get outraged about.
@dogzilla @literalgrill You reek of condescension. Do not talk to me this way.
Goodbye.
@nonlinear @literalgrill Your post reeks of ignorance and avoidance
@dogzilla @nonlinear Do we live in the same world where staff had closed door meetings with Facebook and signed NDAs? Or are the timelines leaking again?
It's even funnier that you're saying there's no central control of Mastodon when there is a literal board of directors but you seem to think I'm not the one informed on how the Fediverse works.
You really should take a moment to understand a little bit about what you’ve chosen to be a reply guy about.