I am struggling to understand how the fediverse is less vibrant than c. three years ago when there are empirically orders of magnitude more users, instances, and services.

I am also not particularly concerned about Pawoo versus if they were some large contingent on Facebook or Twitter: if they were, then those companies would be disincentivized to block them, some of the gross filth there would leak into other parts of those sites, and I would have some kind of formal association with them that I don’t have belonging to instances of services that I trust and that have competent, aggressive moderation.

re: Race-baiting trolling, that’s a serious problem but I think the solution is blocking instances that don’t have aggressive moderation. To the extent that you may be perceived to be racist by all the SJW boogeymen, then I guess that’s just a price you’ll have to pay. Again, what is the alternative here? Sea lions/trolls/etc. on a centralized service would somehow be easier to block? And the compounded complaint about how the cancelers are making the Internet “unsafe” is so ridiculous as to not even take seriously. The author certainly doesn’t because the article in no way bothers to explain what is “unsafe” other than evidently some personality-based gripe about someone whom I’ve never heard of and don’t care about.

And his complaint about there being no culture is literally untrue on various Mastodon instances that I have seen based around artists, anarchists, etc. I just don’t even understand what he’s arguing here.

zero stars

Pointless ramblings… and he (?) just seems to have a lot of shitty “friends” on the Fediverse.

I am not denying that this part of the Fediverse exists, but it is not nearly as prominent as his apparent filter bubble makes him think. And in the end, it is but a mirror of society…

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The interesting part is that looks like we want an interconnected network, not a set of isolated silos. Any modern commercial social media is a kind of network across the globe where everyone can meet everyone as soon as they have accounts (in a centralised way). It’s way easier to maintain a network (and gain profit) when it’s centralised. So, going decentralised becomes a task to keep interconnected while still also being a safe place and at least have resources to operate.

oh y’all are discussing here? here is my comment from the technology sublemmy:

I read this article months ago and I remember that it was a mixed bag, some parts I could understand but others are really weak arguments.

Looking at the headlines I agree with some now, but all of them are totally blown out of proportion. If mastodon stopped existing and a new but worse open source decentralized alternative came along, many people would go there. And that’s good. I don’t understand saying that mastodon is dead just because it has problems. It always had those problems. It will get worse if many people join as well.

Going back to social media where you pay with your data is not really a good idea imo, although I could totally understand if you were harassed on mastodon or sth like that.