Wait! Before you raise your pitchforks, this is an instance-agnostic discussion, not calling anyone or any particular community out. :)
Clarifications:
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I’ve been a member of several large instances, all completely unrelated and lacking overlap with each others participants and interests.
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I’m also aware that with Mastadon it’s largely “who you follow”, but lets just for the sake of argument use the “main local feed” of your own instance as an example.
Now that that’s covered, here’s the complaint:
Posts trend towards giving play by play of someones day vs more in depth and topical discussions, which makes them hard to follow and huge context switches with little reward. Post seem as if the poster’s brain is connected to the post API and every streaming thought they are having comes through. It feels “noisier” than typical of reddit, twitter, etc. It feels like they populate their own threads to a point of basically writing novels and dumping copy/pasta.
While I love Mastodon and will continue to support it and the instances I am involved in, I have to be honest: I’ve been forced to mute quite a lot of people, even those who I had purposely intended on following earlier on because it feels like they’re using Mastodon as a personal notepad.
My concern is that this is just how Mastodon is being culturally accepted, and if so, I am not sure I like it. And if I don’t like it, what will others think about it when considering switching to it?
Should we gatekeep? Should instances or users take a stand against this similarly to how we tell people on chat apps to stop pressing enter after every 3 words and instead write semi-lengthy comments? Should we demand posts have higher quality? Is this all just a compensation quantity over quality? Will the quality come when the community is bigger or will it never grow as a result, or worse, grow into more noise?
/rant
I’m on a very small instance and, yeah, the local feed is not what I’d call the pinnacle of human thought. It’s mostly my instance’s most prolific poster responding to whatever #hastaggames have caught her attention that day.
And I’m totally OK with that. I set up my instance so I could have one that fit my needs, and then opened it up to the world once I had it established, and if it meets someone else’s needs and they’re happy there, that’s all I could ask for, really. I wasn’t expecting a riveting local feed; I set it up to federate because the plan wasn’t to have a ton of people generating stuff locally. I rarely even look at the local feed.
Some people like the “noise.” I may not, but I’m not exactly in any position to judge the content I typically engage with as somehow superior to anyone else’s; it’s just different. I am not the content police, and have no desire to be. A lot of people really seem to genuinely enjoy fluff and shitposts, and as a server admin my job is to give them a stable, welcoming place to do what they feel like doing, so I’m just going to keep doing my job.
Interesting. On my local instance i’m on, most people learned to use the “not listed” function when just commenting on other peoples toots. This really helps to keep the local feed clean.