Wait! Before you raise your pitchforks, this is an instance-agnostic discussion, not calling anyone or any particular community out. :)

Clarifications:

• I’ve been a member of several large instances, all completely unrelated and lacking overlap with each others participants and interests.

• 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