(…) and suggested the community’s hostility toward AI was symptomatic of a broader tendency to drive people away. The comparison he drew to the loss of Black Twitter in 2022 was badly misjudged, and the furious response was largely justified. Hannah Aubry, Mastodon’s community director, publicly distanced the organisation from his views. The thread blew up, accumulating hundreds of comments in a single weekend, most of them hostile, and the pattern of the community’s response is worth looking at closely.

The comparison may be misjudged, but his post did actually trigger the same dynamic, which facilitated/s racism on Mastodon (driving Black Twitter away) too. Toutes proportions gardées of course, as anti-AI scolding is much more bearable than blatant racism and harrasment. And genAI boosters don’t deserve a honour to be treated as another marginalised minority.

Mastodon-and-adjacement (maybe let’s call it the Feediverse, analogically to the Threadiverse) consist (like Threadi) of lots of different instances, but remains experienced mainly as one place. Maybe Mastodon has eased an onboarding too much and people want it to be moderated like a single app. Or, rather microblogging always will be experienced as the simple place? Definitely Black users have experienced racism mainly on place level. And instance -level tools and instance moderation mainly failed to handle it. The main problem, though, is:

One cannot be both a fediverse and a place.

Every initiative to make a place-making tool (but Fediseer, which has been created for Threadi and remains peripherial for Masto) has already received an opposition from communities. Every such an attempt will unwittingly head for takeover of the place by Elon-but-good-one-this-time, and defeat one of the purposes of the federation: independence of the central (not always a just) authority.

So, what to do for Black Twitter to return to the fedi?
Nothing, as now it’s too late. They have already made a home on ATmosphere and created first and main alternative ATProto instance: Blacksky. Nothing ActivityPub-based will be a better experience for them in foreseeable time.

This is not a cultural failing that can be fixed by asking people to be nicer, which was roughly Scott Jenson’s prescription. Nor is it resolved by pointing to the protocol’s openness, which was roughly the community’s response. Neither prescription reaches the actual problem, because Mastodon’s governance tools sit at the instance level and the community’s experience happens at the federation level. Mastodon was built as open infrastructure at the federation level and community at the instance level. The Jenson thread demonstrates that the community has long since reversed this: they experience the federation as their community, and the instance as an administrative detail. The software has not caught up, and until it does, the community will keep enforcing its boundaries the only way the federation layer allows: person by person, reply by reply.

Thoughtful article overall, but I think what is describes is a design problem of Twitter like micro-blogging. There really is only a void to shout into, and I don’t really see how software can catch up to anything there. I also don’t really understand how this problem is specific to the Fediverse/Mastodon, with even the pre-Elon Twitter being famously toxic for very similar reasons.

Lemmy and other “community” based Fediverse software has much less of this problem, because there is a venue i.e a community to post into which has a theme, rules and moderators.