(…) 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.

Indeed, Mbin allows following Mastodon et co. accounts

For now, Catodon is a part of the Threadiverse at the same degree as Mastodon. At this moment it allows following/subscribing a community only.

If you are using it for organising and publishing events, then there is Mobilizon

They are breaking not only API, but also federation with v1 pods…

Anyone who is on Reddit and UpScrolled will definitely enjoy Lemmy.

Last time when I tried to subscribe to a flipboard magazine from PieFed, I received no post from there. I have just added a ticket

Neither Lemmy nor PieFed are able to follow Mastodon users, but Mastodon is able to follow/subscribe to Lemmy/PieFed communities, post to them and talk to their users. Following a busy Lemmy community from Mastodon will make the community flood a Mastodon user’s feed, though.

Mastodon can follow any Pixelfed account and vice versa, but Pixelfed will see only posts with photos and Mastodon will see no more than 4 photos per post. Pixelfed is able to post to a Lemmy community, but I did not try to follow a comm from there.

In fact, Mastodon is able to follow any account from any fediverse app, but all the content from this will be reduced to the lowest common denominator: a post, maybe with formatting.

and UpScrolled already having questionable ethics, this may be the path forward.

I am definitely Out of the loop on this.

00s enbodied in an instance. Sopuli even after the Great Migrations retains its vibes, slightly different than several fledditor Reddit clones, like the largest instances. I like that.

Misskey (and its forks) allows to pin posts of yours or other users to a Clip.

This probably won’t help you, but there was Flockingbird. However its attempt to index Mastodon’s job offers ended up in drama as Mastodon generally does not like being indexed…

Just use Mastodon.