Post #1602049

2026-04-22 18:46 UTC

Corporate social media sold us the premise that a network only has value if it functions as a &quot;global public square&quot; — that any network not engaged in the process of drawing in everyone is therefore a failure. But the value I find in the fediverse derives not from its universality, but rather from the particularity of what takes place here. I don&#39;t want to keep people out, but I don&#39;t feel any urgency about growing any bigger than is required to sustain what we&#39;re already doing.

Replies (3)

@lrhodes@merveilles.town 2026-04-22 18:52

I log on and see amazing visual artists exhibiting their latest work; indie devs building their own software ecosystems; writers and scholars talking about their latest research; designers showing the progress on the games they're making; people just feeling out ways of living that work for them in a world that is too often hostile to idiosyncrasy. The network doesn't have to put me in touch with every artist or dev or designer or writer or scholar or iconoclast in the world, just these.

Open ##2468675
@happyborg@fosstodon.org 2026-04-22 19:10

@lrhodes@merveilles.town Quite right. I've been aware of this too and cautioning against those calling for Mastodon to incorporate features that were available on X for instance. We should be cautious because all these features, even the feed were built in search of business models and tweaked to maximise profits, with all the toxic side effects that are now used as an excuse to double down with so called age verification etc. Just fix the algorithms and platforms that are toxic and leave people free.

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@idlestate@toot.cat 2026-04-22 20:34

@lrhodes@merveilles.town That mentality has a lot of utopian connectionism in it: A variant or subset of the "myth of progress" riding atop the notion, so far as I can tell unfounded at best or more likely refuted by the past history of other media technologies, that if we make it easier for everyone to talk to everyone else we will all "just get along" as some sort of natural outcome.

Open ##2468685