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Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: March 10th, 2024
  • hono4kami@pawb.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Do you think the mostly limited range of political views is a *strength* or a *weakness* of Lemmy? (For example, in terms of attracting new users.)English
    123·
    6 days ago

    Weakness.

    Limited range of political views breeds echo chamber. In my experience, you can’t really have meaningful discussion inside an echo chamber. Disagreement, compromise, nuance doesn’t exists inside an echo chamber. Just that same idea repeated over and over again.

    Gonna be honest, you can’t have meaningful and nuanced discussion here. Everything is black and white. Capitalism? It’s the worst thing on earth. Religious people? Those people are idiots. Don’t YOU dare use Windows, use Linux instead. ALL cops are bad, no exception.

    This kind of things makes me actually scared of recommending people to Lemmy. I’m sure most people are casual people who doesn’t have extreme views on anything. Just some people who wants to shut their brain off and scroll. I feel like the echo chamber I mentioned will put most people off.

    Going tangent a bit–In general fediverse is not diverse.

    When you scroll, you realize most of the post comes from the same kind of political ideas, same country (USA), same beliefs, etc.

    You can’t spell fediverse without spelling diverse, yet I feel like fediverse is anything but diverse.

    This needs to change.

  • hono4kami@pawb.socialOPtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Technology Connections' thoughts on MastodonEnglish
    1·
    7 days ago

    I wasn’t trolling, my response was geniune and I was disappointed. My comment wasn’t clear, please don’t take it the wrong way.

    This was when kbin.social was REALLY active. IIRC probably around June 2023? When Ernest was still active maintaining the kbin.social instance. The Mastodon instance I was talking about is mastodon.art. And if I search around, I’m still right that the instance seems to REALLY like to defederate without valid reason, I will link some thread that talks about this below [1].

    I wrote about the detail of this in kbin.social, but kbin.social is no longer active so I’ll admit I kind of forgot the detail.

    As far as I remember the reasoning stated in mastodon.art federation status is that “right wing” or something along that, at the time. I knew at that time that was wrong. I don’t really care about right wing or left wing (I am just a Southeast Asian, that dichotomy of politics is kinda unrelatable to me, but that’s topic for another time). But kbin.social was definitely not “right wing”, in fact it was one of the “leftist” place I’ve seen on the internet.

    Even then, the reasoning feels kinda off to me, other than the fact that it wasn’t true, why would you defederate instance over difference of opinion? If the instance was spamming your agenda to your instance then it’s probably justifiable. But it clearly wasn’t at the time. [2]

    And regarding “keeping people away from fediverse”, I was talking about the UX of fediverse.

    That time, I wanted to follow someone from mastodon.art as said person is an artist I really like that was disappointed with Twitter and trying out several alternative social medias. Somehow they chose to join mastodon.art. I was happy and wanted to follow said artist. I tried following them but I remember I had a hard time doing so.

    Turns out my instance was defederated.

    At this point, I’m sure most non-tech-savvy user would have given up. But I still tried following it anyway. I tried creating mastodon.art account, and, it turns out, mastodon.art sign up requires approval. At that point, I kinda given up. It’s gonna take lots of time until it gets approved, so why bother?

    The admin behavior somehow actually made me doubt that I will get approved too (though to be fair, it ended up being approved). And then, why would I use the mastodon.art account, when the instance is defederate-happy, making it actually hard to discover another artist to follow (in an app that already have some problem with discoverability)?

    Since then I started using less and less fediverse. I was kind of annoyed by this experience.

    Defederation perhaps is necessary.

    But it is prone to abuse by admins. And that degrades user’s experience.

    1. https://beehaw.org/post/6853561 , https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4695219 ↩︎

    2. Going off topic for a minute, this is yet another part that I don’t like about some folks in the fediverse. It seems similar to my observation of US domestic politics. They just want to stay in their own bubble and doesn’t want to compromise and hang out with people with different opinion. That isn’t how I was taught to live. I hang out with people with different beliefs–be it religion, politics, ethnics groups, etc-- all the time. These kinds of behavior made it hard to have some actual discussion. Those people lacks nuance. ↩︎

  • hono4kami@pawb.socialOPtoFediverse@lemmy.world•Technology Connections' thoughts on MastodonEnglish
    23·
    12 days ago

    This is what I have been thinking!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.

    I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn’t work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!

    Because of shit like this, no wonder people–including tech-savvy person like me–are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It’s what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It’s what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.