Alcun Atirutan BBS

So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.

I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.

But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.

Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"

I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.

That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.

If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.

Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.

This. Fucking. Sucks.

And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.

So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.

Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.

@TechConnectify I’m curious — are there other platforms that handle this kind of harassment better?

@michaelgemar Twitter, for one! If for no other reason that it could automatically detect most harassment and make it hard to find or shadow ban it completely.

But that would be introducing an algorithm to the things you see, which people don't want

And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.

But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.

I would hope you'd be concerned by that.

But at this point, it feels like that's what people want. There is no desire to make this platform more usable for people with larger audiences.

Christ, just the fact that notifications aren't stacked makes using this really hard as someone with a sizable following.

If the culture is that anti-growth, if it's to remain that fractured and rudderless, I don't see a fun future here.

Fin

@TechConnectify Was there ever anyone accountable to that at twitter? in my experience they never exercised moderation unless it was very egregious, and they certainly aren't doing it now.

Twitter has always been a wild west where your best option was the block button. It's only on mastodon that I think there's been even a half-hearted attempt at moderation, inadequate for cross-server BS it may be.

@TechConnectify it can be both. But I think it needs to get more popular for those ‘corners’ to be more sustainable and interesting. I have found my corner on Instagram, but Masto for now is more just interesting tidbits. It’s still growing, give it time and don’t forget to use your filter settings!

@andrewfelix " Don't forget to use your filter settings" is only a very slightly more polite way of saying " You're doing it wrong."

@TechConnectify I don't think that this is necessarily true. If you're on instance A, and you're getting harassed by a rando on instance B, it's instance B's mods' responsibility to moderate their user. If you report the issue to your admins on A, the way this is *supposed* to work is A's admins negotiate with B's admins to improve moderation, and if they fail to do so, A defederates B. That is obviously the nuclear option but it's there for a reason.

@TechConnectify In practice, I think that the way you're describing is more like how it _actually_ works, but this is why everybody is always telling you to move instances. It's relatively early days on this network's popularity, everybody thinks their small weird instance has the secret sauce to dealing with moderation scaling, then they actually scale up and see how hard it is, and most mod teams are pretty under-resourced

@TechConnectify Ironically a reason they're under-resourced is that people are not tied to their instances, in some cases because (in the case of folks like us) we're on big instances that aren't particularly community-oriented, or (in the case of the more enthusiastic instance-switchers) they are on community-oriented instances but they're constantly switching and don't want to be paying $5/mo to 20 different servers as they work out which one they like best

@glyph consider, if you will, that this advice sounds like someone talking to a Hi-Fi enthusiast or audiophile.

I think Mastodon is always going to struggle with the fact that most people don't think that deeply nor do they want to. It has to be simpler, but simpler means limiting options and nobody wants that.

@enbyss I mean, I don't post there anymore. I lurk on there a little bit, and it's definitely gotten worse.

But people being generally shitty? For the most part I just *didn't see that* because it would get hidden in replies.

Twitter understood that they had to build for scale, this place doesn't seem to want scale. So anytime someone like me is here, I just have to deal with the firehose.

@TechConnectify how often are you smashing the block/mute button?

Or are those people making new accounts, and continuing to harass?

@xabean it is fascinating to me how many people seem to think these buttons are the solution to everything.

Mastodon is so interested in being against the concept of virality that people can't seem to understand when someone with 30,000 followers has a post boosted that randos are going to come out from everywhere. Which is even more fun because, for weird Fedi reasons, you might not even see the harassing behavior!

It's so sooo fun.

@TechConnectify For what it's worth, they are working on grouping notifications. From Mastodon's CTO: https://oisaur.com/@renchap/111348686685213485

@val Great, but it's really goddamn late and screams to me how little leadership cares to cater to larger accounts.

@TechConnectify I think your assessment is correct in every aspect. One thing, though, which I failed to see in twitter until well after I left, is that it was perhaps just as fragmented as Mastodon is, but for different reasons. There were these whole spheres of content I was never exposed to simply because "the algorithm" decided I wouldn't be interested in it. Here the fragmentation is explicit and unavoidable, and I'm still unsure if that's better or worse.

@brunoph here's the thing I really don't get. I never, ever, used Twitter with the recommended feed or whatever. I only looked at the people I was following. That feed was chronological, and they never took it away.

The extent to which an algorithm shaped what I was seeing was basically the occasional ad and whatever the heck was on trending. I really don't get why so many people fixate on the algorithm

@brunoph I only used Twitter by looking at people I followed, and I would find new people to follow by whatever they retweeted.

So like, the most toxic and weird things I dealt with on Twitter were when my tweets would get retweeted and become viral. But they had really good systems to make sure I didn't have to see most of the drivel that was directed at me.

That's what's missing here

@TechConnectify I think your points are valid, but there is a stark contrast between your (and others) experience vs mine as it relates to abuse and I think it’s probably not a coincidence that the other people I know who are targets of abuse are also on mas.to. And I don’t see these abusive messages either: my instance’s admins are doing better.

You _shouldn’t_ have to concern yourself with what server you chose. At present, this is the unfortunate reality.

@TechConnectify I think there are technical solutions to this like user-specific defederation configuration. Again, you shouldn’t have to care. I empathize with that. But it’s early days.

My feed is lovely and full of awesome stuff that I never would have seen on the birdsite, and I wish yours was too. I think for you to have this experience, you need to join an instance with admins you like. There are a few tech YTer ones which are good, if you wanted to move.

@ZiggyTheHamster to be honest, I don't understand how switching instances is going to help. Unless all of the weird people I've run into happen to be on instances that a better server will have already defederated or whatever, I don't think this is a unique problem to the instance that I'm on.

The problem is that the dispute happens in a liminal space that nobody has ownership of

@ZiggyTheHamster and I can definitely tell you that most of the people that are making my life here difficult are not on my instance. They're on all sorts of instances, and that is the problem.

I go between posting things where the reaction is fine and then coming back here and rather than getting any empathy, for the most part people tell me I need to be doing something differently (I'm not including you in this, btw. But it's so damn widespread)

@TechConnectify

I think instances aiming for mass appeal without active moderation was a mistake. I think one solution may be to have a paid-for instance that has full-time staff for moderation, plus algorithmic filtering of posts from other instances. Either that, or there needs to be some kind of social expectation shared by all users of all linked instances.

@sekenre That's the core problem though that I feel like people are not engaging with. The very idea of this place is antithetical to the notion that there could even BE a cohesive strategy with how to use it.

@TechConnectify I think using an alternate client is the first thing you can do for the notifications thing. For the rest, if you are getting harassed by an user on another instance and the moderation there is doing nothing, you can always block the remote instance on your end, we were never designed to all talk to each other at the same time on the same level

@ashka you got to understand that when you have a following of my size, it's not individual people that are getting to me. It's the consolidated behavior of many individuals.

@TechConnectify I understand where you're coming from, but I think that's less a problem with Mastodon and more a problem with humanity. It's a direct consequence of the freedom that decentralized platforms give you. It's the same with phone calls and emails where you get spam and can't do anything about it. It's either that or a closed, moderated platform.

Yes, it sucks, and there's not much we can do about it besides changing humanity. But it's freedom.

@can I don't have to answer spam calls, and it's really easy to ignore an email.

It's less easy to get a notification of someone responding to your post, which you might be excited to read, or you might end up feeling like crap.

The social parts of this place are the problem

@TechConnectify
I think you've found the key issue. At its core, the Fediverse is made by and for people who aren't famous and who mostly want to hang out with their online friends. It lacks features most useful to people with hordes of followers, and to a large extent that's by design. Its designers have decided to deal with your problems by not dealing with them and saying if you don't like it maybe you'll go away and stop bothering them.

@VATVSLPR I found this issue ages ago. I want people to sit with it. Because if we want this idea to succeed, like it or not it needs cheerleaders like myself. In fact, it needs many more cheerleaders than just myself.

And I am not going to cheerlead for it in its current state.

And if people tell me I'm not welcome here, (which some have!)... all I can say is have a nice day.

@TechConnectify @can

Is the difference between fedi and email for you mostly a matter of expectations, or does volume of unwanted messages also play an important role (given that you don't publish your email in a very obvious way, I'd expect the volume to be much smaller for email, but maybe I'm way off)?

@robryk @can I think it's how you use it. If you put a content warning on a post here, that's similar to an email with a subject line. You have the choice whether or not to look at that post.

But to be honest, everybody knows a place full of content warnings is just ridiculous. It's not fun at all. You actually want to be able to see things you come across unexpectedly when using a site like this.

The catch is how to deal with people being jackasses.

@TechConnectify I sorta chime with this but the problem is for me I don't think there is going to be one replacement for Twitter or whatever its called these days. It does feel like people generally have a different idea about what a "Twitter replacement" should be. I still like this platform but I feel the days of potentially the format being even somewhat big are over.

@TechConnectify @ZiggyTheHamster Part of it might be inherent to Mastodon's intent of decentralization

If someone is awful enough on Youtube you can just ban them from your channel. They also have to hope that their nastygrams bubble up enough that you see them

On Masto they can just keep jumping between instances and flooding people with abuse because the entire thing is designed around your identity being "portable"

@CursedSilicon @ZiggyTheHamster I mean, yes! That's kind of what I've been getting at. Truly, at this point I'm not sure this idea can ever grow beyond a bunch of interconnected chat rooms. Because if it's miserable for anybody to be here with a larger following, we just won't be here.

So what is this? Social media? Or decentralized discord?

@CursedSilicon @ZiggyTheHamster The fact that this question remains unanswered, in no small part because everybody has a different answer to it and it would be Incredibly Bad to force people to agree on a single answer because that's just not how we do things here in the FOSS movement, is why being here is starting to become exhausting.

One of my greatest personal irritations is when people around me can't make up their minds. This is that /as a platform/

@TechConnectify the anti-growth mindset here does really bug me too (obviously I'm not a big account). It's still my favourite microblogging site by a fair margin now but it's like it's so afraid of doing what Twitter did wrong that it's not doing what it did right.

I think the hipster analogy is bang on. Hope you stay, can understand if you don't.

"Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured." – @TechConnectify

These are legit feelings, ones I do not share. I've seen so many similar statements to conclude that Mastodon may not work for those with large followings. And I feel fine with that, as I do not have a large following. It's an essential conflict of world views or ambition, I think. It's true that I no longer want to do numbers & I no longer care if Mastodon does numbers. I simply enjoy it.

@RMiddleton it's fine if you don't share them, but - and trying really hard not to sound full of myself here - I think you're going to need people like myself to be here if you want the idea to succeed.

I myself would like the idea of decentralized social networking where people can own their own content and host their own servers to be viable!

But if it's painful for me to be here? You're not going to find me pushing people this way.

@TechConnectify @can

I'm sorry, I think I managed to misconvey my question badly.

I wanted to ask about the reason why your experience _with harassment_ over email is better. You mentioned (IIUC) that it's better because it's easier to ignore there; I wonder whether the presumably smaller volume of harassment (in absolute terms) is also important. (If this is the question you were responding to, then I'm very confused by your answer.)

@robryk @can I don't have a problem with harassment over email because I don't have a public email address. I'm not really sure how we got on that topic

@TechConnectify
Apart from maybe two dozen accounts I follow, I "follow" hashtags of things I'm interested in, and that's what really does the trick for me: I discover new interesting postings, threads, and people again and again.
Yes, this isn't Twitter, but it's really enjoyable!

@TechConnectify I have a decently large Mastodon account among French-speaking accounts (@o_sc). In French, I’m basically doing science popularization stuff.

Earlier this year, I said that quote-RT would be useful to me, as they would help me reshare a post in English with a context/translation in French

I subsequently received the worst harassment I have ever received on social media

@o_simardcasanova @o_sc I believe you. I completely believe you.

@eri we have a winner!

@TechConnectify Honestly, I find it quite shocking that you get same or worse abuse here than back at the birdsite.
My experience was between indifference and total silence. But abuse worse than Twitter??

@metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify "Abuse worse than twitter" has been the experience of Black users on this site, from the reports I've seen--the problem is that it's diffuse abuse from sources most people can't see (because of federation) and moderators can only do a little about (you can't kick someone off an instance you don't control.)

@aris_tgd @metrogn0me_gr 100% this

@TechConnectify lemmy (and kbin) solves most of these issues since it has reddit style moderated communities, which as tied to, but not limited by their host instance.

It's also actively developed and able to learn from mastodon, and others.

But lemmy is not mastodon, it's a different style of social media, if you can even call it that.

I belive in federation but I don't actually think this iteration of it will work. But it's a good trial run

@Geniusak there was a really fun thing I went through where someone tagged me on Lemmy, and notifications of a discussion critical of me were making their way through to me on Mastodon.

Not understanding what the heck was happening, I was replying thinking that someone was directly engaging with me. And the fact that this just happened with no warning says to me that, yeah, federation ain't ready for prime time

@TechConnectify Personally, I haven’t experienced any of that because I have no followers - I’m just trying to find the people I used to follow at the bird site. But I can see how it sucks and how it’s baked into the way mastodon works (or doesn’t).
I hope you’ll keep posting somewhere in addition to YT, so if you go to bluesky or wherever, please let us know.

@TechConnectify @CursedSilicon You’re right, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be indecision-as-a-service. There has to be some mechanism for you to, at the most basic level, subscribe to a block list of your choosing, and augment the server’s moderation. This block list could be reactive in the same way that it worked on Twitter, and also target individuals (and any moves they do).

This has to be exposed less technically, though.

@TechConnectify @CursedSilicon the idea being that ultimately, you choose how strongly you want to moderate, and don’t have to rely on the server admins.

I think it’s very early days and that your appraisal that folks in your specific situation represent a very sharp edge case is correct, however. I don’t think it will always be that way.

@TechConnectify @CursedSilicon I do think you have a Hobson’s choice right now, though. Do you accept getting bitten by people actively being abusive to you or do you accept getting bitten by neo-Nazis who you aren’t getting active abuse from but who have somehow occupied most of the seats in the restaurant while you were eating?

And I hate this for you.

@ZiggyTheHamster @CursedSilicon to be honest, a big part of this conflict is that I am not the kind of person who wants to think about any of this stuff. And since this space largely attracts people who are people in the foss community or maybe Linux community, the notion that someone like me simply wants to use a service and expect it to work without being a pain falls in deaf ears.

It's like you've gotta earn your place here or some crap.

@TechConnectify @ZiggyTheHamster Linux/FOSS people can be exhausting, frankly

The biggest thing I've found is that they truly earnestly believe that they can code their way out of any problem. Human failings are just an irrelevant detail to the perfection of the code they'll write to solve all these problems, and if you get caught in an edge case they didn't account for that's clearly *your* fault, their code is obviously perfect!

@CursedSilicon @ZiggyTheHamster right. People seem to give advice without realizing how clunky it is.

As I've said before many times, it's a lack of understanding the specialty in your own expertise. I have to remind myself that my troubleshooting and investigative skills don't translate for many folks - hell, that's why my job is my job! But I get frustrated when others don't see things that are obvious to me, and that's a personal failing I'm working on.

@TechConnectify I admire your character to the extent I know it & I enjoy your work going back many years. It’s even a thrill somewhat to message with you. I’m not anti-individuals who happen to be successful. But I may have become anti-success defined by numbers. Maybe that breaks social networking & $. I think the idea of Mastodon has already proven itself successful. I wish it weren’t adversarial for you & others who are not having good experiences here.

@TechConnectify as I absorb the repeated bad experiences of the well known on Mastodon what I’m wondering is whether

On the Fediverse is fame a negative??

Because there’s no algorithm, no building of audiences into the millions, no likely benefit to anyone’s income to being here…
It’s a nice place for discussions among the non famous.

Greater attention attracts attacks here & offers few rewards.

Maybe?
Just thinking aloud…

@RMiddleton It's certainly looking that way. And I'm hardly famous.

It's also just... really irritating when people assume they know why I'm here. I'm not trying to use Mastodon to promote my work - frankly my following here is a drop in the bucket compared to YouTube. But lots of folks seem to think I'm here to hijack attention or something.

No. I'm here for fun and to offer a way for people to connect with me. But it ain't much fun anymore.

@unchartedworlds @TechConnectify I am curious about this as well. I expect that Alec would prefer to see less of <waves generally around this thread>, which is harder to deal with than “Elon Musk is the leader of my religion and anyone who wants EVs to succeed other than Teslas deserves my focused attention”, which I expect Alec gets as well.

But what I don’t know about is like … do you get unprovoked personal attacks and stuff?

@unchartedworlds @TechConnectify as an example of what I mean, I have some YouTube videos which mostly show me working on some electronics, and I have only like 10 subs. I don’t make content really.

But that didn’t stop some dickhead from commenting on my fingernails and asking what the hell is wrong with them. (Nothing, I chew them, they’re dry because I don’t like how lotion feels and they need them, I’m always scraping my hands and stuff, fuck outta here.)

@unchartedworlds @TechConnectify this happened years ago and even though I don’t really care, their unprovoked comment is still in my head. I’m sure Alec gets a lot of this too. But does he get it on Mastodon, and how prevalent is it? It is this tier of thing that I think we could relatively easily make a dent in.

@ZiggyTheHamster @unchartedworlds I don't want to make any unwarranted equivalencies, but broadly yes. I get similar things here.

The worst so far is a toss-up between someone who let me know they don't think anyone should be able to make a living making videos, and the several folks who said - to me - that it's evil to be hosting content on YouTube.

@TechConnectify One of Mastodon’s biggest weaknesses is that it looks and acts like Twitter. People tend to extrapolate from that and think moderation is handled the same way.

They are very wrong. I think the Fediverse is the best way to do moderation at scale, the trick is understanding how moderation actually works here. This blog post sums it up best:

https://marcushutchins.com/blog/tech/opinions/i-was-wrong-about-mastodon-moderation.html

The same applies to your other complaints. Notification stacking has been around for months if not years, for instance, you’ve just assumed that the official Mastodon app is the best and most feature-rich way to use Mastodon. Other clients exist, and have different philosophies about the UI:

https://docs.elk.zone/guide/features#improved-notifications

Mastodon is a different beast.

@hjhornbeck Just... if you will, please try and understand how this sounds to someone who just wants to exist here and doesn't want to read a service manual's worth of documentation.

It's okay to be an enthusiast for Mastodon - don't misunderstand me. I just want enthusiasts to recognize when their enthusiasm is extraordinary. This posts reads as a mix of "you're doing it wrong" and "just follow these 35 easy steps!"

@TechConnectify I love your stuff and hope you stay on here, but everything you say makes sense.

Do you find that the shit you get on here is targeted dogpiling, or more a low level “well actually” death by a thousand humourless nerds? I personally see the latter a lot and it’s one of the things that makes me want to slam my fingers in a drawer. It’s also incredibly hard to moderate against. But I’m confident that it will change as Mastodon social mores change.

@whalecoiner It's a mix of things. The worst I would call dogpiling, but not targeted.

I basically can't say anything nice about [insert not-FOSS thing here] without a brigade of ne'er-do-wells showing up to throw rocks at me, nor can I express that I'm having trouble without a million "well have you tried" or "you're doing it wrong" or "see, the beauty of the way Mastodon works is..." or "I don't experience that."

It's a death by a thousand cuts thing, mostly.

@TechConnectify I suspect the solution for people with large audiences will be dedicated instances that somehow filter out the nasty cat ear wearing anime keyboard-warrior responses. It would have to be via some kind of trained pre-sorting and judicious blocking of furry hives.

@TechConnectify if that kind of solution happens (and it would need to be funded) then the federated nature of things is what would fundamentally allow it to happen.

@whalecoiner I know the solutions I want to see - it's a broader, more unified culture. How to make that happen exactly is unclear (I'm no expert!) but we need the crowd to be able to signal bad behavior - basically social reinforcement mechanisms need to be here, and right now there aren't many beyond defederating or blocking which doesn't actually educate anybody on what they've done and why it was hurtful.

@TechConnectify @whalecoiner this might be the thing that quote-boosts solve, when they're universal.

QTing an especially egregious reply and saying, "please don't do this" seems to be one of the primary ways shared culture is propagated on other platforms. I routinely have to shame people in my mentions, but few people see it.

(Also yes, notification batching - or even a "just show notifs from people I follow" - would make the platform infinitely more usable.)

@tess @whalecoiner I would welcome quote boosts, but equally important to me is (at least the option to) sort replies by likes/engagement. There's no way to signal "this is a bad take" other than for the OP to just say it - and that might lead to conflict, so it's less likely to be said, and it puts the onus on the OP.

There needs to be the digital equivalent of "hear hear!" and side-eye.

@TechConnectify I don't understand the pain that drives people with large audiences away from mastodon because I've never had a large audience.

I would assume, you having survived YouTube comments, that you could easily deal with whatever dorky criticisms you're getting. But I guess my assumptions are wrong?

I wish you weren't experiencing whatever has you uncomfortable, because I really do appreciate when my feed has some of your posts in it.

@jefftp Yes, those assumptions are wrong.

For one, it's easy to ignore YouTube comments. They don't show up in notifications anymore for me aside from when large accounts leave comments. But also, the comment algorithm is very good at making sure stupid/mean comments are pushed way way down.

Here? There's nothing like that, and unless I want to turn notifications off completely (which I guess I could) I /will/ see all the comments in order as they happen.

@jefftp I've also gotten many more personal attacks (or, at least, more have made it through to me) here than on Twitter. I'll bet in aggregate there are far more in my YT comments but, again, easy to ignore. There's thousands of them under most of my videos and the bad ones just disappear.

Here, though, there are shockingly few consequences for bad behavior - and it's generally up to the OP to take action against them and hope mods pay attention.

@djvuro who

@TechConnectify@mas.to @jefftp@hachyderm.io I've gotten banned from YouTube comments for innocuous posts multiple times because the bots on YouTube really want to pin me.
I notice I'll be leaving a comment on a channel. it gets be a strike, and within a day I'll get a second delete and a 24 hour ban.
I could only imagine how many good comments are gone due to YouTube robots having a vendetta against them that day.

@TechConnectify@mas.to @jefftp@hachyderm.io also AI is well known at this point to think that people with ADHD and/or autism are a bot. most forms of AI get it wrong.

@Jessica @jefftp This is the first time I've encountered this idea: earnestly, can you point me to some resources about this?

@TechConnectify@mas.to @jefftp@hachyderm.io https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_2d1826e2-2bfa-11ee-84c9-6f34496edb29.html there was a news story about a prof a while back during the gold rush of AI

@Jessica @jefftp thanks. Next time you notice a comment of yours getting flak, let me know.

I know of some folks having issues with this, but I've never been able to pin down why. Most people have complained without giving a reason.

@TechConnectify That's a false impression. You just happen to be on an instance with very little moderation. Managing "that in-betweeny space", as you call it, is a simple matter of maintaining a blocklist of instances. For example, the instance I'm on silences mas.to, so I can only see your posts because I deliberately chose to follow you.

That's what people mean when they talk about changing instances: going somewhere with a better moderation policy. It's not about the messages on that instance, specifically.

🦇

@diligentcircle Okay, I'll take your word for it. But this still feels like a lot of complexity rife for misunderstandings and conflict before we even get to replyguys

@TechConnectify@mas.to @jefftp@hachyderm.io I had one being spam and I forget the other one.
It was along the lines of "I'm gonna switch from Spotify to Apple music" and had some reasons I was gonna switch in there.
and since there was 2 strikes, the first one was saying something along the lines of "every search engine is just bing or google in a trench coat" with more words than that.
I forget the other one, it caught me off-guard I forgot what I had commented before it
found the images associated

@TechConnectify@mas.to @jefftp@hachyderm.io btw they will delete the message and strike you within seconds of posting it. sometimes they notify you after you click on a link to another video and sometimes it's immediately after clicking post. it's impossible for you or any youtuber to unban them or to see those posts. they're just gone. and there's no use of appealing because YouTube will never respond.

@Jessica @jefftp Hmm. So... not that this is to suggest you're doing anything wrong (because of course you aren't) but mentioning brands like that does line up with two kinds of coordinated bot campaigns we see a lot.

There have been a lot of fake conversations between hijacked user accounts about how great brand X is (or, especially weirdly, specific services found on some instagram page) and you might be caught in the crosshairs of that.

@Jessica @jefftp This sort of comment spam has gotten a lot worse lately, which means automated attempts to catch it are getting more aggressive.

Now, some of this is speculation on my part - but I have seen some similar comments to what you posted appear under my videos that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever I'm talking about. Like someone saying "AT&T's a better deal than Verizon" under the lava lamp video as an example.

@Jessica @jefftp Based on the two specific things you shared here, that sounds close to what might be happening.

Could be totally wrong about that, and I'm not suggesting you change anything about what you're commenting. Just providing a possible explanation based on what I know and see on my side of the comment section.

@TechConnectify @VATVSLPR I guess my question is what qualifies this as "succeeding"? I've been on Mastodon, first on .social and then on my current instance, for over five and a half years. Everyone always talks about how Mastodon isn't going to succeed if it doesn't bring in more users or attract big accounts. I have no problem with seeing more users or people with big accounts, but I don't really see what the *benefit* of either is to the Fediverse writ large.

@TechConnectify @VATVSLPR Like, don't get me wrong, you absolutely don't deserve harassment, either from your videos or your comments on Mastodon, but the thing to keep in mind this isn't a capitalist platform that needs an endless supply of new users to feed to the advertising grist mill. Big accounts taking their collective balls and going to play at Bluesky isn't going to end the Fediverse or Mastodon. Mastodon has always been crumbling.

@sexybenfranklin @VATVSLPR I mean, to me it seems pretty much a given that in order for an idea to succeed it needs to be a popular idea.

It's why I called LaserDisc a flop - it wanted to be in everybody's home. Its success as a niche videophile format wasn't what they were going for - it's what they settled for.

Maybe that's not a good analogy, but popularity =/= capitalism and growth can (and does!) exist outside of that framework.

@TechConnectify If it's one person: Can't you block them?
If it's multiple: in what way was Twitter better? (I assume you also have to block every individual there too)

@smol_entity Twitter was better because, being a larger platform, they built auto-moderation tools. And if I'm being honest, I think that's a big source of tension here:

Smaller users could get caught in the crossfire and be "shadowbanned" - they like that that can't happen here.

Larger users wouldn't have to see harassment all the time because it was mostly hidden. I'm sure it was happening, but I couldn't see it - and that's what matters to my experience.

@smol_entity When you have maybe 1,000 followers the run-ins with weird and rude randos are rare enough to be ignorable.

Get up to 30K and they happen a lot - especially when your toot goes viral.

Twitter was better at protecting larger users like myself from seeing hurtful things, but it was also too sensitive at flagging things that were innocent.

I'd like us to be somewhere in the middle, but instead Mastodon is at the other extreme.

@lilith To be honest (and I hope this doesn't sound rude) it's not like Mastodon is helping my YT videos gain traction. I'm here to have fun and offer a way for people to connect with me.

It's just turning out to be not so fun lately. I'm gonna keep hanging around, and I'll be a little more careful about what I toot about in the hopes of not inviting the worst, but I would hope that sort of self-censorship wouldn't be necessary here.

@TechConnectify Honestly, I don't think it's true that it needs big users like yourself to "succeed". The fediverse has been around for over a decade now; it's already successful (in that it has a consistent userbase of people who find it useful) and it's not going away any time soon.

I'd say the biggest thing the fediverse needs to make progress on now is tackling issues with racism and other problems faced by minorities (focusing on diversity). Adding large numbers of users or "cheerleaders" isn't going to help with that in and of itself. And no offense to you, but as far as I'm aware, you're not one of those affected minority groups and don't appear to be particularly outspoken on those issues, either.

🦇

@diligentcircle It's all about what you mean by success. I got flak for saying LaserDisc was a flop - but compared to the goals its inventors had for it, it absolutely was.

My main hangup has been "what is success?" and the simple fact that everybody seems to have different answers goes a long way to explaining why this place feels so disjointed to me.

To your second paragraph: yes! I agree. But hostility towards popular people is also pretty icky, no?

@diligentcircle Like, I prefaced this thread by saying you're welcome to tell me to pound sand - I've "made it" as it were and I don't strictly /need/ anything form the Fediverse.

But when (and apologies if you saw this already) people tell me to my face that my job shouldn't be a job or that I'm evil for using YouTube to make a living, I absolutely won't call that equivalent to racism or queerphobia but it's still abjectly shitty behavior we should not want.

@diligentcircle I hope we can agree at least on that point. My central critique right now is that assholery has little to no consequences on this platform - and the common refrain of "use blocklists!" or "Move instances!" is pretty close to victim blaming. Or at least "you're doing it wrong/works on my machine"

That culture is pervasive here and, imo, needs to die regardless of whether I stay here or not.

@TechConnectify It's so painful to see / hear this. It's even more embarrassing to see that some people don't even have the slightest social decency to at least not be hostile in this very thread. Mind-boggling.

I can't speak to how this compares to Twitter, how bad the situation is for accounts with more followers, let alone have any solutions. It's just a shame to see that people have a bad time on the platform that I personally generally feel at home. 😔

@lschuermann It pains me that I need to keep saying this so often. It has been a struggle simply to be believed about this, honestly. But I can understand that as a mighty-privileged person my concerns are (rightly) a low-priority.

I appreciate your thoughts, though. And I'm not going away just yet.

I think @TechConnectify makes a fair point about moderation and accounts with large audiences. I wonder what @Gargron's view/vision on this is 🐘

@TechConnectify Part of me wonders if some of mastodon's toxicity comes frm appealing largely to nerds, pedants, & people who want to be "against" whatever the popular take is, or feel smarter than everyone else- in this case, being against/smarter than twitter & broader social media. Those tend to be the same bad actors in the open source space in my exp. :( they bring their practiced behaviors of "my opinion is the right opinion, and if you disagree thats cause you're dumb" to evry interaction

@CrisColor @TechConnectify I think some of it comes from the fact Mastodon used to be niche, and suddenly became somewhat mainstream. This means that some people who were there for the niche culture became afraid to lose that. The irony is that the niche culture can very easily be preserved by being on a niche instance with limited federation.

@sgued @CrisColor This is true but it brings back the whole tortured reason for this place in my mind.

If you want to wall yourselves off, wall yourselves off. But then that's not really social media is it? It's a chat room. Or a few loosely connected chat rooms.

My position is that I want my posts to be available to anyone anywhere on the fediverse, because that is how I think of this. Social media. But it's also really really hard to not encounter jerkwads

@sgued @CrisColor fundamentally what I think is missing from this platform is a cohesive social awareness. Most of us are experiencing the platform in the liminal space between all of these smaller spaces that might have cohesive social systems, but they're going to conflict when we put them all together.

And the oft-repeated answers seems to be technical solutions to social problems which we should all know by now simply doesn't work.

@TechConnectify

"And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances."

That's not quite true.

Your instance admin is responsible for blocking abusers from any instance, and the abuser's admin is responsible for punishing their behaviour.

If an instance allows abusers to flourish, it tends to get defederated (or it should do).

Whether it works perfectly or not is another issue, but there is definitely a line of responsibility there.

@TechConnectify

When you report abuse it goes to both your admin and (anonymously and optionally) to the admin of the other instance, so they can both carry out their responsibilities.

If there's a disagreement between the two instances over what is acceptable behaviour, one or both can silence the other, or cut them off completely.

@feditips @TechConnectify IMO the issue with this is that

* merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and

* block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches.

@feditips @TechConnectify (also there seems to me to be a very strange disconnect between 'fedi' expecting accounts having problems at scale to be the ones responsible for blocking the "offended" parties exhibiting the antisocial behaviour and not instead "societally" having the expectation that complainers who "don't want to see" certain people in their feed should actually be the ones taking responsibility for shaping their feed and doing the blocking?)

@interpipes @feditips "works on my machine" spilling into social media.

@TechConnectify I guess I'm confused about the comparison to twitter.

However you feel about "your job should not be a job", but that was hardly moderatable harassment on twitter, right?

How would you deal with harrassment on Twitter other than blocking and muting? Or are you saying that you just tend to get more 'less nice' comments here compared twitter because social/cultural reasons?

@joshhunt Either they automatically turned on the quality filter as I grew (because I never did it myself) or they have some special sauce for bigger accounts because the fact is /I did not see this sort of stuff at all/

It would be hidden by the filter. Or, if it somehow made it through, it usually wouldn't become a notification and feedback from other users ("this is a bad take" / getting ratioed) would throw it way down to the bottom of the replies where it stopped getting engagement.

@joshhunt Fundamentally there is a disconnect between the needs of someone like myself (who has a large audience and is likely to attract all sorts of people) and a smaller user who may be subject to real harassment and harm.

But some sort of filter has to get implemented for larger accounts to have a good time here - or at the very least, there need to be REAL signals that others can put out to have a negative (and positive!) reinforcement mechanism.

That social part just doesn't exist here.

@TechConnectify
Respectfully disagree. The project has been developed for free primarily by volunteers and they've been focused on the small groups of users interested in experimenting with something new for 5-6 years before the Twitter implosion drove a wave of new accounts with different needs to the network, which they have been responding to as quickly as they can given the available resources.

The main guy developing it for years has been earning 30k euros/yr through the nonprofit org building it, versus millions of VC that Bluesky is burning through and however much Twitter and FB/Insta have spent over the years.

I appreciate most of your comments in this thread, but wanted to push back on this one that seemed more rude toward the very small team working hard to bring us the service
@val

@_dmh @val Frankly, it was phrased rudely because this seems like such an obvious pain-point with regards to usability. I cannot believe that it hasn't come up in the last two years. Hell, probably five.

Notifications are pretty much useless to me here when something's going out beyond my audience (like today) and tedious on a good day.

Of course I respect the limited resources, but this particular thing is inexcusable to me.

@TechConnectify @_dmh What is your use of notifications on other websites? Is it only to see messages people send at you, or are you interested in "X people boosted your tweet" too?

@val @_dmh I am in fact interesting in seeing those numbers, yes. It's nice to know when things resonate.

Now the choice is between knowing when anybody does any thing or ignoring all that. There's a middle ground that existed for years and years (Ed Barkely and 57 other people liked your post) but it just hasn't been implemented here.

@interpipes @TechConnectify

"block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches"

That doesn't match my experience at all.

I have had abuse occasionally, but my experience is that it was handled well by admins and did not carry on.

1/2

@interpipes @TechConnectify

"merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and"

If it was personal abuse then that would usually breach most instance rules.

But it's difficult to know whether something breaks rules if you can't see it.

2/2

@feditips @TechConnectify the point is that there is a world of difference between *abuse* and merely receiving relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse and will not breach most instance rules but nevertheless crowd out meaningful interactions. Twitter has/had a quality filter specifically for preventing those replies turning into notifications.

@interpipes @feditips Yes. Exactly.

@interpipes @TechConnectify

" relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse..."

Again, it's sort of difficult to comment on this without seeing an example, even a hypothetical one.

However, with closed source filters you will never know what they are improperly hiding from you. There might be good stuff there which Twitter etc is preventing you seeing.

@interpipes @TechConnectify

To add though, Mastodon and the Fedi are open so there's nothing to stop a third party client implementing such filters.

If someone wanted to build such a filter, they are free to do so if there's enough demand to sustain development.

@feditips @interpipes Y'know what this sounds like, though? "Well, I don't think this is a big deal. Hopefully somebody else does. Good luck!"

And that attitude isn't great.

@TechConnectify I have a Bluesky invite I can spare if you want to shop around a bit

@feditips @TechConnectify I imagine the second half of the toot Alec recently boosted;

“eh, I'd prefer if all the YouTubers get out of here anyways. go to bluesky or whatever corpo bullshit.”

is probably a pretty good example of the sorts of comments / sentiments that don’t add value to a conversation, but aren’t abusive and don’t deserve to get equal priority ranking with those from people who actually follow & want to engage with someone.

@interpipes @TechConnectify

What specifically would you like to see happen if someone posts that kind of statement?

(Genuine question, I'm trying to understand the problem.)

@feditips @interpipes I would like to not see it. I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it

If that's too spicy a take, so be it. But that's how Twitter's Quality Filter worked and that's why I could exist there with 90K followers but being here with 30K followers is really starting to suck.

And please don't say this is a problem I need to solve. This is a culture issue the platform needs to work on

@feditips @interpipes So much of this is a disconnect between how a larger user / notable person uses social media and how other people do.

It's completely understandable that we're going to have misaligned priorities.

But unless this platform finds a way to make existing here easier for me, I won't hang around. And I'll take lack of action on this front as confirmation that I'm not wanted here.

@TechConnectify @interpipes

"I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it"

So, to be absolutely clear, you are asking for a complete ban on people saying they dislike YouTubers? No one else should be able to see such posts?

@feditips @interpipes No. Not at all.

This is specifically about replies. There are currently no consequences for bad behavior on Mastodon unless the OP takes action against someone.

That's just not tenable for accounts like myself to engage in. I want a filter *on my replies* - I don't care what people say about YouTubers in their own spaces, but as far as I'm concerned, I should have at least some modicum of agency over discussions that I start.

@feditips @interpipes If you truly don't understand what I'm getting at here, then I don't know how to explain it any better.

The replies are fucking toxic here. And I'm tired of being told to shrug it off, or move instances, or in other ways be told it's MY problem.

The replies are THE REASON I'm spending less time here. And yet somehow, Twitter. TWITTER. figured out how to make it more pleasant for me to exist than this place does without my input at all.

@feditips @interpipes So, before you tell me about all the ways I could be tinkering with my experience to make it better, understand that I fundamentally do not believe this should be my problem to solve.

Not only do I not have the patience for it, it's asking me to do work just... because?

Nah. That's not why I'm here. And if it's this much work to just have fun and be at peace, I'll leave.

@TechConnectify @interpipes

Anyone can make a report, it doesn't have to be the OP. I've often reported posts I've seen in other people's threads.

The reporting is so that the admins know to do something.

The ratio of human moderators to users is much higher on here than on Twitter etc, so the moderation happens through human processes like reports.

The reason Twitter etc use algo is because they don't have enough humans to do anything else.

1/2

@TechConnectify @interpipes

This is why I was trying to ask if I can help, because quite often the processes here exist but they work differently.

When I've had problems with abuse I've reported it, and the reports have been acted upon.

If someone was telling me in a nasty way to leave the Fediverse, I'd report that as personal abuse, and the process would go from there.

2/2

@feditips @interpipes I'm afraid you will never understand this.

There is too much for me to report, and much of what I experience that is irritating isn't likely to be deemed abuse anyway.

People are just rude, or mean, or pedantic, or arrogant, or snarky, or insulting. I wouldn't report them for that anyway, but I still don't want to have to see it.

Everyone here is allergic to automated anything but guess what? I think it's needed.

@ashten I think our perspectives are not as in conflict as you might think. So much of this is down do differences in need and what platforms are used for.

I am glad to hear this platform works well for your needs. It doesn't work for mine - not without some automated filtering. Without it, the platform is miserable with this many followers.

I want us both to share this space, but as it stands I'll be stepping away if things don't change.

@ashten I think it's easy for people to cling to the various moderation and filtering tools that Mastodon offers as a form of agency. Were I in need of those filters, I'd surely agree.

For the most part? I don't need them. A lot of that is privilege, to be sure.

But for my particular problems and needs, they're not tenable. I can't even define what I want filtered beyond "jerks being jerks."

@ashten So it's quite possible this is an irreconcilable problem. I need broader, automated filtering just because of the size of my following. Some folks will likely get caught in the crosshairs of it, which to be clear does upset me. But I'm not sure how to exist here otherwise.

It really is a death by a thousand cuts. I can't spend time where there's a baseline of irritation, and if it gets too bad I won't.

@feditips @TechConnectify @interpipes Hey, remember all the Twitter user blocklists people used to pass around?

Remember those? They were important but they became a lot less so after a while _because pre-Musk Twitter came up with a way to handle this_.

Twitter solved it, now we have to solve it too.

@feditips @TechConnectify @interpipes That's what I think you're missing. Yes, the version of it Twitter needed to solve was a _lot worse_ for a lot of us. For some of us, "your job shouldn't even exist" is pretty ignorable when our standard is, "I'm going to kill every fucking one of you faggots and here's where you live," right?

Doesn't make it not a problem, though! People shouldn't have the kind of armour plating some of us had to grow to be online.

So it is a problem and still needs to be solved, and that's true _even if_ some of our emotional reactions are "that's enough to get to you? really?" See again: people shouldn't have to have the armour plating some of us have.

Does that make it resonate?

@feditips @TechConnectify @interpipes I mean, _if_ your admin keeps up with fediblocking (as I work to), then we _have_ solved the _worst_ of it. (That's a big if, but let's say you have a really on-top-of-shit admin who follows the various fediblock tags and seeks this stuff out.)

But the next tier down isn't solved _at all_ by fediblock. Yes, the Federation does a really pretty good job of siloing nazis! That's great! As I'm fond of saying, it's the first social network to use the Nazi bar phenomenon _against_ nazis!

But that doesn't do shit about people just being assholes, and having a lot of assholes flock to you may not be life-threatening, but it _is_ terribly, terribly wearying.

@moira @feditips @interpipes And adding to this, I know full-well of my privilege here and that people have MUCH more dire problems.

But I am tired of this being brushed off. I want to be here. I can't unless this gets better.

@TechConnectify @feditips @interpipes My read of the situation is: someone or something needs to sort the garbage posts - and Alec doesn’t want to be the one doing it. IMO that’s a valid feature request.

@jeffpc @feditips @interpipes And the people who love this platform need to realize that if they truly love it, some form of automation needs to come into play.

You can make it opt-in, you can make it open source, by all means give users the power to decide how and if it works.

But for the love of all things holy, automation isn't the enemy. It's a tool.

@TechConnectify @interpipes

It sounds more like this is more to do with personal tastes than general principles?

I run a large account and I'm happier with a human-based system. I don't want an algo stripping away replies that I might want to see. I would prefer to be deciding on mutes/blocks myself.

But you prefer to have such decisions taken by an algorithm, even if there's a risk it blocks stuff you might want to see.

Is this a fair summary?

@feditips @interpipes I think it's a fair summary, but I'm not sure you're empathizing with it.

@TechConnectify @michaelgemar

I don't think people have a problem with algorithms per se, it's more about who sets them up, and who twiddles them, to serve whose needs/agenda.

You being a "successful" YouTube thingy, it seems to me that you could afford to stand up an instance of your own without too much hassle.

I also think it skews your judgement towards prioritizing "reach" of the sort that brought you that success.

We ain't here for that.

@jpaskaruk @michaelgemar Hey - don't assume why I'm here or what my priorities are.

I don't really care to have reach here. I'm here to offer a way for folks to connect with me and have fun.

But now that I have 30K followers, just that small amount of reach is miserable.

If you want to keep the platform like that to shoo us away, I guess that's your right. But we are still people.

@TechConnectify

@ZiggyTheHamster @unchartedworlds
While I'd prefer people not host on YT... It's not my call and wherever a video is I'll watch.

@funbreaker @ZiggyTheHamster @unchartedworlds (watch me step in it)

YouTube is arguably the most socialist website there is.

"Wanna put your content here and get paid? Great! We'll give you 55% of the ad revenue we make against your content. And you get to own the copyright still! You're just licensing it to us!"

It has weird rules and it fails people and it does bad things. But the same can be said for governments.

@funbreaker @ZiggyTheHamster @unchartedworlds Now, until somebody else is brave enough to make a video sharing site (or really any site!) that works like this, YouTube will be the place everyone wants to put their stuff. There is a reason so many people who built followings in other apps try to move to YouTube, and there's a reason I'm not trying hard on other apps (though there are many more, too).

So - to me, it's the least bad option by a mile.

@funbreaker @ZiggyTheHamster @unchartedworlds And as I tried to say here earlier But It Did Not Go Well, I, too dislike ads and the incentives they create. Good thing they offer a paid option to get rid of them! And we creators still make money from our labor when people sign up for that. They still share that revenue!

But Google Bad, and purity tests are more important than building competitors I guess.

@dracocide @unchartedworlds @ZiggyTheHamster @tilvids @funbreaker Explain to me why I would want that besides catering to people who intensely dislike YouTube.

@dracocide My videos are backed up and can be uploaded to another site at any time, and to be perfectly honest if they don't exist on a platform that actually pays me to put them there, having them exist elsewhere in the meantime isn't much of a help.

I get the thrust of your argument here, and I'm sorry if this sounds callous but it's extra work for essentially nothing in return.

@dracocide If there were a different site that *also* worked like YT - you bet I'd enjoy that redundancy.

But it needs to be worth my time. I'm sorry if that lowers your opinion of me.

@TechConnectify @dracocide @unchartedworlds @ZiggyTheHamster @tilvids a second place so that a video stays up *somewhere* in case of reportbot overrun?

@funbreaker I replied why I don't really think this is a viable backup plan, but also - I have connections at YouTube.

I 100% get how unfair that is - smaller folks can end up getting kerploded for doing nothing wrong.

But I honestly don't know how to solve that problem in any aspect of life. Even in the real world, we have scapegoats.

@saria @feditips @interpipes Thank you for expressing this so eloquently.

@TechConnectify @feditips @claudius

I just read through the thread and I must say this divide in opinions is very interesting! If I may add one or two things, it is that:

“But that's how Twitter's Quality Filter worked and that's why I could exist there with 90K followers but being here with 30K followers is really starting to suck.”

“And please don't say this is a problem I need to solve. This is a culture issue the platform needs to work on”

I find it very ambivalent that on Twitter a “Quality Filter” could solve the platform's 'culture issue' but on Mastodon it's something the entire platform must change for. What about a “quality filter” on Mastodon? Doesn't need to be too complex, just a “show me only notifications created by people with xy followers” or “xy likes” etc. Something like that could easily be implemented. Not sure if that would solve the problem, it's at least a more approachable issue for me as a developer than “please change the culture of the platform” (which is something I have zero / very little control over).

“I would like to not see it. I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it”

I think what would be best is if you can decide whether you want to see it. Something that is, to a degree, already possible using filters, but I agree should be made a lot easier / possible at all for larger creators.

I mean, due to the decentralized nature of Mastodon it would be impossible to just “mute” / shadowban every user that expresses such sentiment (but isn't against any rules, except maybe harassment if expressed as extremely as in your example). At best you'd shadowban them from your end, which may not be what you want. Even if you run a large Mastodon server, if you shadowban an external user and they're not shadowbanned from their end, every other (external) user can still see their posts! I'm not trying to downplay your issue, as I do understand where it comes from, I'm just trying to explain why it would be very hard to implement something you wish for as Mastodon is structurally very different to Twitter.

Twitter didn't remove comments like that, you maybe had a filter to not show them or had a quality filter to only get notifications from important people / posts etc., but you can't tell me that every comment ever directed to you on Twitter with a similar anti-corporate or “leave the platform!” sentiment was shadowbanned? I mean, again, maybe you didn't see that comment, I just find it very wrong to start throwing around shadowbans only to make some large user accounts feel at home - the platform is still for everyone, and as long as the sentiment doesn't disobey the rules I couldn't shadowban it (if you run the platform, which I'd recommend for every large creator, you could set your own rules and do whatever you wish).

I find it very right, however, to change the software and add features specifically for large creators such as yourself in order for you to make you feel more at home - don't get me wrong here: It's completely reasonable and understandable why you would leave if Mastodon, or any Fediverse software, doesn't create features that are necessary for you to exist. Just like Twitter didn't have a quality filter since day one, Mastodon devs didn't make one because there were more pressing issues at the time.

Now is the time to focus on larger creators and accounts if we truly want Mastodon to become more mainstream. I whole heartedly agree with you on that, I just don't think your proposed solutions (“change the culture of Mastodon” or “shadowban every anti-YouTuber sentiment”) are the right steps forward, much rather I propose a similar quality filter for large creators! Which can be hidden in the settings somewhere, but should also pop up once you hit, e.g. 10,000 followers and give you the choice to activate it whilst explaining what it does.

Does this sound more like what you need?

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius I want to say two things in this reply. First, I don't know how I came across as saying I believe *any* anti-YouTuber sentiment should be shadowbanned. It's much less to do with the content of posts and more to do with behavior of the poster which comes through the content.

Admittedly that's a tricky problem to solve, but the quality filter on Twitter (in my experience anyway) managed this. Or else there was just much less crap on Twitter, which is hard to believe.

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius personally, what I need is a way for my replies and notifications to get easier to manage. Just checking in on this app now led to hundreds of notifications, all of them in order, and a good 10 or 20% of them really irritating.

Stacking them is of course going to be helpful, but also there needs to be some filtering. Bottom line, I want the filter to exist for everybody. Because nobody should need to have a shield of armor on just to look at their social media.

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius The reason why I said shadowban earlier is because, while having the filter prevent me from seeing annoying crap solves my problem, it doesn't preclude the people being annoying from getting engagement on their posts.

If people get engagement on prodding behavior, that's positive reinforcement.

What we really need here are some social tools for social problems. A bare metal feed like it exists now is not good enough.

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius it only works if you can maintain a small enough sphere here. Even if that's what you want, if somebody has a toot go viral they will encounter the same things that I am encountering.

This is not simply a request for large accounts, this is a request to make this platform more enjoyable and easier to use.

And frankly, I would hope people want large accounts here to make the fediverse interesting for all sorts of folks. Not just zealots.

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius so, that's the rub. Either tools have to exist for larger accounts to be here peacefully, or we won't be here.

And if that is truly what people want, you all can have whatever your version of fun is here. But I will have to be elsewhere.

And to repeat myself, I'm not here to leverage the platform. I'm not here trying to hijack it. I'm trying to share my thoughts, have fun, and connect with people. It's just not working for me.

@ErikUden @feditips @claudius and if you want a different perspective (not a big YouTuber account) on the same sorts of issues and why they are so grating, this very thoughtful post may help you to understand a little better

https://social.saria.fun/objects/b6059c07-36a2-411a-87b2-3eb87f184f18