I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.

If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.

I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.

If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.

I do not disagree about the fact that people are free to say what they want. It’s just that, as a user appreciating Nintendo, I am facing very negative comments on most (if not all) subjects even when Nintendo is not doing anything (like my example above about a romhack). For some people, it seems like it’s not about expressing your opinion about the subject, but your opinion about Nintendo on any subject merely mentioning Nintendo.

And it’s like that for many companies (Nintendo is just one example). As a consequence, I do not participate at all (I am just reading the news, trying to avoid the comment section). It’s not very healthy, and I hardly believe people discovering the fediverse will stay long if most messages they see are hating comments about what they like.

I still remember the first time I played it. I was still living with my parents, and they left for a few days. I started the game in the evening, and couldn’t stop until I reach the end of it … in the morning. It’s very uncommon for me to do so (even at the time), but it was so … captivating. I could not stop and go to sleep 😅.

I think it’s even more common among more general communities. But even niche communities like retrogaming can be like that.

Just to give a concrete example, I have seen a post about a pretty cool mod on Zelda ocarina of time where they integrated Pikmin, it has 50+ ups, and a single comment saying they can’t wait for Nintendo to shut it down. What’s the point ? And I see this more and more. It’s not the minority but the majority of the replies I see on such posts. It’s not healthy at all.

Not so serious subjects (I prefer to relax while being on the fediverse :) ). Anything related to Facebook / Apple / Nintendo / Disney is almost always filled with comments full of hate. It is much easier to find good communities for that on Discord for example.

See, in the past, I used a lot Twitter to keep up with news about my interests. It was easy to filter out bad users by banning them, and following more « positive » people. I left when it became « X » because I had less interactions and much more ads (probably a consequence of letting users pay to gain visibility). I hoped the fediverse would replace it.

In a sense it worked, because I get a lot of news. But now, I am worried to read the comments or even comment myself because people are most of the time not kind at all. More specific communities have not this issue, but the fediverse is so small that you are forced to be part of more general communities and face the general harsh talk of most people.

Probably not the same kind of « enshitification », but I think the fediverse creates small communities, and sometimes, it’s difficult / impossible to find non-aggressive communities for some subjects.

It’s not really solving the issues caused by the users themselves, especially when communities are not big enough to justify big moderation teams, and those people have no incentive at all to be « kind » (it’s hit or miss I would say). Instead of 1 big community with good moderation, you can end up with many small communities with little or bad moderation.

I have no solution to propose, it’s probably inherent to the fediverse.