Some bullshit went down last night that really reaffirms my stance that the fediverse and Mastodon is mostly a model of what to not do at this point.

A big part of it is that you basically have to have internet poisoning to run a server/instance. It requires a fair amount of technical skill and it also requires you to have resources to pay for hosting and such.

It's technically decentralized, but it's largely the fare of people who have material advantages and the psychology involved in being extremely online, which means there's a big FYAD-type problem.

There was one instance that was doing a lot of good technical experimentation and had an interesting community, but the person running it burned out dealing with upstream bullshit and disinterest in actually improving the software. The guy in charge wants his own Twitter.

As things stand, it's essentially what would happen if you connected a bunch of Discord servers together, complete with a weird culture of backbiting, nested channels of shit-talking, petty screenshotting, and telephone games.

So, it's an iteration of what not to do. Default federation was a bad idea. The fact that internet-poisoned, mostly white people with time and money posture themselves as leaders is an issue.

How FOSS projects are modeled is an issue. They run on mostly-unpaid labor, and again, a white tech guy is the face of it, and he treats it as his personal project instead of a community with responsibilities attached.

In terms of pure internet, I think a big issue was importing the culture of Something Awful-descended "weird Twitter" really poisoned the whole thing. People were so obsessed with 4chan as the ur-evil that they didn't realize they were letting FYAD wannabes take charge.

There's this recurring problem where people get away with infinite bullshit because their friends like their bits, which is how you get a white guy with a history of weird, shitty racist jokes and DM creeping posturing as epic antiracist praxis.

The technical issues can be surmounted, but the online cultural ones can only really be addressed with more deliberate moderation and internet anthropology. A big part of that is disabusing nostalgia for places like Something Awful.

It's unfortunate that it jumped the rails, because it really was a good place for me for a long time, especially when other social media was affecting my mental health. It's worth trying something like it again. But not something *like* it. Learn and improve.

I maintain a presence on it but it's tertiary to my existence at this point. I'm not dramatically burying it, it's just unfortunate in a lot of ways and it needs to be learned from so we don't just keep reverse-engineering FYAD shit until the sun burns out.

If this gets back to anyone who feels the need to start some CW: meta over it, maybe consider how much of your time I'm worth, and how much rent you're charging for me to live in your head.

Since this is a recurring issue with people taking criticism badly: I say all of this as a white person. I also say it as a white person who's watched pretty much anyone who *wasn't* white but a little too mouthy get systematically chased off and harangued.