If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/
Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.
What do you think about this case ?
💯 exactly. Question remains: what is the consequence of this detailed (and in my eyes correct) analysis? Well, maybe this very generalized discussion goes too far beyond the concrete case. But those questions have been on my mind too for a few months; Is the fediverse good but too complicated for this world?
Probably.
Let’s face it: Hardly anyone has an actual computer anymore. People do everything with phones nowadays. For them, everything is an app. They don’t know what’s happening behind the app, like, whether that app is just a remote control for a website. They don’t want to know. And they don’t care. It works. That’s all.
This may be why Google is putting all bets on Gemini. Nobody Googles anymore when nobody uses the Web anymore because everybody uses dedicated apps for everything.
These people are often easy to spot on Mastodon because they hold on to Mastodon’s official app for their dear lives. It’s the most lack-lustre Mastodon app of all. But they don’t know because they’ve never tried anything else. Above all, however, they couldn’t use Mastodon with an app that isn’t named “Mastodon”.
Then there are the more old-school people who do still use the Web. Most of them still actually have a desktop or laptop computer.
But they are caught in a principle that has ruled over the Web from 1994 to today: One service, one up-front website. And that website is usually www.<Insert the name of the service here>.com or www.<Insert the name of the service here>.org or maybe www.<Insert the name of the service here>.net.
And if it’s a “network”, it’s one network, one service, one up-front website.
The concept of one network, one service, many websites that are also connected to each other and communicate with each other is incomprehensible to them. You keep seeing this with Lemmy newbies. Although e-mail is literally this. But then again, for what appears to be the vast majority of people out there, e-mail = Google Mail.
The concept of one network, multiple services is just as incomprehensible. Following a YouTube channel or a Facebook user or a subreddit from Twitter? Impossibru!
Consequentially, the concept of one network, many different services, each in turn with many websites, all of which are connected to each other and communicate with each other is nothing short of eldritch to them.
“You mean… like… there’s… like… 9,000 Twitters? And you can be on one Twitter website and follow someone on another Twitter website? How’s that even possible?! And… like… there’s 400 Facebooks? And you can be on one Facebook website and befriend someone on another Facebook website? And… you can follow… Facebook users? From, like, Twitter?!?” Minds equal blown. Like, heads a sploding.
This is why estimated 50% of all Mastodon users are geeks, and so are estimated 99% of all non-Mastodon, non-commercial-silos Fediverse users.
Seriously: Mastodon on-boarding is already for dumb-dumbs in practice. Load the app. Name. Password. Go. Toot away. You may or may not know that you’re on a website named “mastodon.social” now (the official app defaults to mastodon.social). You may or may not know that it’s only one of over 9,000 Mastodon “servers”. Doesn’t matter for getting on board.
Still, there are many many calls for making Fediverse on-boarding even easier, even more “for dumb-dumbs”. Either whoever calls for this hasn’t seen the official Mastodon phone app from up close and the way it railroads everyone to mastodon.social. Either they think that it’s still a hard requirement to manually, consciously choose a server. Or they still find the way the Mastodon app handles it too complicated, too confusing, too scary.
Seriously, if the Fediverse needs to be simplified even further and made more comfortable for those who are scared of any technology beyond a toaster, those who need ChatGPT to work a washing-machine, it has to become like in my Chirper proposal: presenting itself as a centralised silo to the point of sanitising or culling any and all content that hints at the technology behind it.
Then all newbies will be Kazims as far as Fediverse knowledge goes because the software won’t let them look behind itself. But it’ll be as easy-peasy as joining and using WhatsApp.
If i may summarize:
The Fediverse is great for everyone who wants to engage with the medium they are using for real. People who don’t give a fuck are not willing to invest the minimum time to understand the underlying structure, which makes the Fediverse completely opaque to them.
I will now extrapolate:
This is also what makes the Fediverse great: we are a collection basin of people who want to look behind the mirror, who are not satisfied with easy answers and shallow slogans. We want to know how shit works and are not satisfied when we realize that we are getting a raw deal.
Therefore the Fediverse itself is a great platform for connecting people who are bound to have ideas and are open to critizism. Even if we never reach critical mass (which would only mean an eternal september for most of us), we still are the fraction of society that interacts with technology and people critically - we don’t accept black boxes, and we don’t accept things that go against logical analysis (for the most part - we are still humans, and we all are fallable).
I would not be surprised if in the next decade there would be at least (i’d say even more, but it’s the question of if we ever hear of it, because we tend to protect the fediverse in general to not become a target from outside forces) one political movement rooted in the fediverse that becomes at least a painful thorn in the side of an established government.
This network is not for everyone, but it is here for the people who actually wanna engage with technology, society, politics and the crosssections of those areas.