(2023-05-05) Farrell The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Mastodon

Henry Farrell: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Mastodon. Erin Kissane wrote a great essay on the differences between Mastodon and Bluesky. ((2023-04-30) Kissane Blue Skies Over Mastodon)

Mastodon is a great place to be, if you are a left-leaning tech policy obsessive, and want to hang out with other left-leaning tech policy obsessives

The way that I would put it is that Mastodon (or at least the bit of Mastodon that I’m familiar with) has the strengths and weaknesses of strong community. Those with the community ethos and identity fit right in, and find it not only welcoming but downright comforting. If you don’t fit in though, all that Gemeinschaftery is a whole other story. Strong communities tend to be really parochial. (monoculture)

Bluesky doesn’t look to me to be about community in the same sense.

It’s mostly left-leaning – conservatives and right libertarians are sticking with Twitter – but relatively hostile to Deep Serious Discussion.

On Bluesky, there’s a lot of the ‘let’s everyone focus obsessively on the topic of the day’ energy that Twitter used to have. Much of this froth seems to me to be ostentatious displays of shitposting virtuosity

What I’d like in my ideal social media service is something different from both – somewhere a little closer to the middle of the indifference curve between community and self-exposure

So what I want is moderately cohesive communities, with enough weak ties between them that ideas, arguments, memes can be generated by people very different to you, and spread to you, and that you can spread back.

But discovery and context collapse are two sides of the same coin.