It would be an interesting weekend project to try and "diff" two users by their followed users to better understand this. Maybe someone's done that.

My experience on the website hasn't changed, but I deliberately only follow accounts that do not engage in news or politics. My account is completely detached from current events besides my local municipality's accounts.

After Elon purchased Twitter, I suspect things bifurcated after a large contingent of left-of-center people rage-quit. This created two asymmetries: one on Twitter, and one on Mastodon. Now there are two quasi-echo-chambers that to go together oil and water. Any time someone tries to cross over, they experience what appears like a uniform attack against them, but in reality it's because people took sides and sorted themselves into separate networks.

The woodworking communities on Twitter and Mastodon are both excellent and different.

> Sounds like somebody who might be happy finding the smallest and queerest Mastodon server they can find.

Hi, I am actually the author of the post, but I tend to keep a low-ish profile here. I think you may have misread me a bit, or I didn't make myself clear. I want to explain why as I think it may be insightful.

The thing that's bothered me for a long time now about the fediverse is that it has this culture of inter-instance suspicion. Fediverse users seem to expect instances to correspond to roughly what I call “subcultures” in the post, and then form the moderation/federation policy based on that, cutting you off from other subcultures that aren't aligned with “us”. Even if this doesn't happen at a technical level, people seem to act that way at the social level. A lot of weight seems to be placed on what instance you're on.

To me I can't help but find this deeply toxic. I actually have a single-user fediverse instance, and I suppose in some sense that means I have the “smallest and queerest” Mastodon server, but it's really very different. I did this because I refuse to belong to just one subculture. I think every person is part of many different little subcultures at the same time in their different spheres of life, and I really didn't want some instance admin deciding for me which cultures I am and am not allowed to be part of. I also didn't want people to immediately dismiss me as being from the “wrong” culture by my handle. I guess I'm one of those people who think friendships are somewhat sacred and social pressure to make all your friends be culturally aligned is not good.

As much as I said in the post that the lack of legibility in the audiences on Twitter with the current algorithm is bad, I think excessive legibility can also be bad. Humans are too tribal. The fediverse puts one particular tribal marker front-and-centre and it seems to break too many people's brains at some level.

Having to keep tabs on both Twitter and the fediverse already takes up a lot of my attention, so I haven't really felt able to maintain a serious presence on other places, but it seems like Bluesky might be closer to the Twitter philosophy here, so I'm more optimistic about that site if I had to pick a single succcessor to Twitter.

> That post is about as articulate as I’ve seen that explains why some people don’t want visibility, or who go “death con 3” (after Kanye West) when they see a reply they don’t like. There’s a real contradiction between the author’s desires and having a big pool to swim in, algorithmic feed or not.

I want to push back on this too. I don't think that no visibility between these groups is good, and I also don't think hyper-visibility is. I think what I'm arguing is that there's a happy medium that's being lost, or that the particular compromise Twitter had made Twitter specifically work.

[Added in an edit:] There's definitely some small and super insular subcultures that lose out from this constant bubble-bursting effect, but it's not just those that do. There's also for instance a pretty huge subculture I'm part of on Twitter that's defined by people being, more than anything else, open-minded and willing to assume good faith. That subculture doesn't hate contact with others, it really appreciates diversity, but for its own survival it needs to keep at least some distance from the people on Twitter who are so terminally tribal that they will attack them on sight.

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>I miss Reddit, having nuked my account, and vowing never to go back.

Just curious, why?

> people have this pathological need to be angry at something or someone

Yes. I think this is corrosive to social media sites. It's also something that kinda defines them of course. If they never got anyone animated for any reason, they'd be boring, but there's some threshold where it starts making things a bad time.

There's a lot more subtlety to it than just that.

For example, reading the conversation that follows from a single tweet. There's pages of culture war bullshit, spam, AI, paid blue checks that all gets ranked more highly in the replies than what quality discussion there might be.

Another example, let's say you post a tweet. The tweet is shown to others who aren't following the strict chronological timeline of their own followers. The "algorithm" (whatever that is) shows it to people who hate your stance, because that's what drives engagement/revenue, and now your own replies are flooded with shit.

If you read the article they repeat themselves several times saying that they're not just concerned about what he sees in their feed but also what other people see in their feeds.

That is, they want to be able to post things that show vulnerability without having the posts be visible to people who will attack people that show that vulnerability. They want less visibility.

If you think the bubble has bust and it's not just a differently filtered bubble, I have a bridge to sell you.