Published: February 28, 2025
[Source filename for funsies: 20250228-fediverse-culture-complaints.md]
In my journey to have a healthier relationship with technology, I've done a lot of thinking. Most of it is pretty chaotic, but today I was reminded of the last paragraph of my previous post about Bluesky and its relationship with ActivityPub-based federated social stacks like Mastodon and Pixelfed (termed the “fediverse”).
To be clear, I think both the fediverse and ATproto, which is the technology underlying Bluesky, are wonderful open-web solutions in response to what Ed Zitron has dubbed the “rot economy” — this psyop brain-hacky state of mainstream social media from the late 2010s on — but as I alluded to in my previous blog post, I make no real effort to hide my belief that Bluesky's ability to look like these mainstream social platforms makes it way more friendly to the casual user. Therein lies the issue...
These cultural quirks have been endemic to the FL end of the FLOSS[1] community for a long time — deep distrust of the status quo coupled with weapons-grade cynicism leads to the community dripping with what can only be described as “front-of-classroom energy”[2] which turns off almost any normie who comes into contact. No one likes a teacher's pet. Trust me, I used to be one.
I really do like the concept of the fediverse. I think ATproto does a better job of smashing the machine to bits and turning each part into a pluggable module while ActivityPub-based services shrink and package the whole stack, but if a more clearly-delineated island is your jam, go for it.
Many denizens of the fediverse still treat it and talk about it... endlessly... like a cool kids' club. This thing is not new anymore. I started feeling myself getting sick of Twitter sometime in early 2017 and set up an account on a Mastodon server. People in my life semi-derisively called it “weird Twitter”. I still take it as a term of endearment.
The fact Mastodon was the first real mostly usable alternative to the online social scene has, in my opinion, led to its deification among nerds like me and other enthusiasts and early adopters. I still occasionally look at Mastodon, and almost every time I see at least one post railing on anything that's not. If the driver of discussion on a social platform is the platform itself, I can't see how anyone who just wants to connect with others would have an enjoyable time. As I've mentioned before, this is probably some sort of defense mechanism now that Mastodon has an alternative of its own.
In yet another clue that I'm getting old and turning into everything I used to hate, it's easy for me to complain about younger generations. Writing about this reminds me of another thing I frequently see online, and it gives me the urge to put my millennial hat on and complain more. My generation worked so hard to reject labels, and now it seems like young people are scrambling to label themselves with everything under the sun. It's a very “old man yells at cloud” feeling.
This old man will yell at that cloud another time. Until then, maybe try to be a normal person on the internet.