I'd liken such positive experiences on Mastodon to the *intimate serendipity* people experienced in blogging in 2003 and on Twitter in 2006. The typical follow-on is *filtered sludge*. What's interesting to me about Mastodon's design is that they set out to address filtered-sludge from the start -- rather than ad hoc response driven by commercial interests. I chuckled that I used the example of Trent Reznor -- an early Twitter enthusiast and then disappointed critic -- when I saw that he "officially" left Twitter two weeks ago. https://readingthecomments.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/dtys4tyk#twitter-and-the-sea... When I went to blogging get-togethers in 2003, it was with a dozen of like-minded enthusiasts: I met interesting people and we had good conversations. Over a decade later, going to a meeting for people who post comments to the Web seems passé. (Today almost any gathering could qualify as such a meeting.) After a network of people (online or otherwise) becomes popular, people want to bring their friends. At first, this is great. The value of a network increases significantly with each new node. A network of five phones permits ten connections; doubling the phones to ten permits forty-five possible connections. As Dunbar notes, however, at some point the scale of networks overwhelms the participants. First, we ask, “Who brought that guy to the party?” Second, the network becomes a target for those who wish to exploit it via spam and manipulation. On 12/6/22 21:23, Paul Levinson via Air-L wrote:
I've been on Mastodon about six weeks now, and I'm really enjoying it. For me, it's akin to what I liked about Facebook and Twitter in their early years -- meeting people I hadn't been in touch with for years.