No worries! I hope I was not too much of a dick in my response, and I totally understand why and how you would read things the way you did. I’ll just try to express myself more clearly in the future. You know, this communication thing? It’s a never ending struggle! :D
I’m just pretty sure that people are either making it up or ascribing normal, terrestrial things that they don’t understand as fantastical things.
Yes.
As I said: If there were aliens, those fantastical things, are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And in most non US places. After all, aliens are a modern US legend, invented from Americans, for Americans.
I didn’t say that there were any aliens anywhere. Or that there were any other fantastical things anywhere.
That “almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today” is superstitious and wouldn’t know what aliens are
Didn’t we just establish that aliens are superstition? I think you are overestimating how many people share “aliens” as the most popular superstition which comes to mind first.
Most of the US shares that. A lot of other places probably don’t. Don’t underestimate how many strange stories about strange things in the night are out there :D
You didn’t get the point I made.
So… what were they mistaking the aliens for?
Ghosts. Spirits. Dragons. Or any other mythical creatures, or mythical phenomena of your choice.
If there were aliens, those are the descriptions I would expect through most of human history. And those are the descriptions I would expect in basically all the world, almost everywhere that isn’t the US, even today.
Of course! How could I miss it. The argument: “User numbers are an indicator of quality”, is not valid, unless in context of the fediverse. Because…
Wait, I don’t think me, being the dumb asshat I am, understand that: Why? Why do you think user numbers indicate that something “can’t be as bad as you make it out to be” in the fediverse, but not anywhere else?
Reddit has more users than lemmy. Can’t be that bad then!
I see! Thank you for clarifying!
So let me see if I understand you correctly. I asked what Mastodon is for. You answered that Mastodon is for having meaningful conversations with people one on one about subjects important to you.
That would mean Mastodon is not in any way comparable to twitter, or any other social media platform of the like. To me it seems that, by this description you provide, it is best compared to a chat room, where you are together with a hand full of friends you already know, and can have a conversation. Just in a timeline that is a bit slower, and a bit more permanent than a chat room, but not quite as bloated as a classical internet forum.
That means Mastodon is not “social media”. The purpose of you being there is not to easily discover new stuff which might interest you. And likewise you also can’t easily reach out to new people with stuff that interests you, and which you think might interest other people. Mastodon doesn’t want you to be able to do that easily. Because Mastodon is an internet forum with people you already know, just with an added word limit.
So it seems I have misunderstood Mastodon. It doesn’t intend to be social media. It intends to be an early 2010s internet forum with a word limit. Now that I know what it is, and that this is what it is supposed to be, it makes a lot more sense to me.
And there are small independent artists who want to display their latest artwork to an audience of followers on a social media platform, with the potential of broader reach and impact. And there are activists, who aim to raise awareness by doing the same thing.
What you seem to be saying, is that social networks like Mastodon are not for that. No artists. No activism.
So, what’s Mastodon for?
I don’t see the problem. I don’t have a right to my screen name. Anyone can use variations of that name to post anything they want on any platforms they want. I can’t stop them. And I should not be able to stop them.
If my precious online identity gets hit in the confusion… Well, that’s the risk I take if I have tied my online identity to nothing else but a meaningless pseudonym, easily faked, copied, and impersonated.
For me, this is just a simple demonstration that you can’t trust the name “goat”, and a picture of a goat, as a reliable identifyer. Now that I type it out, this is just stupidly obvious. Anyone who thinks that a goat picture and a nickname reliably identify someone on the internet, is just being very, very stupid in this instance.
I find it dangerous to allow someone to impersonate someone else on the fediverse (an admin too) and begin starting trouble.
I don’t find that dangerous at all. I find it very disturbing that anyone would be stupid enough to believe that the nickname “goat” and a goat picture is enough to reliably identify them as the same person.
All in all, that seems like a non problem to me. A misunderstanding among a stupid minority, easily cleared up, whenever it is desired.
My problem is that I only understand one of those things. The other is meaningless hot air, spewed exclusively by intellectual elites who may or may not have any idea of what that is even supposed to mean.
And that explanation doesn’t tell me anything either. Put up a guillotine. Put the man in. Let the blade fall. I understand that. Create a network of mutual aid to replace hierarchies? Never saw that happen. Never learned about that, or how that is supposed to work. Don’t know what that is supposed to mean, or how that is supposed to play out.
If you assume anyone knows about any of that, and if you assume that anyone can imagine anything concrete about that, you are out of touch. You are communicating ineffectively. At least to me. And probably to most other people as well.