Something I've always found funny about hipster anti-immigrant/anti-visitor snobbery is how incoherent it is.
A canonical example in my mind, for no particular reason, is the time a native New Yorker pointed to someone and condescendingly noted that they must be a tourist or recent transplant because real New Yorkers don't wear baseball caps.
Of course many native New Yorkers wear baseball caps.
Reminded of this the past few days seeing all the Eternal September comments about how "real" Mastodon users do X or don't do Y, where there are plenty of examples of Mastodon users with old, active, accounts who don't do X or do Y.
I do think there's something nice about small communities and it feels sad when they grow and old norms change and get lost, but adding a snobbery norm on top of the other new norms seems strictly worse than adapting to the changes.
On reading more of the "Twitter users are ruining everything" discussion, e.g., https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/, I'm struck by how little engagement there is with what Twitter users are actually like, as evidenced by, e.g., treating Twitter users as an other that's an undifferentiated mass
Twitter has ~300M MAU. Without knowing anything about Twitter users, it should be clear that there are many communities with many different norms, which I haven't seen acknowledged by any of the "true Mastodon folks"
If you do a bit of research into what Twitter users are actually like, it turns out, unsurprisingly, that (on average), Japanese user are different from Korean users are different from American users, etc.
And, within each of these very large groups there are also subcommunities with wildly different norms, e.g., BTS fans have wildly different norms than Korean users at large.
These differences in behavior are dramatic enough that they've, at times, caused scaling problems/outages for Twitter.
E.g., BTS fans make unusually long reply chains (even normalized for the number of comments).
(IIRC, exact details probably wrong) Twitter had an outage due to poor performance with depth > 10k because there was a limit on cached replies because it hadn't occurred to anyone that you'd have > 10k depth thread with millions of users spamming refresh.
Anyway, lumping millions of different communities into a single "other" bucket is lame and also ironic considering the nature of the complaints.
If you look at a lot of the specific complaints, e.g., Twitter users do X because they're used to optimizing for engagement, these comments apply to a tiny fraction of Twitter users.
From public numbers, top 0.1% is ~10k followers; top 1% isn't a high follower / high engagement account at all and top 1% account generally don't do high engagement behaviors (and if they did they would become widely followed).
Pretty wild to see so much stereotyping based on the behavior of 0.2% of some group.
@danluu I like Mastodon better because I don’t have a bunch of whining influencers claiming their pet scam is the best thing since sliced bread. I do see some level-headed people on both sides, though.
@rcarmo @danluu The main platform support influencers need is just the ability to have lots of followers, so there's nothing about Mastodon's structure that's especially anti-influencer. If Mastodon becomes big enough to be worth people trying to make a job out of, you'll have to deal with influencers hyping things here too ;)
@jefftk @rcarmo On the scam thing in particular, I think the main thing "protecting" mastodon at the moment is its size.
If Mastodon scales up to the point that it needs scam/bot removal on the order of https://twitter.com/danluu/status/964562384558927872 (order 1M bans per day) I think it's going to have a very hard time without relying on some sophisticated centralized actors to do spam and bot detection.
A lot of Mastodon fans seem to think Mastodon is immune to this. AFAICT, they don't understand the problem space.
@jefftk @rcarmo For better or for worse, I agree with Jeff on this one.
I think the relative lack of algorithmic ranking that funnels people towards the most highly engaging posts will tilt things a bit differently (relatively away from the most "click bait" influencer stuff, relatively towards stuff like Jeff or Scott Alexander write), but I don't see why things should fundamentally be different.