Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.

Anyway, folks, support your #fediverse server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is.

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in reply to 👩‍🦯The Blind Fraggle

@Fragglemuppet They talk more about politics than technical stuff. And yeah, it sort of is, but it's much less visible on mobile. Also: remember Myspace Tom? Just because some username and profile photo is shown to you, that doesn't mean they're someone you can interact with. At least not on the big corporate social media.
in reply to Michael 🇺🇦

@heluecht I didn't get into the other software part of things. I was more concerned with helping them understand that racist harassment from users on another instance isn't something they just have to deal with and move on, or if it turns out that it is, they should move somewhere better. Last I heard there admin had been convinced to use the FediNuke Blocklist. seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

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in reply to Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷

@Tooden This has been my frustration with fedi for a while. The majority of us, and I include myself in this, are tech nerds. And tech nerds are historically not good at communicating with non-tech-nerds. But social media is all about communicating! I think this is the primary reason fedi struggles to grow. We make it seem harder than it is, and we kind of blow off people who want to have conversations about things not related to our specific interests. See the way folks interested in sports get treated around here: mostly, they get yelled at and told they shouldn't like sports at all because it's corporate or bad for the environment or politically distasteful. Anyway, let's talk some more about the 47 hard drives I just purchased for my 12th server.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

The biggest deal, from my vantage point is that tech nerds (often, not always) dislike algo-fed timelines whereas the research indicates that really most (90%) people like that. I think people come to fedi and it feels like a lot of work right up front (CHOOSE an instance, PICK people to follow) and there's no short way in. I spend a lot of time making tech topics clear to tech novices and almost no one I talk to in my rural location has ever even heard of Mastodon.
in reply to Silver Huskey

@silver_huskey I think even that's going to become less clear as more and more big corporate websites start requiring age verification. Just because your account needs some sort of manual approval is already not really triggering people to think "There's a human in charge somewhere". They're just thinking "Probably some exploited and underpaid contractor in another country has to verify my identity somehow."