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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".
So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.
It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?
Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?
More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.
As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:
The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.
EDIT:
I didn't know we had any channies hereLook, okay, some 4channers are all rightI didn't mean that literally no 4channers could be good Mottizens, only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different and a lot of people who enjoy spending time on 4chan kind of enjoy being deliberately provocative, which is banned here.
I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.
See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)
I didn’t take it as an insult lol, just thought it might be a fun factoid for people who didn’t know how much overlap we had (I know of a couple high-profile mottizens who have confirmed they post there)
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It's called code-switching, and it's actually very brat.
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