Longer than anyone would care for it to. Two of my BFFs and smartest peops aee entrenched.

Much less so on here though, though it's gotten a bit worse with a Diaspora becoming more mainstream the past few years

@zulu So do you think any social media that grows is doomed to support evil? Or is the corporate control that is important?

Not evil per se, but with scale there is an increased distance between users and so a tendency to care less about the ideals of the network and to use it simply as a tool grows as well. And with that, humanity dwindles; there is more wiggle room to be self-centred and less responsible for your actions.

There's a really great article on this topic that summarized the whole process very well: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths. I'd be curious to know what you think, too.

The corporate control makes things a lot worse. I agree that diaspora is not as bad, but I still think many of the dynamics are the same. Every bit of power that we get from the internet is nothing compared to the extra power it gives to the already powerful.

@zulu That's an interesting read. I can't say how accurate or generalisable that model is, but I suspect there's some truth in it. I'm not sure how much this relates to the question of Diaspora (et al.). The problems I see with Diaspora arise from two things: first, the critical mass of facebook means it can't get off the ground (social media is far from being novel or a subculture in itself). Second, Diaspora's freedom allows nastiness that puts people off (perhaps Mastodon or Friendica are different, not sure). For example, the #feminism hashtag on Diaspora is rife with misogyny, making it useless for discussing feminist issues.

Personally, I'm not interested in Diaspora as a subculture, I'm interested in it as an alternative tool which has less of the corporate evils of facebook. My primary interest is a way to connect with friends, who all say they'd leave facebook but their friends and family are there. A bit of connection with people I don't know in real life, with whom I share interests, is a secondary thing for me here. A friend suggested facebook is a natural monopoly, so should be state run, that's an interesting idea.

Hm, iteresting thoughts. I tried getting my friends and family on here years ago and was dismayed that they didn't ultimately jump ship, but I must say that now I'm thankful they didn't. It's just so much less noisy without them. I now have access to them on other channels and yeah, definitely glad their activity is curtailed to just that. If I want to share something with them, we all have various Telegram or Signal chats, we don't even use email anymore. And those are much better places for family photos and inside jokes because they have less surveillance capitalism going on, and are also generally closed to the public so we can be more ourselves.

The filter required to pass to get in something like Diaspora is the same thing that keeps things mostly civil and fun out here. Of course, with more average folks having come out here in recent years, there are more idiots as well, but that just means the bulk of the superusers will just move on again to the next neat, quiet place. This has already been happening lately with Friendica for about five years now, then Mastodon not long after that, and more recently things like Matrix just this past year. All are very neat places with their own specific vibes :)

Regarding ugly personalities on here though, you can always just block them via the ignore button on their posts or profiles. Then refresh that tag page and you'll see all their posts have been magically scrubbed from your view :)