I use twitter and I really like the furry art community on there. I also like Mastodon or related ActivityPub services.
Due to recent events lots of people search for alternatives and I feel just very frustrated see all those artists looking for Zucks Threads or Jacks Bluesky when Mastodon is right there, without a chance of a twitter situation ever happening again. They seem to avoid Mastodon like cats avoiding water.
What have we done wrong, and how can we make it better.
Remember how people said that from millenials onwards every generation will be skilled in tech? It so happens that gen-z actually ranks lower in advanced tech skills. Gen-Z learned to use tech, but not to understand it as much as those of us who experienced the early-to-mid internet and computers.
As such there’s a large amount of people who don’t know or understand the pros of decentralized platforms like Mastodon. And of course, there’s also the artists who need to follow the masses because they make a living out of it.
I’m oversimplifying things a lot, but if you grew up discovering the internet through your parents’ ipad, there’s a higher chance that the corporate internet has a much strong impact / incentive for you.
It so happens that gen-z actually ranks lower in advanced tech skills. Gen-Z learned to use tech, but not to understand it as much as those of us who experienced the early-to-mid internet and computers.
The kids today do not even know what a folder is, or what filesystems do. I am scared about our all future.
We need to do it like the brits, give every kid a Rasperry Pi in school and teach them actual computer skills, not Excel.It is by design, unfortunately. Apple pushes iPads into schools so that people grow up in Apple’s walled garden.
The thing is, most of them are looking to Threads and BlueSky because that is where the majority of normie non technical people are going to go. It will also give them a far bigger outreach of having their art seen and noticed by bigger groups of people.
But mastodon also suffers because the second biggest instance, pawoo.net l, leaves many people with a bad experience since they host rampant amounts of pedophilic content and fetishists galore and a lot of mastodon instances defederate from it because of it’s peoblems.
I left that instance when I got hit with some of that content, disturbing to say the least… I left for the much better packmates.org mastodon instance (hosted by our yiffit admin @Wander@yiffit.net )
Pawoo was meant as a tie in to the Japanese art gallery site pixiv but even though it still has those tie ins, it’s been sold off multiple times. And the current owners will not do anything to curve the pedophilic content on it
Pawoo is one of the biggest black eyes for mastodon and probably hurts it when people are deciding to use mastodon, threads, or bluesky.
