Skip to main content


What @gruber@mastodon.social clearly doesn’t understand about the Fediverse is that *I don’t have to interact with people or services that make me miserable*.

Which I couldn’t do when I was using Facebook. I was at the mercy of their algorithm, hoping that I wouldn’t encounter something they dumped into my feed which would make me deeply unhappy.

And yet he believes that choosing not to connect with #Barcelona makes you a “misfit island loser”.

@gruber@mastodon.social believes that freedom of association is for losers.

in reply to Chris Trottier

@Chris Trottier @John Gruber There’s no virtue in misery. There’s also quite a bit of irony involved in him posting that on Bluresky of all places.
in reply to Chris Trottier

@noracodes I think one of the big things to call out is the difference between *you* making that choice and *your instance admin making that choice for all of their users*.

A lot of Mastodon’s unpleasant effects are because your instance (which you might choose because it has a good Local feed, or just a low latency to you) has absolute control who you can interact with, and moving instances is a very expensive operation.

in reply to James Brown

Yep. When Barcelona lands there may be a real test of the robustness of the user-admin relationship. The moment any instance has a decent split in the views or desires of its users, the admins will have to make a choice one way or the other, and many users will similarly have to choose to stay or move to another instance.

Presuming the majority of users haven’t moved instances before (?), it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out. Not to mention how users will feel once they realise for the first time they’re being forced to leave an instance because of an admins decision.