Mastodon Linking Norms

Thanks for the post - I've signed up for mastodon because it's being discussed, not because I actually want to use it.  I don't really get it, and I suppose that makes me part of the problem.  I hadn't realized that it wasn't intended (by most) to be a competitor/replacement for Twitter and/or a general competitor to other popular social media.  I'm still not sure what it IS intended for, or why that admin thinks it could be anything else without active encouragement/enforcement of the norms they're seeking.

Without federation, I'd expect a bunch of differently-focused groups and servers to show up, which happen to use Mastodon as their server, but are more socially-enforced topic and norm enforcing.  I can imagine if LW were getting started today, they'd consider Mastodon as a possible platform.  This includes some amount of moderation, warnings to users, and banning.  See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism [LW · GW] for some thinking on the topic, and tons of related posts about community development in the middle-early days of the rationalist online world.

WITH federation as the primary feature, and the perception from outside that servers are all equivalent, this capability is lost, and it's assumed to be a least-common-denominator network, with everyone having equal voice and capability, regardless of quality or intent.  Easy sign-up and open federation means no censorship or control.  And THIS implies no enforcement of rules or goodwill.  

I don't know if that admin is an outlier, or if that's a common attitude, but I'm kind of shocked that anyone wouldn't see this coming.  There have been MANY cases similar to Eternal September, as accidentally-small ungated groups (because there were invisible gates that nobody thought about) became public and popular, and discovered just how important gates are.  Or more commonly, got overwhelmed, died (to many core users - nothing ever actually dies.  Usenet is arguably bigger than it was in 1993, but it's dead for the communities that made it great), and were replaced by different things, with different (visible and invisible) gates.

Relatedly, remember to appreciate the LW team and admins, who've MULTIPLE TIMES noticed changes in norms and user composition, and adjusted things to accommodate and keep the community alive and great.   This has mostly been encouragement, features, and discussion, rather than pruning, banning, and curation, but both are in the toolkit.  I don't think "mastodon" is cohesive enough to do anything like that.  There may be some mastodon servers with a vision and the willingness to enact it, but I haven't heard of them.

I think norms used to be stricter in at least some parts of the 'net, e.g. if someone had a blog read mostly by their 10 friends, it might have been relying on a form of security by obscurity and it was considered poor form to link to it in a more public context. I think there was also a period when Tumblr was considered a more private platform for posting stuff than more "official" social medias were, and linking to people's Tumblr posts was frowned upon (at least in some circles).

I think these norms have lost favor over time, but with something as amorphous as social norms it's impossible to know. I can only tell for sure that I don't see those norms very much anymore in the kinds of online circles that I frequent. Possibly there are still large subcultures that do hold onto these norms, and maybe that Mastodon admin belongs to one of those subcultures.

I've only been on Mastodon a bit longer than the current Twitter immigrants, but as far as I know there's no norm against linking. But the server admins are all a bit stressed by the increased load. So I can understand why they'd be annoyed by any link that brought new users. I've been holding off on inviting new users to the instance I'm on, because the server is only just coping as it is.