With all the due benefit of the "duh, it's fight-for-the-culture time" doubt, damn, people here are aggressive about certain (N>1) categories of opinions in a way I hadn't seen since the worst days of hanging out on Tumblr. Getting specific "tone" flashbacks too, probably just because of the patterns people adopt in this style of posts given an increased character count.
Demographics change but people don't lmao
@essentialrandom I think there's something to be considered as to whether the landscape also supports this sort of fighting.
Like there's maybe also here again more space to fight over, and more ability to defend that patch of space if you feel you've won it.
(... maybe.)
(... but also, People Don't.)
@gaditb @essentialrandom yeah something i will say as an Old is that masto users are definitely way more invested in The Meta but that comes as a direct consequence of it being something they can be engaged in and change, like
twitter users could yell and scream for a change to the platform all day and like, what's the point, twitter isn't going to listen lmao. but here that same discourse CAN have a material impact on the platform, so there's actually a reason to get involved
what this means is that users generally DO feel enabled to influence and shape the platform with their actions, and that has both positive and negative effects lol
@Lady @essentialrandom Ooh, I actually... okay, I don't DISAGREE here, but I think just viewing the landscape as the code is incomplete.
That explains, e.g., the current debate over quote-toots, but it doesn't explain the equally virulent arguments over Properly Using CWs or over self-promotion. I think it's not just the platform itself that people feel like they might have more control over, but the norms of the people/communities nearby* them as well.
(*"nearby" might be doing a lot there and I haven't defined it)
@Lady @essentialrandom Like as one example worth looking at, the push for "tags should go in CamelCase!". That was never a big thing on Twitter, but not for any technical reason -- the way tags work here is not functionally different, for that purpose, than on Twitter.
So what changed? I'd argue probably, a greater expectation about the ability to be heard by a coherent, smaller bounded set of people AROUND YOU, that your voice could potentially make a measurable impact on that would affect your experience. Making a push like that now more worth a shot.
(A null hypothesis here is that people are recognizing it as a new platform with newly-developing, and so more fluid and pliable, norms, regardless of the architecture of the platform. And so people are just trying to luck their preferred norm into the accepted universals. Also I... don't actually remotely know how CamelCase tags advocacy looked on Twitter, to actually compare.)
@gaditb @essentialrandom (admins actually now CAN edit the default casing of a tag to make it camelcase, so there was actually a code change which resulted from this discussion. eugen added it as part of the trends review workflow.)
@gaditb @essentialrandom long series of changes; i think they all predate 4.0:
• use user-provided casing in autosuggest: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8394
• use the first casing as the default in the backend without intervention: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/11416
• trending tags UI, which allows editing of casing: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/11490
@Lady @essentialrandom (Oh! There was a change I am unambiguously For that was part of 4.0? Today I Learned, I guess.)