Last night, I tried to start a post about the current state of Mastodon, but I couldn’t really formulate anything that wasn’t overly emotive. I tapped out a few words, looked at the screen for about an hour, and then gave up and went to bed. Others have done much better than I could: Hugh Rundle has captured his (very resonating) feelings much better than I could in his own blog post. That post went viral (by Mastodon standards). I hope that the emotional labor that Hugh put into that post resonated with some of the new Mastodonoians.

Mastodon is in a strange place right now. The people who are running the infrastructure have mostly been on the fediverse for a long time. Yet most of the users on a lot of the servers are very new. This seems like a recipe for conflict. Some of us admins have deliberately kept our servers small and invite-only to manage the dissonance. Honestly, I feel that may be the only plausible coping mechanism in the short term. The longer term is going to require a lot of flexibility from everyone involved. Making new ties as well as maintaining old ones are both necessary for the future of the network. Let’s see how this goes.

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