If you want to find a sense of community with real discussion, you join a threaded discussion forum with like-minded individuals. If you want to scream in to the ether and have other people "follow" you, that's what Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok are for. Centralized ether screaming will always be better than decentralized ether screaming because ego reinforcement from counters is a "more is always better" kind of thing.
It's not about "number go up" in the same way Twitter or Instagram is because there's no algorithm to give it a feedback loop.
Both Twitter/Instagram and Tumblr/Mastodon are about getting community/attention from strangers by posting what you want and letting them come to you (as opposed to Reddit or forums where you join existing discussions). But the Twitter/Instagram model relies on an algorithm so it only benefits those who are already famous or who invest in gaming the system, whereas Tumblr/Mastodon make it easy for everyone to find their community of a few dozen mutuals without being buried by the algorithm.
I'm not knocking it, I do it too. We are all desperate for connection and have a desire to be heard. We don't even care if it's real or not, we just don't want to feel alone. We are so desperate for connection, in fact, that we will create work that others profit from just so we don't feel alone.
It's why we are talking to each other right now. We could be doing anything else right now, but here we are. Desperate to be heard. Clicking refresh. Wanting to feel validated. Even if one of us is a bot, does it matter? The feeling is real.
> Centralized ether screaming will always be better than decentralized ether screaming because ego reinforcement from counters is a "more is always better" kind of thing
Rather than "taking part" in a community, what most people want is to "make use of" a community in a way that stimulates their emotions.
To bring the topic off on a slight tangent - I think this is an example of a distillation of natural human instincts. We've recognized the dopamine hit we get from the evolutionary favored behavior of building a community and engaging with it, and then found a way to separate it and repeat it without the effort that led to its evolution.
In those cases Mastodon really is more akin to decentralized shouting into the void then a hotbed of genuinely valuable discussions.