As a developer for an an avid user of the Social Web, I’ve seen multiple moments where there’s a huge influx of people at once for one reason or another. These reasons vary from Elon tweeting something stupid to a popular podcaster creating their own instance to introduce their listeners to Mastodon.

When these large influxes of users join in, it can cause a kind of ‘splash’ in your social graph with all kinds of new followers, people sharing a ton of posts from people you don’t usually see posts from, and it can be a little chaotic. Ultimately all of this levels out, of course, but as it’s going on I’ve noticed some interesting behavior from the incumbents that I have to say—I don’t particularly enjoy.

When a New Group Joins

The thing that I see that really bugs me the most is people trying to come off as friendly, while also trying to impose their own ideas about what social media should be to these new people. It can be disguised as a welcome and giving the new users a few tips about the space, but what it’s actually doing is telling them what they can and can’t talk about.

One place where I see this in particular is in talking about AI. Yeah, in general, there aren’t a lot of people on the Social Web talking about AI, but this doesn’t mean people can’t come in here and start posting about AI. After all, that’s a big chunk of what I do.

Why I Don’t Like This Behavior

In order for the Social Web to take off and become the main way people interact with social media, those who are currently here cannot drive groups away. If someone joins a new platform and the first thing they see is that people are berating them or talking down to them while they try and find friends to talk about the things they like, they’re just going to leave. Then they’re going to go back to a centralized social media network and tell all the people there about how they got yelled at for just trying to be themselves.

While there’s certain content people don’t ever want to give a platform to or to see in their social media, we can’t just push those people off the platform. The whole point of this place is that we have control over what we see.

This is a place to share ideas about anything and everything, whether you like it or not. We have the power to control our experience on this platform, you can choose what you do and don’t see. Use those tools at your disposal—that’s how you tailor your social media experience. Not by telling others how to tailor theirs.