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I'm going back to Mastodon. I'm tired of having a minimum of one dumbass reply "I have no clue what you're talking about" every time I make a post.

yeah lmfao what is up with that. every time!

It's starter packs. I had a bunch of people follow me thinking I'm going to spoon-feed and dumb down every post because I'm in a journalism starter pack and are then astonished when they realise the reason these bizarre impenetrable posts are in their timeline is because they in fact follow me.

the level of social media illiteracy has shocked me (and I mostly escaped the big starter packs 🙏) Like people don't understand that follow-back spam gets you a lot of spammers in your timeline? That posts aren't crafted directly to the reader? We need like an onboarding quiz

also normal illiteracy

the upside to mastodon is that the impenetrability is an effective onboarding quiz to filter out people with poor online literacy the downside is that those people tend to be annoying as shit

based on my analysis and anecdotal evidence, a not insignificant amount of this low social media literacy is fairly generational

Also, other big platforms (IG, Threads, Twitter to a lesser extent) actively reward behavior that is considered a blockable offense here. In particular, people feel like they need to follow-farm to get their posts seen on those platforms because of The Algorithm™.

Sigh, yeah, I'm so glad Seth maade that SP to List bot and I suggest everyone uses that rather than hitting follow all. (The follow all button needs to be nuked)

Like, Starter packs do fill a real useful role, but it feels like users should be able to opt out of a giant blinking invite for new users to follow them.