It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?
I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.
I've deleted my main Masto account, I am so tired of the "if you like x then you hate y" which is just so frustrating and counterintuitive to a constructive debate. If you don't agree with their opinion it's because you are a racist Nazi that supports the genocide of trans people as well as being pro-billionnaire...
The main example of this is the whole Meta Threads federating with Activitypub, if you somehow see good things with this, it's because you support giving a platform to Nazis and transphobes, which is just so far from the truth.
The weird negative point of mastodon is it massively facilitates being stuck inside an echo chamber because you can literally defederate with any instance that might have any hint of someone who doesn't agree with you
And so in the end I find myself going to Twitter more than I'd like because people I want to see the content people I follow post there and I can't just create myself a safe garden of opinions I think are "objectively" wrong
This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that's trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there's no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.
You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon's a lot worse.
Weird. I don't see any of that on my Mastodon feed.
It's almost as if I get to choose what's displayed in my feed instead of having it force-fed to me.
I'm thinking that perhaps someone didn't learn how the system works and how to use it and instead just read #Explore. For a sane experience in Mastodon, you need to build a feed by hand (no algorithm will do it for you), build filters by hand, and in general you're far more in control of your experience than you are at places like Echs. I'll peek into #Explore every so often to find new people to add to my feed (and many more people to block from it!), but other than that I don't use it. Precisely for the reasons you cite here.