I recently got into blogging; and while I was designing my site, I went through hundreds of blogs and personal sites, and I saw many instances of the same thing.
I would, however, add that just because most people are bad at estimating others doesn't mean that everyone is equally bad. There may be some people who are incredibly good at seeing where others are coming from and what their true intentions are. But, of course, everyone's probably overestimating their own capacity to estimate others.
I wonder if this is because the creators routinely prune negative comments of them. Or perhaps it is because Youtube severely down ranks comments with dislikes.
Wikipedia, although a non-profit, is not federated; it's a centralized platform. It doesn't seem to me that it's centralization that's necessarily the problem, although, I agree with you, it often is.
> A lot the post above boils down to "Trust me bro." As early users of a new website, what assurances can be put in place to help us believe the motives here? As the site grows, and costs exponentially more, your mindset and desires are sure to change.
Looking at this from your perspective, you have a really good point here. And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone. This even applies to the fediverse; you have to trust the admins.
Perhaps the most that someone can do here is to proclaim their values loudly, so that they are, at the very least, putting their reputation on the line.
If you have any ideas what I could do here, I'd love to hear. Seriously.
Well, the problem is that people use the word 'love' to refer to all sorts of things from sexual desire, to attachment, to kindness, compassion, and benevolence.
The Pali word 'mettā' means something quite similar to 'agape'. In Buddhist traditions, mettā (or loving-kindess) meditation is all about cultivating this sort of sentiment by conscious effort. From the very little I've practiced this, I can confirm your point about how benevolence, for some reason, reduces fear and anxiety (often we aren't even aware that it's there).
Hedonism, if it's logically consistent and takes a long-term view, is basically Epicureanism, which is far from what comes to mind when we hear the term hedonism.
You are like 1% of the 1% of the 1% of internet users. Most people have never heard of Mastodon, and even if they had, they'd find it hella confusing because there's no mastodon.com that they can go and sign up.
This is the single greatest barrier to entry that's not going to go away without compromising the ideals of federation.