the paradox of connection

13 May, 2026

I read Ava’s commentary on the absurdity of social media norms and thought I’d pile onto it because lots of people consider the new decentralized platforms like the Fediverse to have addressed most if not all structural ills that plague the legacy platforms’ cultures. I’m not saying that the Fediverse and maybe even Bluesky don’t address at least a couple of the legacy platforms’ shortcomings; they do. However, they don’t go anywhere near far enough because they want to maintain a level of familiarity for switching users while keeping engagement management for potential celebrities/companies/organizations using their platforms on comparable levels as the others. So significant change is far from the case, the reason for which I’ll attempt to explain in this post.

Before I start, I admit that I’m mostly thinking of Mastodon when I speak of the Fediverse as that is the software that most people, including me, know and associate with the Fediverse the most. Moreover, it’s the piece of software whose changes impact every other by the simple virtue of being the most widely used, thus forcing the other projects to adapt. Take their recent, horrible implementation of quote-posts,¹ for example, that every Fediverse software, who didn’t want to show broken posts because the majority uses Mastodon, had to implement.

Anyhow, I wanted to focus on the design-enabled toxic culture on these newer platforms—specifically Mastodon as that is what I used the longest out of all, but I’ve witnessed a lot of what I will be discussing here on Bluesky as well—that I consider to be incomprehensibly absurd and not discussed nearly enough.

A lot of these cultural absurdities are born out of the paradox of connection that social media champions. You are on there to connect with new people, but connection doesn’t happen because you are overloaded with data of who follows who, who liked what, who is mutuals with whom, who posts how much, who reposts what, etc. that you end up forgetting that the profiles likely have people behind them and aren’t just datapoints with a profile picture. What you end up doing is not connecting, but devouring a feed of profiles that you vaguely associate with humans and are too scared to actually interact with.

Anyone with a moderate level of infamy on Mastodon usually hates being DMed. Some consider it an overstepping of boundaries or spam while others find it too direct of an approach unless you’ve commented on their posts in public before and were acting „in good faith“ which could mean literally anything. How else am I supposed to actually connect? By passively feeding on what you shat into the public sphere? That is not connection! If you read my blog and don’t email me privately, we have no connection. I don’t know you exist as a free agent and you probably don’t know the same of me either. It’s mind-bogglingly insane that I have to explain this at all.

As I said, some expect you to comment on their posts and leaving a positive impression prior to DMing them. But what happens when the act of commenting is considered an overstepping in itself? As we know, Mastodon is a microblogging platform with a character limit, so not much can be fit into one viral post. This has as a consequence that if the viral post was asking for assistance about something and it breaks the containment of mostly only followers seeing it, people lack the context to know what the person already knows and begin commenting redundancies. This is due in part to how easy commenting is compared to checking someone’s profile/posting history and in another because such a micro-post lacking any context is putting the onus of gathering it on the answerer.

This unfortunately happens mostly to women, or maybe I think that because I saw mostly women complain about and label it as misogyny, which it very much is, but misogyny here, unlike how the common criticism I had seen made it seem like, isn’t limited to the act of the commenter. The design is reinforcing misogyny by removing context and reducing the person behind the screen to a PNG and some ID that is making the equivalent of a TikTok in text. This leaves ample room for enabling prejudice and letting it guide the act. It incentivizes reaction rather than engagement with a person. There is much less intention going into a comment on there than an email you might pop me after reading one of my posts. It’s a public performance rather than personal assistance that you might offer to a stranger because those comments show up in the Home feed of those following you, as if all this wasn’t absurd enough.

Aside from that, the people that complain about useless replies made a public post, often have a large following and somehow expect to be flooded with high quality replies to their very specific question. No, that’s not happening. You cannot control people’s low effort reactions that are proliferating thanks to horrible platform design that makes brainlessly answering easier than engaging with your problem that you couldn’t explain adequately in your post because of some arbitrary character limit. Ignore the bullshit replies and move on, or block the users if they’re being detrimental to your mental health. And if this keeps happening? Maybe, just maybe, zoom out and see the big picture, that your appeals won’t change anything because the design of the tool will always guide this kind of human behavior that is practiced without a second thought. What people often forget is that our morals and customs guide our social behavior. When those morals and customs are codified in the form of a platform for communication, they are much more resistant to change. The simpler the medium of communication, the easier it is for us to adapt it to us.

Back to the paradox of connection: On social media, you are not meant to connect with someone, learn from them through direct communication, and figure out how to help them if they need your help. We are all standing on rooftops and yelling at each other, hoping that somehow the yells make sense enough for virality. But then, when the reaction to our action doesn’t match our expectation because of social customs built around bad design, we begin pathologizing what’s going wrong now without any understanding of why we got here. We often, and very conveniently, forget who designs these platforms and why, even the ostensibly good ones like Mastodon and the broader Fediverse. We like to think we’re better for using Mastodon or Bluesky instead of TikTok, Instagram or X while they all do the exact same thing: strip context, flood you with information ranging from metrics to „things you may like“—which are ads even when they’re not labeled as such—while we keep their legacy alive and well.

Connection isn’t just bits transferred in a way that makes them somehow land on someone else’s device. The intention is what counts, and I’ve yet to see people show me how they intentionally seek out connection on social media and making use of this alleged potential. It seems they only ever grow apart from people, not together. We cling to them in the hopes of keeping up with friends. Have we forgotten what texting and calling are for? Oh, you say it’s too awkward to text that friend unprompted? Well, maybe they don’t mean enough to you to make time for them. So why are you bothering with keeping up with them from a distance? Doesn’t that seem miserable in your eyes? Why are you so vehemently defending staying on these shitty platforms in the name of connection while your insides convulse in agony when you have to make that connection count?