Reasons to Quit Twitter and Facebook and Switch to Mastodon
finertech.com
finertech.com
Is banning and ostracizing for wrong think really the way we want to go? It works as long as you are on the politically correct side.
There are so many problems that arise, in the same way extremists could gain majority and outcast other people. This also creates an unhealthy environment in which discussions are not open due to being afraid of being banned.
Expression of the majority over-rules the right of expression and this is not right.
On the other hand, federation is a self organizing system where the networks grow completely organically. This is much closer to how humans organize and interact offline. Everybody can run an instance, and they can choose how they moderate it and whom they federate with. There's no single company deciding what's right or wrong for everybody. There are going to be all kinds of extreme bubbles, as well as moderate ones, and everything in between.
Containment based systems work better for everyone involved.
Online is different from IRL. IRL, you have an obligation to engage in dialogue rather than pile-on on someone else's pre-existing drama. You cannot simply regurgitate someone else's quotes, . IRL, you are putting your name behind your words, so you can't ghost when you are asked to provide evidence to support your position, nor can you engage in "lol it's just a joke, stop being so serious" chicanery.
Most importantly, there aren't any likes or retweets IRL that incentivize comments with a "mic drop" attitude. You are in conversation with that person only, you aren't performing for the Internet at large.
Except many times none of these hold true.
That might be fine on Twitter, where no one's going to bother looking through your post history, but again IRL, people aren't randomly looking around for other people to get into arguments with in the first place.
A tactic used by many a racist and misogynist in real life, unfortunately. They manage to make folks attempting to improve the culture seem boring and humourless.
The best advice I ever got is simply to respond to racist or other inappropriate commentary with "We don't do that here." I've used it to good effect to help shape a more pleasant working environment.
There was a time when the world didn’t just ostracize people like this, the entire planet went to war to stop them. So, yeah. Silencing them on a social media site seems like a decent first step.
Of course those who want to censor will call their targets Nazis, and try to scare people like you by saying that the world will end if we don't censor them.
As far as I know, Facebook doesn't censor revolutionary Maoists or Khmir Rouge sympathizers, and their ideas are easily as dangerous, if any ideas are dangerous. No, we can work through this as a society.
Censoring everything is letting them win.
So what's the term for a bunch of white guys shouting "Jews will not replace us" while holding swastika, iron cross, and Nazi eagle symbols?
I remember when the media tried telling us about how "Anonymous" were "hackers on steroids" who treated things like a "real life video game".[1]
Yes, there are some creeps out there. But they are not a serious threat.
Role playing Nazis, by choice. And this wasn't a historical reenactment, or even a skit/play. This was an attempt at showing fear through symbology and crowd size.
You seem to sympathize with them in a very odd manor.
>They were trying to spook you, and they did, apparently.
LOL I see what you pathetically tried to do there.
Please explain, what's so friendly and cuddly about people who's ideology involves extermination of other humans.
>The most they could muster from the entire world is < 200
Not sure what you mean, feel free to clarify.
>I remember when the media tried telling us about how "Anonymous" were "hackers on steroids" who treated things like a "real life video game"
So because one news outlet was wrong one time, we should now disregard all reporting from any outlet till the end of time. Got it.
>Yes, there are some creeps out there. But they are not a serious threat.
You are an expert on what defines a serious threat now too! So in your clearly expert opinion (/s) what is the definition of a "serious threat?"
Also Nazis do exist - they don’t have an explicit functional party in most countries, but there are plenty of people out there who have adopted the swastika, heil hitler, sieg hiel, the antisemitism and racism (and blaming those groups for their inability to get a job), and mein kampf (that delusional book where me fuckhead falsely claimed he was good at science and maths because of his high quality aryan ancestry). The fact that they are no longer backed by an army doesn’t make them not exist.
If someone acts like a nazi, quacks like a nazi, and outright worships the original nazi leader, they’re nazis.
I have nothing against banning people doing Nazi salutes or waving Swastika flags or obviously being racist, but these days thous terms have become some watered down that when I hear someone is a Nazi my first instinct is not disgust or hate, but instead my mind goes to "oh someone who said something mildly politically incorrect"
This all is to say that now the term Nazi does not include you and you are all for silencing them, but that does not mean that in the future you might not be painted as one or same silencing won't be used on your views and opinions.
The kids run Fedilab on hand-me-down, wifi-only Android phones and just go to town with emojis, gifs, and photos. The parents share more of their days with the kids rather than only texting each other.
The setup guide is great--I followed it on a 1GB Vultr VPS and was up and running easily, except for one maddening hurdle, which is that on 1GB server you do need a swap file to successfully precompile JS assets. See [1] for the workaround. I guess this is just normal in 2019. Otherwise all the services run fine with 1GB once compiled.
I wish it supported locking down public posts at the admin level, but that's just my use case. The login system blocks most access, and public posts can be blocked with nginx authentication and tweaking the list of streams flagged public in the streaming service.
[1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/5836#issuecomme...
Polls functionality is in master, just waiting for release. My kids are going to love this.
[1] - https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/projects/8#card-185452...
Instead of writing Twitter clone they should have done a LiveJournal of Facebook clone, with better interface, different approach to privacy and discoverability etc. But being Twitter-like it is simply not that interesting.
If you don't like the Mastodon UI you can always try Pleroma, PixelFed or a number of other ActivityPub projects offering wildly different UI's. It's early days still, but the Fediverse is growing steadily.
But yes discoverability is an issue because it's hard in a federated environment.
I still like the instance I joined, though. Really nice people. Check out fosstodon.org if you're interested :)
this means that if youre unhappy with the moderation in a community, if you want to own your own data/privacy, or if you want to use self-hosted software, you can just do that with mastodon.
a few weeks back i went through a pleroma guide and set up my own pleroma instance. it only took a few hours, and it has been running for over a month on a $5 Linode (1 GB RAM). i migrated from mastodon.social, and it carried over everyone i was following seamlessly.
i get that the whole decentralized thing has been blown out of proportion in the past, but in the fediverse (mastodon, pleroma, GNU social, etc) it is working quite well.
Mastodon isn't a startup - it's not even a company. It's a framework, like phpBB forums were (are, I guess). Basically, it's a way that anyone with a web server can set up a Twitter-clone site, but - thanks to the ActivityPub protocol - all those twitter-clones can talk to each other, making the whole universe of Mastodon instances functionally one giant social network.
Mastodon:Twitter::IRC:Facebook Messenger
Practical answer:
Mastodon is a Twitter clone that's currently pretty nice and enjoyable by virtue of being small. It's also decentralized, which is a cool buzzword, but also in practice means that it's nicely broken up into a bunch of small specialized communities in each Mastodon instance that can feel pretty cozy and friendly, way less overwhelming than Twitter.
The really unique thing about it is that it's a weirdo open-source-y alternative social network that actually doesn't appear to be dying off like Diaspora or Voat or Steemit or whatever did - it seems to have reached a sort of social critical mass where people are sticking around because they genuinely enjoy the company and interactions with other users, and is growing at a sustainable rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=IPSbNdBmWKE https://joinmastodon.org/
I felt that the real problem is the same most new networks have: everyone is on other centralized networks
The other problem is discoverability is challenging. My experience trying to find people worth following was kind of meh: it seemed like it was (I’m still not sure if this is accurate) necessary to connect to Multiple different servers, to follow people who had chosen different servers as their main account.
Maybe it would be better with more usability? But fundamentally it has to compete with network effects of other platforms, and most users simply do not care about centralization: it’s not a selling point, it’s just a fact
“What is Mastodon? My elevator pitch is that it’s a social network for sharing short messages, photos, links, and more that is built by and for people. It’s open source and federated, which means there are no ads, no invasive tracking, no shareholders to demand #maximum #engagement, and no single company or server that can be shut down. It already has over 2 million users, and you can learn more at JoinMastodon.org.”
In reality, Mastodon is just one single network (because who'd want to tweet alone) which is even more tightly moderated than Twitter or Facebook.