Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical? | Hacker News Reader

Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical?

tbray.org

It's great that nostr was on the list of competitors, as it seems like a better balance between a smart clients that compete in UX and dumb servers that compete in resilience.

As it uses just a private-public keypair, it doesn't make me choose a specific server to trust with storing my identity.

> So I think it behooves privileged geeks like myself to help find and improve an alternate home for things like #BlackTwitter.

I always suspected these attitudes were common amongst the white leftwing intelligentsia, but here it is in black and white (no pun intended).

Here’s the author admitting his White Saviour complex.

What causes this behaviour? Is it a form of co-dependency? Or do these white folk feel that publicly and overtly shepherding minority groups will boost their own popularity or influence? Or is it simply virtue-signalling without self-awareness?

I just don’t get it.

You don’t get how some people might care about communities other than their own?

I’m talking about the degree of elitism / superiority / technocratic urge that makes a white man feel he’s responsible for “finding a home” for black people - as if they’re not capable of making that choice themselves. This attitude is known as the soft bigotry of low expectations.

I see no evidence that he asked any black person, let alone the whole black community, if they wanted Tim Bray to select a new home for them.

He read some blogs and is following black-skinned people, so he knows all about black culture and has elected to be a champion of their ideals.

This is the "I am not racist, I have black friends" for people that spend way too much time on Twitter.

I'd say that minority (or even not-so minority in the case of women's) rights need to be defended by the majority/dominant group in order to be socially defendable. 78% supported same sex marriage in Ireland when it was legalised in 2015, and that wasn't because 78% were gay.

There’s a difference between supporting marriage equality and, say, a straight man standing on a pedestal and announcing he wants to unilaterally “re-home the gay community” despite not a single gay person asking for this.

He notes many are asking for it. They want to migrate off Twitter but require Quote Tweet.

Yes because apparently it's part of the black culture, the author says. I do not know what kind of ivory tower echo chamber this person is interacting with, to reduce an entire ethnicity to a specific feature they really need to feel heard.

Ain't that some inane Twitterati bullshit. The author is trying so hard to be inclusive to black minorities, it's starting to feel racist.

He's saying that there is a group of people who are stuck on a platform they don't like because of a feature missing from Mastodon that the users who can't switch called out themselves. The only racists here are the people who think he shouldn't help just because he's a different race.

> Mastodon is missing some necessary affordances; in particular the Quote Tweet, said to be crucial to #BlackTwitter culture

Emphasis mine. I don't think he wants to help fight racial equality. He just want to fight for a subset of black Twitter nerds, and from his ivory tower he equates them with an entire ethnicity. Then wonders if Mastodon, lacking Quote Tweets is unethical because how can black people communicate then?!

Spoiler alert, the black racial struggle is bigger than Afro-American nerds identifying with an hashtag on Twitter, with a deep love for quoting tweets.

> Then wonders if Mastodon, lacking Quote Tweets is unethical because how can black people communicate then

He wonders if migrating to Mastodon without crossposting might be unethical because it cuts people who are stuck on Twitter off from the group who has migrated. You have deliberately misinterpreted what he said. Consider why you might have done so and why you think he wants to "fight racial equality [sic]." You've been hoodwinked into fighting a culture war that only one side is fighting. The same duped culture warriors who have been fighting against teaching about American history from the perspective of native Americans and slaves and have been fighting against some "war on Christmas" for the last two decades.

>What causes this behaviour?

As someone who's brown it's always been really irritating to have the white people try to pretend (and some of them even believe it) to have the white knight/savior complex.

Just leave me alone and let me do my own shit ffs. Browns and Blacks are not not mentally challenged 12 year olds.

I remember constant discussions in the last few years that went like this: "If you don't like Twitter, why don't you start your own?" And many people tried, but no one is succeeding so far. I think the reason for that is that Twitter really has no functionality, except for (and that's a BIG one) the Network Effect itself. This Network Effect works the other way as well: if you don't have it, you can't compete with Twitter. The new "microblogging services" will not have network effect by definition, and they can't get traction.

Now that Elon Musk is making changes, we are again into the "If you hate Twitter, please you start your own." But I think these new efforts will go the same way as the old ones. You simply do not have the network effect to compete effectively.

I think you vastly overstate the size a network effect has to be before you hit critical mass.

Especially for interest-related things. For instance, the Haskell subreddit has 73k members. But members on Reddit isn't a good metric (I don't even think I'm one). There's typically a hundred or so users at a time. It's not huge but it works.

I'm on chat servers and forums with less than 100 active users and it's plenty to spend years participating and following along.

Look at the success of Discord where people pay for modest size chat servers.

Maybe smaller platforms are healthier. It may be more meaningful for people to participate in smaller systems such as topic-specific forums for, say, Java programmers, or photographers, fans of some book, etc.

I deleted my Twitter in 2017 as I felt it was not healthy. People mostly seem to be asserting membership in this tribe or that tribe and confuse having access to a megaphone with having something to say.

If you express your whole identity consistently and everywhere with everyone online of course you are going to have conflicts with people who will sometimes be offended by something your said. (I have really frightened people in the past, for instance, by singing Frank Zappa songs)

This compartmentalization (put on the hat that "I am a photographer" on the photography site) will get you much better service and help you be focused on helping other members no matter who they are. Insofar as you have a context you will work that in the context of how your attributes affect you as a photographer, how you get hassled as a photographer, what it is you see in the world as a photographer, etc.

On some other forum there is a different presentation of self.

Unlike the old ones, the network effect is the combined network of all ActivityPub instances, so if one of them has it, they all have it. With Tumblr having announced upcoming ActivityPub support, I think the market will soon become the "combined network of all ActivityPub" versus the "network of Twitter".

For perspective, I have exactly 200 followers and 108 follows on mastodon. Interaction and engagement with my posts is higher than it ever was on Twitter, even when I had a couple thousand followers. The variety of posts in my home timeline is on par with Twitter, except the quality is higher due to a lack of algorithms promoting and hiding posts for unknowable reasons. This is a point reiterated by almost everyone who actually spends some time to understand and get involved with the platform.

There are enough users on mastodon to comfortably capture new users. It's self-sufficient at this point. Whether or not any new users come from Twitter, mastodon is a success, and will likely be around for a long time. It's stable and there's enough network for anyone to jump in, given they spend a week or two to give it an honest try.

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