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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

I noticed that every "standard tech journalism template" on his list was either tech Corporate Press Release stuff, or tech celebrity news stuff...

...vs., jumping over to Ars Technica (called out in these comments for having 80% of commenters assume that Mastodon is a for-profit Twitter competitor), and their "20 Most-read Stories of 2022" article - gosh, maybe three stories of their Top 12 fit any of those templates.

Conclusion: Article author's mental image of "tech journalist" is actually "tech gossip columnist" - for people who want to sound cool & informed, but wouldn't actually want to know anything useful about tech.

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For the record I'm a paid subscribed to Ars. But the comments on the Mastodon article were... wow.

But then the article was syndicated from somewhere and not at the normal Ars level either.

Linky to article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/mastodon-is-hurt...

From a quick glance at wired.com - the syndicated Ars article's source - the original article's postulates look even more delusional.

Like this:

> And administrators must comply with not only their local laws, but laws that exist anywhere their server is accessible.

This is bullshit and they have to know it's bullshit. Why? Because their servers are accessible in Thailand, but nobody pretends they have to abide the lèse-majesté laws Thailand enforces. Ditto the various laws in force in other countries Ars doesn't care about.

Plus, they don't look into why Twitter complies with the GDPR: Twitter has assets in Europe that the EU could seize. A local Mastodon instance operator doesn't, so they don't have to care. Vice-versa in the converse, of course: A small European Mastodon instance operator doesn't have to care about any laws in North or South America.

And that's one of the real differences between Twitter and Mastodon. On Mastodon everything is built around interacting with peers. Sure there might be celebrities on but that's not the main thing. Twitter on the other hand is all about celebrity access.

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