Mastodon hit 10M users
mastodon.social
mastodon.social
(1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with.
(2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think all kinds of organizations (e.g. sports clubs, media companies, private companies, schools, political parties, gov't agencies, etc.) should give it a shot hosting their own instances to take control of their social media identity. They don't necessarily need to open registrations for everyone and start moderating "the masses". I only let few hand-picked people on my instance that I happen to know IRL and still have a happy life.
(3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy. Surely, their audience was a good fit but I think it's a matter of critical mass when more less-nerdy people would join the Fediverse.
In summary, I deleted my Twitter account ~2 months ago and don't regret it. Some things are a bit annoying (mostly bugs, finding and connecting with other people, not much interaction with my posts [maybe it's because my posts are sh*t]) but all in all it's a great resource for inspiration and digital interaction with other people.
ymmv. The mastodon.lol (which was a safe space instance) drama over Hogwarts Legacy [0] was a very good reminder that the platform doesn’t matter, its the people.
Neither mattered in that case. It was just a conundrum. Something a lot of people wanted to boycott had a AAA game built for it.
I assume you're coming on the side of Nathan, but can't you see why people were going to have a strong reaction about posts about the game surfacing in the feed? It was a wedge issue. I'm not on either side, except I am against those who actually threw those insults at Nathan, which I'm pretty sure were a tiny % of the people who disagreed with him. I think if they had merely expressed frustration about the situation but not gone off the handle the same thing could have happened, albeit more slowly.
This is the fundamental fallacy of modern social media, that expressing frustration is action. Nathan wasn't going to change, and shouldn't have to.
The advancement of decentralization presents an actual action disapproving users can take: leave for another instance, even by creating their own. Fragmentation of communities is a feature, not a bug.
They attacked Pikamee. If you don't know who Pikamee is, that's like stamping on puppies.
What does that mean?
It's not entirely wrong: a space with peers is a safe space. It's how e.g. recovery of PTST for veterans or rape-victims work too, I'm told. It's also why clubs have a door-policy.
In this case, safe space means both "only likeminded", i.e. gatekeeping - door policy, as tech, policy and features to protect: good privacy defaults, permissioned access, privacy features etc.
So in case of anything politic and not say hobby circle - an echo chamber
For example I wouldn't consider rule "no politics talk" to be echo chamber on any social space but banning/shadowbanning one kind of leaning vs the other would certainly lean to that.
Then again it is not as simple as some topics just produce people that cannot actually hold conversation about what they talk about and are more interested in throwing their piece and not trying to honestly discuss anything. The unkind extremisms can be banned without turning community into echo chamber even tho technically kicking the <person> having <view> would fall upon "banning one side of politics"
Or on the other side, would you consider post discussing BDSM kinks of some ballet person to be on-topic and belonging to ballet community ? Or who they gave money for political stuff ? Would those comments improve that community or just be off-topic waste of page space ?
While overall the Fediverse is a kind place, it's the people that make or break that. And people are fallible.
¹ I'm working on a longer blog-post, but need some distance first, else it's just a reconing/grudge- or sounds like one.
So long as you lean to progressive worldviews and see insult slinging at those that don't see your way not as being toxic, but rather just expressions of righteous indignation... sure, I could buy that line. A quick perusal on the front page of mastodon.social had only of either relatively neutral topics or various progressive tropes on the news of the day. No contrary views were there at all. Perhaps this is what you mean: it's your bubble, so it's cozy and non-toxic. A safe-space of sorts for all right minded people.
I do agree with you: Twitter is a digital hellscape. Of course, I deleted my account half a decade or so ago for this reason and to be fair, it's not changed. It might now have a different flavor with Musk, but still as toxic a place as it was before him. I can't see Mastodon as being much different and with that I'll do us both a favor a stay away from there as well.
I find this happens most often to people with a worldview that is objectively incompatible with civilization.
In case that is going to turn out to correlate with “worldview[s] that [are] objectively incompatible with [the other] civilization”, … what could it mean …
I haven't opened Gab in a while so I just loaded the front page, and I can see why Mastodon moderators don't want to deal with them either. The content is not as blatantly illegal as many other blacklisted sites, but the front page is incredibly toxic and hateful. I would block most of those posts if they woulf ever hit my personal instance.
Feel free to join (or set up) an instance that doesn't employ blacklists, though. The default Mastodon configuration comes with an empty blacklist so I'm sure there are servers out there that will let you access Gab and other blacklisted servers if you wish.
However, other servers are allowed to block you or your server at their digression if you're boosting or posting content they don't care for. After all, freedom of speech does not imply any obligation to be heard.
Nah. It tends to include neo-nazis, neo-confederates, racists, sexists, white supremacists, kiddy diddlers, and the like. It's not a particularly difficult group to not be a part of.
You might consider being concerned if your ideas and attitudes align with those of the aforementioned deplorables. And yes, that would be the correct term.
Edit: Calling people by the correct descriptive terms is not smearing. I'm sorry you are confused.
It all just boils down to a fig-leaf for your hatred.
I think that illustrates the way these things work pretty clearly.
With some charity, you could say Gab has a different worldview. However, there are also people who think sex with children is ok. That is also technically 'a different worldview'. You see, there is a reason Gab has been cut off, and it is not just that he has a different worldview.
If you don't list the specific reason, you distort the most important part of this particular moderation. I noticed this is a fairly common myth in what seems like a right-wing frame of 'progressive politics trying to limit freedom of speech'.
But, wanting to give your point a chance... I went to the first 10 servers that were suggested by joinmastodon. There was very little difference just scrolling their landing pages in terms of content than that of mastodon.social. Not surprising: Federation is suppose to allow this sort of decentralized sharing of the exact same content across instances. Of those, only really the instance run by the makers of the Vivaldi Browser seems to be notably toned down on the political muck.. and they probably for business reasons.
Then I went different interest specific group servers and scrolled through their landing page content. And they were also very reflective of my mastodon.social experience... many of the same Toots. The kind of community didn't really matter so much for the most part (I'm guessing a fair amount of lazy configuration to be honest).
Here's an example: birds.town which bills itself as...
"A server primarily meant for people who like birds, birding and nature in general, but obviously everyone is equally welcome here! Have fun cawing about "
And I almost was happily surprised. The top Toots of the feed (or whatever it's called in Mastodon-land) were, in fact, about birding! Unfortunately I kept scrolling. Oh dear.
"I'd find conservatives attacks on “woke” funny if they weren't so dangerous.
Woke people fought and won the battle against slavery.
Woke people went to war and defeated fascism in WWII.
Woke people fought for and won equal rights for women and people of color.
Woke people battled for rights for workers like 40-hour workweeks and safety protections."
https://birds.town/@augieray@mastodon.social/110049850172355...
Yes, because that's what I want to know when participating in a social network focusing on bird watching.
And generally, whenever there's people annoying me, I just unfollow/mute/block them - problem solved.
The point I was answering was that I saw what I saw because I used a single instance of a Federated service (mastodon.social)... my counter-point here was that the instance really didn't matter. I was served, by default, largely the same toxic content across the 20 or so servers I ended up landing on.
Yes, I can unfollow, mute, block, etc. anyone that I decide isn't someone I want in my life. But I'm pretty sure I could do that on Twitter, too (could be wrong, I've not been there for a long time). Life's too short. Maybe the local feed would have been much better... or maybe the warm cozy Mastodon isn't that which competes with Twitter, but that which competes with Discourse or Discord.
In the case of Pleroma, it was much the same, but with way more fringe lunatics and right wingers. I don't want to find a community "aligned with my worldview" that shuts out people unaligned with them, I want to find a community of mentally healthy adults, and that does not seem to exist in the larger Mastodon or Pleroma fediverse, unless your hobbies include pearl clutching about perceived racism or making infographics about white genocide.
With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fated activist groups sh*tposting things about each other and newspaper headlines crafted to produce anger-driven traffic. Something, which doesn't give me anything but depressions.
I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir.
But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...:
"New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun.
Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest"
(https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465)
"Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context.
No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight."
(https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093)
"Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep"
(https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content)
"The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids.
Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*"
(https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work).
And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made.
This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically.
So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).
- As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters).
- So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website.
- I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools).
- Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff.
- I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.
And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.
Much better, I think, is to have a truth finding conversation together. Perhaps coming from different sides of the story, but always on the search for trying to find common ground, the truth, science, and an open mind to be changed by those things.
And not see the whole thing as a match to be won you know?
I’m a German, back in school (20+ years ago) I was taught that arguing, when done in good faith, helps everyone. So I disagree heavily with your characterization of arguing as American.
The New Left has become unrecognizable to me as a mode of liberal thinking and both sides of the political fence in the US appear to have escaped into a hole of myopic beliefs that mirror each other in their intensity and desire for control.
> As someone who'd consider themselves progressive by the yardstick of 10 years ago but not measured to the new progressives of today ...
> The New Left has become unrecognizable to me
That's an expected phenomenon. What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.
When people are young, they challenge the corrupt system. As those changes are enacted, those young people grow older and become the system. Then a new generation sees that 'progress' of your youth as the old, corrupt, scelerotic system; they have nothing invested in your achievements; they see the system's flaws and push to change them.
The formerly-young-challengers, now old-system-members, say 'that's crazy, outlandish, outrageous, etc.' - exactly what was said to them when they were young.
Oh yes, I know, 'this time it's different'. 'These kids really are outrageous.' Those words are also exactly the same as before.
If you want to be progressive, you need to keep seeing the flaws, not accepting them, and keep pushing for change. The moment you stop, say 'far enough we've done a good job', you cease being progressive.
I would even argue most progressives are seeing flaws and don’t accept them and push for change but you don’t need to be “radical”(as in further from the status quo) in your views to do that and it doesn’t make you less of a progressive - you are just trying to push to a different spot on the manifold.
The big divide isn't over specific beliefs and policies as much as whether you believe the current system tends to favour you or not.
I'm not sure about that. I know some conservatives (which I'd consider myself as well, though leaning libertarian) who are very well off but didn't start that way, and their political ideas remained constant. I know others who aren't particularly wealthy, but hold the same ideas.
Fundamentally, I believe it's more about "what will work?", in essence "if we organized our society along these lines, would it still function, or would it fall apart", and progressives and conservatives have vastly different opinions on that.
For a single issue: conservatives generally believe that "if you pay people to do nothing, that's exactly what they'll do" and thus are opposed to high welfare (because people will stop working, and without people working, nothing gets produced), while progressives believe that people will be freed by not worrying about their income and will voluntarily work and become very productive, which is why they're very much in favor of high welfare (e.g. UBI). It's one side saying "don't change this, you'll break everything" and the other side saying "no, we need to change this, it'll get better".
But it's not about your current status in the system. My political convictions haven't changed much since when I was pretty much poor vs now that I'm doing very well (though they've become calmer, but I'd attribute that mostly to age).
Which is by and large the entire problem. The right is rarely interested in solving problems.
So I could find minor points of agreement -- there's certainly people out there who are a tad too radical for my taste. The problem is that in general though I'm very much in favor of change, and the right isn't.
The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem. That is basically why they pick up the label "conservative", the right only exists as a political unit to resist threats from the left. Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies). And every faction generally keeps busy dealing with their own perceived problems.
That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.
> Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies).
No, the right favors non-government approaches because they want to pick and choose. They for instance heavily endorse personal charity because you get to pick who you help.
I on the other hand think there should be a floor in society below which nobody is allowed to fall, and that it ideally should be implemented in a fully blind and dispassionate manner, eg, UBI. Everyone gets it automatically no questions asked, without needing to be liked by the local community.
My government have made it very difficult for me to take my own health, retirement savings, home improvement and often financial decisions into my own hands. Typically the way his happens is that some leftist will be responsible although in the case of the financial stuff it tends to be nonpartisan corruption. If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen. Ignoring the left is not really an option; they'll identify resources and come for them to fund their own plans. Otherwise the awkward truth is that controlling government wouldn't be such a big deal.
> ...
> If I am too effective at savings then there will also be attempts to gain control of the savings and funnel them into causes I usually think are poorly chosen
Right, that's exactly what I was talking about. We can agree on the surface about some things, but underlying priorities and views aren't really compatible even when things happen to align by accident.
Eg, my desire for having guaranteed social minimums isn't really compatible with your desire to personally control what your tax money gets spent on.
I put it to you that it isn't 'obstructionism', it is plain old disagreement. Or if you prefer, the left is being just as obstructionist in blocking the right from making their own decisions. The only difference is where the obstructions are happening.
There's different things being discussed. I started answering the "If you want to set yourself an interesting challenge, try to figure out why it is you think being on the right wing of politics is incompatible with those opinions" bit.
My answer to that is that there are genuine underlying incompatibilities, and so even if there's a superficial agreement on something once in a while (eg, we both agree some policy goes a tad too far), it still makes no sense for me to switch camps.
The obstructionism is a tangential side point: that the right seems to have no policy other than being anti-left, and so far you've done nothing to convince me otherwise.
One 2019 UK report (https://www.icax.co.uk/pdf/Absolute_Zero_Report.pdf) proposes a timeline that's been circulating on Twitter, involving the closure of all airports and shutting down all international shipping by 2050, while pricing 40% of traffic off the roads and banning beef+lamb. That (along with many more less-drastic but still significant restrictions) is what it would take to reach 'net zero' with current technology.
And that was written in 2019, when people were generally a lot more reasonable than they are in the post-Covid world.
(Do they even realise what they're proposing by 'no international shipping'... Amongst many other things, that means zero microchips for the UK, let alone complete technology products such as phones, TVs, or EVs)
Meanwhile in the real world (here in the UK), we've got a massive cost-of-living crisis, a collapsing healthcare system, a disaster of a property market, and a rising population that we're failing to build infrastructure to cope with. We have a a terribly incompetent government, and an opposition that seems no better. And we're living with the threat of WW3, the tail end of the pandemic, and now a banking crisis too.
> We currently have no non-emitting freight ships, so there is an urgent need for exploration of means to electrify ship power
It seems like you are the one "catastrophising".
What if it is a catastrophe? Should we pretend otherwise?
The word 'catastrophize' implies that the speaker is creating the catastrophe. Climate change sure seems like one to me, whether anyone says it or not.
While I don't want to try and defend every right wing policy, the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020. The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.
All the evidence I see is I'm more likely to die in a fire caused by soldiers than power plants.
That's why it will be very difficult for us to find any common ground. Even though I am very much a free market guy and definitely don't agree with every policy on the left. The right down plays, ignores or ridicules global warming. How one can read the IPCC report and doesn't feel any sense of urgency is beyond me. This shouldn't even be a left or right issue.
1. Attacking the left brings them support
2. Their carbon industry supporters.
Your argument is assumptions - that climate change isn't the biggest challenge, that others are bigger.
> The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.
What is "official reporting"?
China and Russia feature quite largely in the news. It's hard to imagine them getting more coverage.
What makes you believe we have any control over the climate?
What makes you believe that in the sham democracy, your vote makes any difference?
CO2 has two vibrational modes that are IR active. We release carbon as CO2 into the atmosphere that was previously bound inside the earth's crust. Humans increased the CO2 concentration from 280ppm to 420ppm (pre-industrial -> today). The science is settled. Whether you believe in it or not: Global warming is happening and humans are causing it. I understand that it is something you don't want to be true (and trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong). But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.
Well, we'll see. There are predictions of global devastation within the next decade.
> But physics doesn't care if you want it to be true or not.
It's not about that. Rather it's about the law of slow-moving disasters.
For example, what if I told you there was a train coming down the tracks that is about to flatten you. Would you be scared? What if I told you it was coming at you at 1cm/year. Would you be scared then?
This is the law of slow-moving disasters. We tend not to notice them in practice. If the weather changes year to year on the time-scale of decades or centuries, the rate of change is so low that buildings will simply be replaced over time. In extreme cases, populations will migrate.
Ancient humans have lived in climates both much warmer, and much cooler than those we currently experience.
> trust me, I would also love if it turned out to be wrong
I think I trust you. You seem like a stand-up guy, but understand that there is a huge amount of power to be distilled out of this. So there are a great number of people who are heavily incentivised to look the other way if there are any unanswered questions.
For a parallel example, see the refusal to acknowledge side effects including mycardiatus from COVID vaccinations.
I never really got this argument: There are even more powerful and even richer people that have incentives that nothing changes: ExxonMobile, Koch Industries, BP, Volkswagen, BMW, GM, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.
We've already 'seen'. The science is, of course, based on an enormous amount of empirical evidence. We can always just say, 'we'll see what happens next', but it's a bizarre argument - on that basis you never act.
Speaking this way breaks the conversation.
It's one of the larger instances but the top heaviest constitute the majority by far and they all enshrine these policies.
I don't think you're really answering my criticism. You're lumping my "retrograde" progressiveness in with the well-worn wheel of timely revolts against the corruption of the past. I'm saying that both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism and that the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few.
There seems to be no middle ground anymore for white males that exclusively want to address labor issues. Perhaps it is true that to push for progress in labor, the root problem of the power dynamics must be addressed (i.e. you can't be colorblind here).
> You have made your decision, then.
Is this something the hero says? To me, it looks like something the villain says.
Can you give examples of that happening? I don't see any at all. I mean actual violence and terror.
These wild claims are becoming comical. The other day, it was the Cambodian genocide. Are we just picking catastrophes and arbitrarily saying they are happening? What's next? The Fall or Rome? The 10 Plagues from the Bible?
If you want to talk about instruments of control in the service of the few, how about we talk about the forces that keep healthcare expensive and poorly distributed in the U.S.? Or are working to ban books and art performances in Florida (and elsewhere)? How about the instruments of control that have been invading Ukraine for over a year? These seem much more tangible and consequential than moderation decisions on a website no one has to use. Perspective is very important, lest we fall into the false equivalency trap.
The instruments of control are distributed in a very lopsided manner, to my eyes. "The Left is CONTROLLING PEOPLE on Mastodon" doesn't really cut it. If you don't the policies of one instance, join a different one. Or make your own, and you can make your own policies. You can decide what level of control you want on the social media you choose to interact with. And if some instances have rules you don't like? My advice would be, ignore those instances and don't worry about their rules. They only affect you if you allow them to.
So can you provide any evidence? Name this instance?
> both sides of the political aisle have become hives of extremism
It's laughable. Look at the people in power. What progressive is in any major office: Look at the President, the Minority Leader of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, Democratic Governors, etc. etc. All are mainstream Dems, hardly a progressive to be seen. Meanwhile, a majority of the GOP in Washington voted to overturn democracy and as sided with the rioters who attempted a coup.
> the left, particularly, has become the thing it once hated, an instrument of control in the service of the few
What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.
The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.
I've already shared the specifics I'm comfortable sharing. I have zero desire to start a witch hunt.
> What has the left controlled? The right wing has used governmet power to ban books, educational topics, political freedom for teachers, criminalized gender choices, protests, etc. etc. Even in colleges, the right has shut down dissent, including among faculty (e.g., at UNC, in Florida, Harvard, Yale, etc.). The right is trying to eliminate tenure and academic freedom.
You're perfectly demonstrating exactly the behavior I intended to point out. "Other-ing" the opposition into the Sith is not productive and the Left is as guilty of this as the Right.
> The left is trying to break the control of a few. Whether you like their tactics or not, they are trying to give power to minorities and other vulnerable people.
Through race essentialism? Or by what means are you specifically referring to? The common platform of the new left is that all white people are guilty of the original sin of their skin color. A platform based on enforced shame is not a platform for collaboration.
That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line - in reality it was the boring, normie mainstream liberals who dragged the online activists into supporting that in the first place, not the other way around. Until just a few years ago they supported anti-trans viewpoints that were way out of kilter with mainstream society and demanded trans women shut up about harassment campaigns that went just as much against mainstream norms and values as the harassment that the online left is apologists for today. There's a good chance this changed through younger people with different views coming in, but they had those views in the first place because society as a whole had already shifted.
The difference really, genuinely, and consistently is just toxicity, extremism, and a refusal to accept that anyone who deviates even an inch from their views is a decent person. Those are the things that have stayed constant even as the arguments and the targets have shifted. The culture shifts easily from expecting trans women to shut up about TERF harassment campaigns to justifying harassment of streamers who play a game based on a franchise by someone who liked tweets containing TERF views because the cruelty is the point. While the views go beyond what mainstream society is willing to accept, the direction is extremely questionable. (For example, there have been multiple ugly Mastodon disputes involving server operators trying to shut people up about the long trail of rape allegations that follow one specific trans woman around, pretty much all from other trans women. Paying attention to them is supposedly hateful and an attack on trans women. Again, this is one specific person who's allegedly doing it, the same one every single time - not trans women as a whole.)
The word "TERF" to describe the people and worldview that wanted to exclude trans people and trans rights from social justice activism wasn't even recorded as existing until 15 years ago, not because those views didn't exist - they're traceable in basically their modern form all the way back to like the seventies and are oddly pervasive - but because they succeeded well enough that even discussing the idea that this was a bad thing didn't start to become a part of activist discussion until then. This whole shift in viewpoint to that becoming unacceptable is incredibly recent.
Also, in general ordinary non-terminally-online people were much, much less anti-trans than both the "attack helecopter" anti-SJW side and the anti-trans campaigners that social justice activists were meant to sympathise with, though that may not have been obvious since one of the big things that was unacceptable was actually talking about what anti-trans people on the same side were doing and the real-world consequences (including stuff like laws they lobbied for). Admittedly, I'm from the UK so my experiences may not be representative of the US and other countries, but we are supposedly "TERF island" so that cuts both ways.
I think it would have been worth it to give this more than a moments thought. A quick glance at 20th century events shows fascism and communist dictatorships being seen as more fashionable and modern than flaky Weimar republics and crumbling empires. The next 50-80 years nevertheless showed history bending haphazaradly away from these trends. In the least, taking for granted that what follows is inevitably more progressive seems a tad rash.
What's far more interesting is examining the thoughts and actions of the inglorious bastards, both young and old, who at the time recognized early on that This Was Not The Way, and with what critera they did so.
This is where modern Progressives (or wokes) diverge from Liberalism. It is a politics of radical egalitarianism and fundamentalism. The idea that certain people have access to certain knowledge and "other ways of knowing" that makes them the authority on a subject and them and only them should be listened to. And of course, using unfalsifiable methods to achieve this as evidenced in their most popular literature that states "All white people are racist and denial of this is evidence of their fragility, which is racist". This language trick is used over and over. And of course, creating a grievance hierarchy that intends to flip Liberalism on its head since clearly the Liberal intellectual tradition was created by and for white men to maintain their power over everyone else. Of course ignoring that all of the so-called "progress" we've made (women's right, gay rights, civil rights, etc) are from the Liberal tradition.
Some people are bigots. But many people that are labeled bigots are simply skeptical liberals, which are often called fascists now.
Wise people should fear times when people on the ends of the political spectrum do not talk _to_ each other, but only _about_ each other. It should be VERY apparent that we seem to be getting to such a social time (exacerbated by technology driven bubbles), and anyone who dreads the next Burning Times is a wise person.
> The reason given was that white people must not be able to opt out of the BIPOC experience of political outrage.
...or the modern left being by far the most racist ones out there
My memory of the 2003 to 2008 time frame is different.
I recall mainstream complaints about GTA 3, released 2001. Famously, Senator Clinton asked the FTC to investigate GTA 3 over the "hot coffee" mod in 2005.
There was also the 2005 California Law [0] that banned the sale of violent video games to minors.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
And for many years (still rears its ugly head from time to time) "the game violence causes real violence" garbage.
Ahh, ok. So the moral panic of the early 80s, about 40 years ago.
The "video games cause real violence" argument was personified by Tipper Gore in the 90s, more than 30 years ago.
I don't recall anything from 15-20 years ago particular to conservatives. It has been mainstream since the 90s.
These days, any social media that allows "silos" eventually settles into such, and they are gate-kept. The strong silo-ing is also IMHO a byproduct of the modern social web of binary upvote / downvotes that fuel algorithmic feeds, a feature not present in the early days of the web, and (my theory) one that tends to reward the "strongest" opinions, which also tend to be the most extreme. "Left" or "right" isn't the problem I see regarding social media, instead it's the overall design. I don't know if Mastodon has avoided this (IMHO) cardinal sin or not.
I'm not sure which mastodon server you are on, or which ones you're linked with, but I'm on Universeodon and I've frankly seen nothing of the sort.
You do have a point of course, but I haven't seen any sort of toxic behaviour. Toxic and hateful people simply get banned, and the servers that house them get blacklisted. Which isn't too dissimilar to how the world used to function before centralized social media made it harder to moderate which people you want to spend your time on.
I'm progressive of course, so it's easy for me. But the thing is, if you came up to me in the real world and started to talk about how wrong it is for people to be gay, then I'd frankly walk away from you. This is what becomes possible with decentralized social media, but I'm not sure I'd call it a bubble or safespace, it's simply going back to the world before Facebook and Twitter, to when it was much easier to ignore people.
I don't know if that's supposed to sound like a good thing, but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.
If you think "only bad people are toxic", you probably haven't been to many debates where your viewpoint happens to be the minority viewpoint.
You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you.
Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.
I agree with your point about freedom of association, but let's not pretend this is just limited to racism.
And if you support the concept of free association, what do you do when it collides with civil rights law?
What if this happens more than once? Should I reregister every month and refollow the same people again and again?
What if I set up my own server and people will decide that some of my toots are not "left" or "progressive" enough?
One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
This is why all leftists started leaving twitter when Musk took over and promised free speech (not freedom of reach), they knew instantly that the gig was up.
All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.
Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe. The west is one global entity these days. JK Rowling is hated by swedish leftists and california leftists.
Third, "it's simply not true" is not a convincing argument in the face of millions of examples. Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?
> All censorship-based platforms, such as reddit or mastodon that has _mods_, are left wing.
This seems to be relying on popular belief rather than facts, and making a lot of assumptions in regards to why particular groups would prefer particular forums. If we're drawing spurious correlations 4chan also seems to enjoy a lot more violent and illegal pornography than say reddit - can we draw conclusions from that regarding the right as well?
> Secondly, the woke left is the same in the US as it is in Europe.
You're now defining a sub group of the left. What separates the "woke" left from the regular left. or are they all one and the same in your eyes? And if so, do you think that actually aligns with everyone who calls identifies as left?
> The west is one global entity these days.
Are you American? As a Canadian I say it definitely is not, we're now at an impasse I guess?
> Why do you think all the biggest comedians in the US avoid colleges?
Who are the biggest comedians? And if they are the biggest why would they go to a college when they can fill a stadium.
If you think modern leftism is being mad about people being racist, that says more about you.
This is oversimplifying things.
Here is the example: https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01...
>We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that
So I can't really be part of the team if a person whom I follow on github or somewhere else is somehow "correct worldview". I may even not be aware of this.
Not to mention that many people actually have no idea what they are talking about and use words like "nazis" only to describe abstract "bad people" as opposed to their image of "good people"
Example from the same link:
>we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism)
Apparently I won't be able to participate if I follow Bill Gates blog.
Your right to freedom of speech is between you and the government. People aren’t required to publish your work just because you complain.
The difference here is you can just hook into the same decentralized system the publisher is using, and subvert them by finding another instance to use or even making your own! With no difference in reach or power.
Why is that bad? The seems to be MUCH better for you.
This is a strawman. Commenter said anything about the right to free speech, only about the willingness to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.
We all know that Bob is not obligated to listen to Alice, and he is not required to host a venue for her opinions. But Bob's eagerness to run away to a place where there is no risk of seeing Alice's view, while not necessarily bad (if you want to live in a bubble, live in a bubble), it is _not_ a virtue.
Let me try to help: one is not illegal so it should in principle be allowed on a platform that is seeking an honest discussion. The other is a crime and can be dealt withing the framework of the law. If the person commiting crimes is behind an anonymous identity, I think that's where the problem actually lies - perhaps the administrator should be compelled by law to disclose the real person behind the anonymous profile (is the Mastodon community against that)?! If what they've done is indeed against the law, then a ban is definitely justified (and may be required by law - i.e. we're back to the rule of law, not mob rules), no one will argue against that... but what I am against is banning people simply for having opposing views, which is what we actually see happening. Do you see people complaining that someone who commits crimes online should not be banned from anything? That's not my argument or anyone else's argument, so your response comes as a complete strawman.
Frankly, if Alice is seeking honest disagreement discussion, Alice should seek to talk with people who consent to that kind of engagement with her, instead of chasing after Bob who would rather not engage. If Alice is having difficulty finding those people, maybe her source selection is simply quite uncommon; lots of highly controversial subject matter applies almost exclusively to small parts of the population, and a minority of that minority is generally available to debate on that subject.
I’m sure Alice can have spirited debate about toppings on pizza, a subject that a larger set of people are usually willing to disagree and discuss about. If she insists on trying to force a minority of a minority to debate with her, I think a friend group is fairly justified in defending Bob by ousting Alice, as Alice is unable to respect people’s basic boundaries like “can we change the subject”.
This is a commonly parroted error. The First Amendment to the US Constitution which protects freedom of expression is mostly between the gov't and you...
...but the CONCEPT of freedom of speech is an ethical concept that goes well beyond the roll of government. It is about ensuring the rights of minority speech and controversial opinions.
Speech that makes you uncomfortable can be some of the most valuable speech people need to hear.
I often find it telling when you ask someone who favors social media censorship if they would prefer themselves be shielded from uncomfortable speech, or if they specifically want everyone to be shielded.
Without fail, they want censorship for everyone else - not themselves.
But does that apply here? We’re talking about private citizens, running a publication platform.
If you went to your local community newsletter, asked to put in an article saying “this community is full of bigots, and none of you want to hear about it” and they deny including your article, there’s no legal recourse for you.
Sure, there’s the ideals of the marketplace of ideas, but there’s also very real restrictions on speech because society wouldn’t function if everyone was required to hear and consider every voice.
I’m also not American, so I’m no expert here obviously. I could be totally wrong on this and maybe there is legal precedent for forcing a private publication to publish something after some sort of legal free speech complaint.
In 1776, a person shouting obscenities in a pub, would get duly thrown out. He had the freedom to shout in the park, at a coffee shop, in the library, or in any of a thousand other places in town.
Today, political discourse takes places almost entirely online and via private corporations. Google isn't a pub on 2nd ave and 54th street. It's ALL THE ESTABLISHMENTS IN TOWN. ...or at least it, along with 3-4 other of the global tech oligopolies. It's important to note that while massive global tech companies are not formally part of government, they are very integrated with gov't through lobbying, gov't contracts, and direct political sponsorship, and a variety of other individual contacts and arrangements.
As a result of their SCALE of their control, they implicitly inherit some ethical obligations to allow uncomfortable speech to occur.
I don't believe in limitless speech rights - but the current limits are vague and selectively enforced and thus easily susceptible to political bias - which is the most dangerous kind of censorship.
Mastodon is decentralized at the protocol level. It's the opposite of that at the social level. The mob rule may be "decentralized", but it turns out it still sucks. Cross one extremist and get accused of being a bigot / -ist du jour, and them and their friend will run you out of town. No big deal, you say, you can always switch towns? Except no, because the extremists will follow and denounce you for your "bigotry" / -ism, and threaten to do the same to anyone willing to harbor you, and then no town will want you in, because none of them want to be cut off of everyone else. On the main subnet, it's every instance pointing a gun at every other one - even if most believe the common rules are extreme, no one trusts others enough to challenge them.
The irony is, this is basically rediscovering the lessons of past thousand years of civilization. Mastodon is the digital equivalent of a sea of towns afraid of their own people and other towns alike, due to roving parties of political officers executing criminals and wrongthinkers alike. Somewhere along the way people figured that rule of law, presumption of innocence, due process, proportionality of punishment, civilization, are nice things to have.
Anyway. Been there, done that, tried to enjoy it while pretending there is no problem, until the admin retired the instance. I don't feel like participating again. I'm off both Twitter and Mastodon. As much as I hate corporate ad-poisoned Internet, I do have to grant it that it's the more honest one - people will do bad things to each other in pursuit of ad revenue (or revenue in general), but at least they're not pretending too much. They're not bending their own minds past breaking point to feel OK with delivering mob punishment and signalling allegiance to not become targets themselves.
If the group-think and witch hunting is as hard on you as you seem to describe, I can assure you there are MANY others in the same position.
So make your own thing.
Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.
The adventurous among them will venture over when they want.
Maybe. And maybe it's my age showing. But there's one other thing - the modern social media solve for a different problem than the forums and boards of yore: they're all-encompassing, topic-agnostic. They're social, as in, one identity, for everything, with everyone.
Back in the day, topical, isolated cliques were all we had. All the different mailing groups, IRC servers, phpBB boards, etc. were entirely independent of each other. Sure, I may have used the same handle on a bunch of them, but reputation - good or bad, pristine or smeared - did not propagate through the boundaries. Then social media happened, and we got used to having centralized platforms, with a single identity, for all aspects of life. That's the world of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Mastodon is just decentralizing Twitter on a protocol level - it's carrying over the expectation of single identity, of a topic-agnostic, all-encompassing platform.
> Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.
Because the Internet isn't a niche hobby anymore. It is life. There's no on-line vs. off-line anymore, they're both intertwined in almost everything we do daily. In other words, it's serious. Serious, as in, standing up to worst cases of dishonesty and hatred on some board may suddenly cost you your actual job, and your family a roof over their heads.
People have tried to create more sensible set of community rules on Mastodon. Last I checked, none of those attempts were successful - mostly because anyone who tries or is seen supporting the attempt, gets shot on sight^W^W^Waccused of being hateful racist bigot wanting to harbor literal nazis. There's an inherent asymmetry here; it's the same kind of play as "would someone think of the children", except the society doesn't have antibodies for the former just yet, like it has for the latter.
If you are against gay marriage there’s nothing at all toxic or hateful about that. Hell, I know gay people who were against gay marriage when the public debate was at its peak.
Where it’s toxic is if any time a gay person talks about wedding planning, posts a meme about the phrase “her wife” having good energy, or shares art of two guys at the altar you appear in the replies to get on your soapbox and start an argument about gay marriage. Nobody asked. Alternatively, just like HN, if your account is entirely flamebait about gay marriage nobody wants to see that and you’ll get the hammer.
Where it’s hate is when you express the that you’re against gay marriage because you don’t want to see gay people to be out in public, you think affection between two men is disgusting and unnatural, you call their sexual orientation a lifestyle choice, call gay people pedos, or otherwise pick on, doxx, belittle, or dehumanize gay people.
Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful. I express minority opinions constantly and have never once even been worried about the banhammer.
<< Like y’all, it isn’t that hard to expressly minority opinions without being toxic or hateful.
You can, but it becomes a game of using language that it is harder to pinpoint ( hence silliness like Xi banning 8 for infinity ). All the while majority opinion can be as hateful as is deemed necessary ( and no one complains because it is the majority ) creating yet another echo-chamber we so sorely need.
FWIW, this trend is now being challenged.
edit: I like calling spade a spade. You can dislike it all you want, but I am personally less and less willing to comply with other person's sensibilities[1].
[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763...
Which is why dirty commie liberals like me want to get a national hate speech law passed just like other countries have.
Canada (which passed in the 1989)
Ireland (passed in 1989)
New Zeland (passed in 1993)
Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, UK, Iceland, Denmark
I moved from the old country partly cuz of Lèse-majesté laws regarding ruling elite and clergy. Forgive me, but other countries having X type laws does not automatically constitute a valid argument to enact anything similar here. I now personally see it as an indirect way to circumvent original framework of this country having failed to do it directly.
In short, I am going to use a very, very old argument. If everyone jumped off of a bridge, would you do it too?
<< is more free when it's not stifled by hate.
Fascinating statement and I would love you to elaborate further, because to me it is contradictory.
Freedom of speech is called freedom of speech for a reason. It is not called freedom with asterisk to account for other person's perception of your communication. That is not freedom. It is the opposite of freedom. Frankly, what you are proposing inevitably results in an echo chamber. It is cool if that if it is what you want. It is not what I want.
You seem reasonable. I am willing to engage. Convince me 'free speech' is more free when it is restricted.
Both sides actually want free speech, the blue side just argues that speech is more free when it's not stifled by hate.
Is the most alarming doublethink I have seen in some time.
I don't really see it as doublethink. There's plenty of examples were rules make people more free. Our whole system of laws is based on that idea.
I can drive on public roads and get where I want to quickly and safely because we all follow traffic laws. I have greater freedom to travel because there are rules.
I can mostly (well during the day at least, give it up for being a woman) walk around freely and completely defenseless because of the laws about assault, murder, and theft.
Right now we're on a forum where good discussion can be had because the mods will drop the banhammer if you start posting hate. If you know that posting anything about a controversial topic or just being a person who's identity is controversial at the moment will bring out a tidal wave of green accounts hurling insults against, you likely wouldn't post. Would you feel comfortable existing in the public sphere as a trans person if when you tweet you about any topic you got a hundred replies telling you to kill yourself already? Would you want to hang out in an IRC channel where any time you talk someone says, "shut up woman, get back to the kitchen?"
If you believe your right to swing your arm ends where my face begins then whether you think it's right to restrict hate speech or not I think there should at least be some recognition that my position is at least logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.
You, an individual who does not want to see this can set ignore on that someone.
<< logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.
It is consistent if you accept the logic leap made to assume restriction on speech somehow enhances it. Personally, I am not convinced, because I think you confuse safety ( or mental comfort ) with freedom.
Maybe the word freedom has become too overloaded with meaning in English language. Maybe we should use something else:
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
Also, as a very practical measure, even if we do assume that hate speech actually does what it is supposed to do ( identify hate and remove hateful content ), do you really think it is smart to hide it from public view? And we did not even touch that 'hate speech' has recently come, not unlike nazis' to mean 'anything I don't like'.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-index?c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Brigade
I didn't use being against "gay marriage" as the example though. I used being against "gay people" as the example.
I've been banned from several subreddits for simply disagreeing with majority views, and pretty much every time it was in a neutral or respectful tone.
-----
PS: the entire concept of "toxic" seems "new age-y" and pseudo-religious. People refer to things being toxic as a substitute for "evil" and "taboo" - stuff that brings uncomfortable or negative associations, and in this manner they are embedding their projection of a civil religion onto others, which is an act of aggression in itself in a medium that is supposed not to have such rules.
Note that they say "toxic" and not just "rude" which would imply a certain common, traditional culture that most people would be expected to know and to some extent abide by. Toxic takes the place of the figure of "rudeness", "bad manners" and "heresy" but instead of based off a longstanding tradition, culture and religion, based of a newfangled atheist civil religion that a lot of people simply don't accept or don't want to play ball with. Their very presence and their discourse is seen as contaminating society, thus "toxic" - this is exactly equivalent to the moral worldview of a religious fanatic.
And those "heretics" are dealt with with medieval intolerance as there is no discussion to be had on these "values" from their point of view. You see in this people the fervour, hatred and emotional response you'd expect from an inquisitor who just witnessed wanton heresy or a taboo being broken, and that is exactly how more often than not mods behave in these platforms. Their interest in expanding their ideology and protecting themselves and others from heretics motivates them to put a lot of free labour in these endeavours, which is hard to compete with.
Trans person: *exists and makes a post*
"Honest debater": I don't think you should...
And they get banned. Not everything is or was an invitation to "debate".
Like, if you're only there to argue, nobody is going to want to hang out with you, sorry. Plenty of good debates happen, including people with differing political views, but you have to bring something besides hate to the table.
Of course, then those people claim they were "censored" for "being conservative" or whatever, but more than likely they were just banned because their only point in registering was to attack other people.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int...
People said exactly the same thing about open relays and spam filters some twenty years ago. A very famous Internet personality kept an open relay around for many years until there was literally no one left to federate with. I worked at a place who thought themselves obligated to keep around copies of all incoming messages for some period of time.
Who are you to decide between signal and noise, and so on, the discussion went. Turns out that's useless discourse. Because similar logic goes the other way around, who are you to decide what I keep?
I am not obliged to read email from all senders, and above all, I do not have to explain myself and I don't have to keep them stored as to not infringe their right of expression.
Every decentralized protocol with any real world traction allows every actor to filter traffic in a permissionless manner. You can call it righteousness or as amoral as you'd like, but until you can present an alternative system that's how it's going to work.
1. Spam is filtered, not censored. I can still see spam in my "Spam" folder if I want to. Mastodon doesn't merely filter "bad" content; it prevents you from seeing it even if you want to. It would be the equivalent of email actively deleting spam, and "spam" includes an email that suggests vaccines have side effects.
2. It's easy to see that it's not for the benefit of users. They could easily mark things as toxic (perhaps by category, or by who marked it as toxic), and let users filter out what they want. It's not about helping users. It's about controlling users.
3. "Spam" does not include contrary political viewpoints. There's a difference between a viagra ad. I don't want my uncle sending me political rants, but I certainly don't want google deciding I can't read them.
You can pick a different server if you don't like the censorship on the one you're on, that's the whole point
To the spammers it's all great content you should be getting. No one's deleting your messages on your own Mastodon server, they're just not copying it to their server, what's the problem?
Today, social media are all-encompassing, and Internet is now a critical part of normal life. Getting banned from one modern discussion board can easily get you banned from every other one too, and/or the fallout may impact "offline" aspects of your life. At best, it'll make a bunch if things inconvenient. At worst, it may destroy your relationships, your career, and push you into poverty.
Or, in other words: getting banned from a group in the 1990s or early 2000s was like getting a formal reprimand in your record at school. Today, it's starting to look more like getting a criminal record in the police database.
Who are these people? The protocol is decentralised, if you don't like it, spin your own instance! 5-10$ a month and you get more than enough for a few thousand people.
Just so we’re clear here, Florida wants to ban children from discussing their periods but also wants student athletes to report their periods, in case you were still unclear about how fucking dumb these people are.
I run a politics forum and the one rule is no name calling/insulting people (famous or a forum member), groups, ideology etc. It is incredibly civil. It turns out 1) that is the only rule you need to keep civility 2) it makes for a really boring place as most people just want to name call and not actually discuss politics.
To me there are basically two sides to this, and I'll outline them with two examples.
One is when people decide to have a debate on whether or not trans women should be allowed in women sports. In this case, banning people who have the "wrong" opinion is sort of dystopian. At least with the decentralized social network, you can't really ban them, just silence them on your particular server, so in a sense it's less dystopian than centralized social media. But I frankly agree with you on this, because it makes having discussions on certain subjects impossible, which isn't great.
The other example is when someone posts pictures of Warhammer models they have painted, and someone starts commenting on their gender, race, religion or whatever that is completely unrelated to the original post. Or when someone is being plain hateful in any context. In those cases, the way I see it is that the hateful person is breaking the social contract in which we all agree to be respectful to each other. Once you break that contract, then it no longer applies to you. This is the way the real world functions, and it's how the internet used to function before the ability to moderate assholes was centralized and sort of removed.
Specifically, for the "sin" of defending people who choose to also remain at Twitter because we still have some people we care about over there (in my case, lots of Black folks who haven't made the switch.)
And for that, I've been called, e.g. a Nazi.
Oh stop with the wo is me… you could always change your views. I mean who doesn’t like the progressive ideals of inclusion and fairness? (And no, inclusion doesn’t mean I have to accommodate racists or nazis or other alt-right trolls, it also means though, that the crazies on the left spewing hate shouldn’t apply either).
I'm not sure what your definition of 'town square' is: are you sure you're not looking for a town Coliseum?
Most people are not online to debate controversial topics with anonymous strangers.
the very format is useless for anything other than flame wars and bait, culture wars and the occasional announcement - for all of that, going to a smaller network is pointless, it just reduces your reach and your scope; if it's worth the effort, you maintain accounts side by side
of course the most important thing to keep "meaningful conversations" is to have not the biggest but "the adequate" group of people participating, and for this... well, it's entirely specific on the topics and demographics you are interested in, the platform is almost irrelevant in the technical sense, even in the sense of its general policies to some extent as people move from platform to platform in such chaotic fashion
Here’s the thing though: not all ideas are created equal. You want equal airtime for contrary views, but those contrary views are
1. less popular statistically
2. against the interests of the working class
The alternative worldview to progressivism is basically pro-capital, anti-minority, anti-equality nonsense.
You’re unhappy that progressives hurl insults at regressives, but it should be noted that they are not falling into the trap of the paradox of tolerance.
When one breaks the social contract, they’re no longer under the protections of that contract, and that’s what happens when the regressive ideology sends hate toward the poor, women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and other similarly disenfranchised groups.
The alternative to progressive taxation is regressive taxation. The alternative to equal rights is unequal rights. The alternative to workers’ rights are corporations’ rights. The alternative to freedom of religion is theocracy. The alternative to body autonomy is control by others. The alternative to the scientific method is assumption and ignorance. The alternative to environmental protection is environmental destruction. These contrasting ideologies are not of equal value, objectively.
In other words, if I make a statement like “people shouldn’t own slaves” there is no contrary view that should be entertained.
You want someone to tolerate the intolerance of your desired contrary worldview, but again, you should know that it’s not hypocritical for the tolerant and accepting people to not accept your views.
The real problem, and where Mastodon has been tested numerous times on and failed, is scaling to larger groups. When people aren't under direct social pressure at all times to play nice and fair. There just aren't enough tools available to counteract this on Mastodon, most places just rely on shared blocklists. There are very good reasons why shadow banning became a thing, but that's a lesson to be learned down the line.
For now, the fact that Mastodon in general isn't all that widely used is its strongest asset. Everything else stems from this but will not last long.
Both causes are entirely external to the Fediverse, and I haven't seen groups of "bad people" having to be cut off by blacklisting, so I'm not sure if I'm convinced that the list is necessary or effective.
On a smaller instance, it's much easier for a mod to nip bad behavior in the bud—and less politically fraught, because the moderation decision doesn't have worldwide policy implications. It's the difference between being kicked out of a local coffeeshop vs arrested in the town square.
The real test is – can your community handle an influx of a billion of the worst users on the internet? People baiting for flame wars, bots, scammers, pedophiles. They are all out there, and will show up the second your service has a whiff of popularity.
I find it curious and ironic that there are a number of recommended block lists of Mastodon instances with a "free speech" being a category under which many instances are blocked.
I'm all for free-association and eliminating those with whom you disagree but it would be a mistake to credit ActivityPub (of which Mastodon is merely ONE server type) with creating a non-toxic environment without noticing how that happened.
In other words, you've built yourself a tiny echo chamber. The only way you have "zero toxicity" is that the group is exceedingly small or you force group-think.
> (3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy.
That's not a good thing. It means that the german IT mag has no readers.
Search is hot garbage, can't find anything useful, or what people are actually talking about, not that Twitters search is great by any measure.
Missing content when visiting external content, cuz why would anyone ever want to see or search old content.
Also most clients I have seen show replies in a really stupid way, you have to actively click to see what the person is replying to, its not visible in the timeline.
Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land.
In general I have been spending more time on hacker news and youtube than Twitter and fediverse, they aren't like pre-elon twitter.
> Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land.
"Outside of the super-active communities using Mastodon everyday, it is a ghostland."
Yes. From finding things to searching archives etc.
Tim Bray has a good post on the topic: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-... (you can skip to the very last section if you don't want to read it all)
I used Twitter search constantly.
Search is a principal use case. It's not a small extra feature.
Edit: Just checked with a new checkout and it's working with my GTS instance. Now to figure out how to make it work with Akkoma...
How can I read with it for example
https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11005195786562981...
?
Not a users, but accounts.
45% of 20 people that took part in my poll[0] has 2..4 accounts on various Mastodon servers (I has 3 accounts).
Directionally, it's good news. More self-selecting into using Mastodon, hopefully for non-nefarious purposes (advertising, influencing, blowhard-ing), will lead to more conversations.
(The fact that most servers have a fairly low character limit for posts, but allow chaining posts together to make threads is another problem, inherited from Twitter. It's harder to write; it's harder to read. It's harder to read even if all the posts in a chain federate to your server, which they may not. Individual posts in the middle of a chain may surface on the timeline out of context and make no sense. The entire structure is ridiculous, irritating, and pointlessly difficult to use.)
It optimizes for something I'm sure. Maybe "conversation volume"
It's popular.
A week later, someone else helpfully provided the same answer, because the previous answer had not federated to his server. It's not a matter of which app you use: conversations will silently be missing bits.
Let's see the data for active users, not just registrations.
Are you implying this isn't possible with Mastodon/ActivityPub?
This is one of the reasons I think the nostr protocol is a better way of building a decentralized + censorship resistant social network.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
But if you want to hang out for free on someone else's dime, you have to play by their rules.
And while gotosocial is still a multitier server (it resembles mastodon in much), there's nothing fundamental stopping the development of an even simpler rust/go/x activitypub server that acts for one actor only - a single-user server, which could be far, far simpler and leaner even.
While it currently indeed is rather impractical and even unattainable to run your own instance, it's by no means impossible.
The protocol has no opinion on it¹. ActivityPub is more complex than nostr (I've built software for both) but not fundamentally different. Neither nostr nor activityPub have fundamental properties that make it possible or impossible to be fully P2P or fully centralized.
Nostr can easily become centralized. AP too. But ActivityPub can operate in a P2P nature - where every user == a server just as well as nostr can.
Practically, Mastodon is the default for AP, and thus dictates the use and shape. But I run my own gotosocial AP server, which is both simple, lean and clean. So already it's practically possible to run an AP server on tiny hardware with hardly any maintenance overhead.
¹EDIT: AP just describes an "inbox/outbox" with a PUB-SUB mechanism over HTTP. HTTP requires some discovery (dns), but that does not require fixed servers/domains. One could theoretically have an "inbox" (http-endpoint) on their mobile phone, bypassing the need for a server alltogether.
Nostr is much simpler, it has that going for it, certainly! But when people say that nostr is "p2p" and AP isn't, that only describes the current state, not their fundamentals.
A perfect social network experience IMHO.
Browsing the commonly blacklisted Mastodon instances has given me more than enough reason to not want to moderate that crap. From AI generated child porn to calls for various genocides, there's plenty of disgusting material posted online that I'm not willing to sift through. When a server's front page is full of swastikas (and not as the religious, peaceful symbol they once were) then I'm not going to vet every single account on there; the people who flock to such servers are of no interest to me.
My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech.
I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to.
However, your freedom of speech does not give you any freedom of consequences, and if others don't want to hear what you have to say they're as free to ignore and block you or your server as you are to speak your mind. This includes some incredibly toxic behaviour from popular "safe" Mastodon servers as well.
Well, they are the loud and annoying ones but it's easy to miss others for the noise the unreasonable people are causing
> I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to.
The moderation of instance feed is just fine and required, that's how instance gets its own identity.
What I disagree with is mods having rights to block what people can subscribe to. That forces making own instances just not to be on whim on the admins's political views which is far too high barrier to entry for most.
There is also lack of any identity transfer, if server goes to shit you can move out sure, but none of your subscribers will automatically follow. I'd like something like "here is my DNS entry with public key, this redirects to whichever current server I'm on" so you don't need to host your own instance if you just want to have alias that's not tied to, again, admin's whims.
This is why server selection is part of Mastodon. It's also why Mastodon servers either fall in the category of "heavily moderated" or "free for all shouting match that ends up blacklisted everywhere": servers where moderators don't bother will attract the worst people and end up being too toxic for moderated servers to deal with. Most servers are run as volunteer projects.
As for moving accounts: when you move servers, your followers will actually follow your account. It takes a while for everyone's accounts to receive the redirects, but followers are transferred. You do lose old posts, though.
Nostr seems to use the model you're describing. Your digital identity on there is independent from any kind of instance. You (or your relay of choice) is also supposed to do all the moderation necessary. Nostr also allows verification based on your domain, for better or worse.
I meant it in "moderators control what shows to people but if you subscribe to someone on the other server you still get their updates" way. Then for the rest it could be AND kind of deal, if the server-blocked user you're answering is blocked they don't see it unless they also subscribed to them.
Does that not equate to all forms of spam, harassment, flooding, etc. having to be dealt with on an individual basis by every user?
If I dislike how Twitter or Facebook is being run, my choices are to suck it up or to leave the entire network.
If I dislike how a Mastodon instance is run, I can move to another instance and keep my relationships from my old account.
I mean if this is a dealbreaker for you why are you on HN? HN has opinionated moderation. That's part of the deal of being here.
The whole point of Mastodon is unbundling this concept of 'social media' as an opaque entity of some kind. You already have full control with Mastodon. Don't like how your instance is doing moderation? Start your own instance and set your own rules.
This has the downside of missing interactivity and incomplete reaction chains, but as someone who's usually not interested in either it's been good enough for me to remove Twitter from my pinned tabs.
Anecdotally, I was 5 times as active on twitter as I am on Mastodon.
Now I am not on twitter at all.
So I'm more active on Mastodon than on twitter right now, but not super active.
If you think that's a victory for twitter, fair enough. It got so much critical mass that it's hard to replicate off of Twitter. But as weeks keep passing by without me going back to twitter, I think that's a win for Mastodon.
Meanwhile, even though my Twitter feed is a shell of what it once was, I wind up there several times a day. And it's not "because of the algorithm", I have been using the algorithm-free feed for years now.
Which one?
And once you get into like mobile client apps, your options absolutely explode.
I hope this situation improves once we finish hiring a product designer. Personally I don't think the web client is as bad as some people make it sound, but I know it can be improved. In the interim you can try the 3rd party web client Elk [1], some people seem to really like it.
[1]: https://elk.zone
If someone would just make a 1:1 clone of Discord and slap it on Matrix, it'd be perfect. The underlying technology is fine, the interfaces are the clunky ones.
Mastodon has a bit of the same, just following someone from another instance is like 6 steps. Basically you need to copy their URL, go to your own instance, search for them using the same URL and click follow if it's the only search result. Compared to Twitter's one click that's a good 500% increase in complexity.
You have users, subreddits (servers), and mods.
Except everything is federated, so you also have the overhead of choosing your server or making a ton of alt accounts. Flashback to old MMO times.
You say you have the 'overhead of choosing your server', but then you have a similar overhead with every post on Reddit—choosing which subreddit to post it on. You absolutely don't have to make a ton of alt accounts, that's sort of the point of being federated. You create your account on a server of your choosing (even one you own/manage), and then you can follow anyone on any server (even those not using Mastodon, provided they're using an ActivityPub compatible server, such as Pixelfed which is similar to Instagram).
Mastodon encourages short form microblogging with individuals who know each other interacting on all sorts of different topics.
Reddit encourages link sharing or longer form posts with communities of like-minded pseudonymous users.
Both platforms can be used for both use cases though.
Anyhow, it's more "federated Twitter" than anything else. Particularly early twitter before the quote-tweets, algorithmic feed, and other modern features.
I’ve been very surprised how many people and organisations are on the fediverse.
Twitter currently has ~400M users, 50% of them DAUs [1]
[1] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. ~ Nelson MandelaNobody outside Twitter knows the current amount of DAUs. Whichever number you find post Q3 last year is a pure guess.
Edit: seems like they aren’t. So probably there are more users and the 10m have been passed long ago
Which would that be? Undesirable by whom? Who gets to decide whether an instance is "undesirable"? I'd think that what is undesirable to one is the bee's knees to the other. Who is to be the arbiter of desirability? In a truly distributed system the answer would be 'nobody - everybody'. Are you talking about instances which are blocked in the source code of Mastodon? Blocked in some of the clients? In that case the answer is 'those who created those blocks'. Are they to be the arbiters then?
Probably those sites that "zero toxicity" people declared toxic and mandated to exclude from the fediverse where everyone is welcome. I remember this discussion a while ago and it was one of the main reasons I lost my interest in Mastoson (second being I see no reason to try to fit my thoughts into the format of one yell - I prefer more deliberate discourse) - it felt like they are too much concerned with exclusion rather than inclusion. There are tools to ensure you don't fail to block something that all right thinking people are blocking: https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate
But something seems off. "users" key on that .json only adds up to 7816421, not 10M. There has to be either a data error, or couple elephants in the room totaling at 2.2M, or the long tail that isn't loading for me.
Widely blocked instances: these are part of these stats.
Instances which intentionally completely defederate (Gab and Truth Social, mostly): these are not.
And has such an analysis been done to produce the numbers this account is reporting?
Can Twitter even manage that, given the well known issues with bots?
The bot is open source, it crawls the list at https://instances.social and checks on each instance how many users they have and how many toots (statuses) they have.
But humans are nice, generally speaking... it should work as an indication that there are most likely more than few millions who've signed up at at least one of these instances.
>We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that, we will kick you out of our space. We have no patience for bigotry, and we see no reason whatsoever to tolerate having it anywhere near us. Fuck terfs and fuck nazis.
>we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism)
I'd honestly rather stay away from people who claim they are "antifascist organization" but at the same time have zero understanding what does "nazism" or "fascism" actually means. Nor do they have any kind of FAQ on how they are going to determine who is what and how should I know if somebody I follow on fediverse or github is one of those things.
Basically I wouldn’t worry about a stance like that, because either it will never apply to me or if it does, I can take it as a fairly low-stakes learning opportunity! (It’s not like I’m losing my job, getting divorced, etc. from this!)
(I would consider it a similar hardline stance to, idk, “we do not work with human traffickers, if we think you’re pro human trafficking we’ll avoid you” or “we do not work with serial killers, if we think you’re pro serial killer we’ll avoid you”. Like I know I’m neither of those things, and if people think I am, holy shit!! I need to fix that asap!!)
But thtat's the thing. On fediverse nobody informs you (unless you have an argument with someone). Your instances just gets banned, possibly by multiple instances\relays and that's it.
Not to mention that they are putting everything into one basket: transphobe, racist, fascist even capitalists are bad. Everyone is bad are you are also bad if you have any connection to those.
>(It’s not like I’m losing my job, getting divorced, etc. from this!)
Yes, you just lose connection to a people you were previously following. Even if they are okay with whatever your stance is.
> Like I know I’m neither of those things, and if people think I am, holy shit!! I need to fix that asap!
No, you should not. Otherwise you will spend your whole life fixing problems that do not exist.
Some idiots who can't even take their time and learn what does the word "fascism" is are telling you you are a fascist while you are not? Fuck them. They need some help, not you. (Unless of course you are staring to hear the same thing from different people including those who actually know you. In that case you probably should question some things)
Like I said before I would rather learn it off a github pr than my boss firing me or my partner divorcing me or my child enstranging.
which server?
there are multiple server-side platforms too, incl. some forks, so if mastodon.social is not for you – look around for better lighter alternatives (as well for self-hosting)
start around here: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications
honestly, if github and HN suffice for all your social needs, you probably dont need anything else.
microblogging is not for everyone. but for others, since twitter is just no longer viable, people have been migrating to something that can't be just bought out by yet another rich asshole. plus privacy, extended control over your own data, and all that other nerd shit no one cares about.
Come on, especially on hacker news, you are a tech person, surely you can find out how the other 10 million people created an account. If anything it was in your spam.
Broadly, I think the best use of Mastodon IS to be a Twitter competitor; a noisy town square.
What I have seen is -- the disagreeable people on Twitter want to publically fight. They want to push their bad ideas and have everyone listen to them, and thus are willing to get into it.
The disagreeable people on Mastodon want to silence others. They're more block happy and don't want to be questioned at all.
That's why, presently, I prefer the disagreeable people over at Twitter; they're actually using the platform better (and you can possibly change their minds)
I do hope this changes.
Mastodon offers a simple solution to stay out of the text wars, one that Twitter wouldn't dare offer: "turn off reblogs".
Half the people I follow retweet/boost things I find irrelevant (personally). I can turn that off on Mastodon to reduce the noise. I can't on Twitter because then I might spend less time on the app, robbing them on precious ad revenue.
In my opinion, Twitter was (and is) instrumental in effectively highlighting certain kinds of important, unrecognized, "news," e.g. police brutality.
I'm glad Mastodon folk are considering effective ways to reintroduce it.
[0] based on a graph before these huge spikes https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11003025216596297...
I checked out Mastodon for an hour or so, saw less engagement than Twitter, more of an echo chamber, and a generally inferior user experience. Now I don't actively use it.
It's sad in some ways, because I think centralised Big Tech (as a general concept) is undesirable. But to break the network effect, alternatives have to be much better.
Also I'm concerned about Mastodon shared, curated blocklists. People who express unconventional/inconvenient viewpoints will not be safe on a decentralised network that has anti-free-speech, groupthink authoritarian mechanisms.
(Yes, I know I wouldn't be forced to use a shared blocklist on my own Mastodon instance - but the problem is that my instance would be vulnerable to the whims of those who curate shared blocklists).
BTW Nostrica (the first ever Nostr conference) is going on right now:
Jabber was born in 1998, in a world where there was a handful of centralised desktop instant messaging apps that didn't interoperate at all - ICQ and AIM dominated, but there were plenty of others around too. Most of us ran multiple apps at once, or tried to get clients that could connect to multiple services, but this was complicated by proprietary and frequently changing protocols.
A decentralised, federated, and open protocol that let users connect to all other users was a great idea… for users. But it didn't do anything for the behemoths rapidly gaining users in their proprietary centralised systems, and it didn't do anything for ISPs who'd just have to run, and support, another service. Early clients and servers weren't as straightforward as downloading a desktop program from Tucows and running it, and in the space of technically savvy people running a system built on open standards there was already a well established (and heavily fractured!) IRC.
XMPP's standardisation in the IETF didn't really help it. While the IETF isn't quite as slow as more traditional standards bodies it's definitely nowhere near as fast as centralised companies with only one client implementation to care about. As the war for eyeballs heated up, instant messaging apps rapidly added features like sharing images (crazy! over _dial-up_?) or emojis (before they were called emojis!) and XMPP simply did not keep up.
Nevertheless, XMPP was the basis of iChat (or at least, some versions of it) until iChat was killed in 2011, and the basis of Google Talk until that was killed in 2013. It wasn't too uncommon for corporate internal chat platforms to be using XMPP in one form or another - Cisco still have a product today called Cisco Jabber. But the main thing all of these systems had in common was they absolutely sucked at federating with each other. Theoretically Google Talk supported it, but your corporate system probably didn't. iChat notionally might've but as far as I recall it had so many proprietary extensions and missing standard features that it just wasn't feasible to federate. XMPP did pretty well for a stretch being the underlying protocol for a bunch of proprietary, centralised, and siloed chat systems.
In the end mobile phones killed instant messaging platforms. In the 90s most of us didn't have phones, but at the start of the century that rapidly changed and suddenly we all had the same instant messaging platform right in our hands: SMS. Sure, it was never built for heavy use, and mobile companies often charged per message (50c per text in Australia in the early 2000s), but it was _there_ and everyone was on it, and in just a few years desktop instant messaging died off. XMPP never had a chance.
Smartphones, of course, re-introduced the hot mess of a dozen competing instant messaging platforms with different parts of your social network on different ones, all centralised, all proprietary.
In comparison to Twitter (Since Mastodon zealots often pitch it as a 'Twitter alternative' somehow) 7 years after it launched, it had well over 250M+ total users with well over 150M daily actives. [0] Even Nostr has 6M total users in less than 7 years. [1] Either way, total registered number of users tells us nothing about the usage of the network.
Yet we have daily actives much less than 1.5M with a large drop in users this year since they don't stick around on Mastodon. [2] It only tells us that there are very loud crickets screaming about migrating to Mastodon which accounted for less than 1% of Twitter's total number of users. (And most of them never stuck around)
7 years is not early days with this. Matrix launched in 2014 and reached 10M in less than 5 years and multiplied by up to 8x to 80M in less than 4 years [3] and it is highly competitive against Signal. There is no excuses for such sluggish user numbers for Mastodon with even less monthly active users.
Thus, I think we have given Mastodon enough time and it is clear that it hasn't taken off. Perhaps it is time to stop pretending about users caring about signing up to a over-engineered discord forum promoting pseudo-federation.
[0] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
[1] https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
Anecdotally, I've enjoyed Twitter a lot more since his takeover. They've relaxed their rules and unbanned a lot of people who I'd missed seeing on the platform. Musk does seem to be at least partially keeping his promise of improving the free speech aspect of the site.
Hello brand new account, do you work for Twitter? If not, how do you know?
In another comment you ask to see Mastodon's active user count. Where's Twitter's? Personally I'd love to see a line chart of Twitter's DAU for the past six months. Like way more than I'm interested in Mastodon's.
I'm sure you know those previous years of operation does certainly count. Mastodon launched in 2016 (7 years ago). Not in November 2022.
What I can see, it grew a lot in the last 6 months and if a user's timeline is all empty then it's because the user missed to actively grow their network which is a bit annoying (search and hand-pick) but all in all is absolutely worth the time.
I personally don't care about "sports Twitter" or "political Twitter" or "weird Twitter", etc. They can all stay on Twitter as far I'm concerned. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My own opinion is that Twitter itself was much better in the early days, before all of the celebrities invaded.
It is exactly this sick mindset of profit-making that made Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Instagram, ... what they are today: dopamine machines giving 10s doses to the users to feed the datasets and make profits. It does not serve the user. It is not a model to follow, but one to reject wholly and fully.
Can mastodon detect porn automatically and hide it?
Anybody can build a social network today, the most difficult task is and always will be moderation.
Porn is not detected automatically, but most instances require you to put it behind a content warning. Then it will not be shown automatically, you have to click to view it.
This feels like a solution looking for a problem. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that this concept will eventually die.
Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether.
There were plenty social media not owned by Zuckerberg or Musk networks already
>Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether.
You mean like IRC?
ex: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amastodon.social+hacke...
The search within the app is mostly not working and crap, unless you use hashtags (and the toots were created with hashtags)
But there still has to be infrastructure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a new social network could be built on the Mastodon foundation. There would already be users and there would be an exit strategy for power users if the new network fails. Right now, it's not worth investing time in a new network because the social graph doesn't survive the end of the network. With Mastodon, it would be easy to migrate to a new service.
In fact, everyone here complaining about how the platform won't put up with their edgy anti-woke shenanigans should just stay away. You're all too smart and cool for such a lame place.