Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

> How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary.

I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out.

Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity

mastodon.technology? Been on it for past couple of weeks; feels quite ok so far.

For the most part it's tech folks talking about tech, though the federated timeline is naturally more diverse. If a bunch of HNers join up, even more so. It is what you make of it, you shape the local culture as much as anyone else.

Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.

I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.

Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.

These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.

Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)

This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.