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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

61–70 of 472 posts

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#61
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To not support it's new owner

We know many things about Musk because he's a well known public figure which has attracted the attention of plenty of investigative journalists. But what do you know about the owners of the Mastodon instance you registered your account with? Are they accountable? Are they sensible? Are they competent? Do they even have a real identity?

They are at least less powerful and resourceful and you can simply switch your instance or make your own.

None of this is true for Twitter.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#63

I don't see a valid reason to leave Twitter in his post. IMO laying off the accessibility team isn't a reason to leave. But, each to his own opinion. The layoffs will have effect, but it doesn't have to be a bad one. Once they get leaner, they might have a clearer vison and know where to expand.

If Musk wants twitter to be the town square for the world, that town square needs to be accessible for all. Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with…

You don’t need a whole accessibility team for a product to be accessible. It can be handled by raising the awareness of other product teams plus some central auditing, for example (Twitter after all is a pretty basic product, UX wise).

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#64

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

For Mastodon to 'work' in a way I'd enjoy, it would need a culture that it just does not have, and that has never emerged from any microblogging platform. The Fediverse as a whole is filled with enraged culture warriors, going out of their own way to be upset and exclude others. I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment wh…

> I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion.

I'm pretty sure that this qualifies as an "island" - one that you would need pretty harsh moderation to maintain too, not unlike HN itself. And of course you'd likely want to defederate from the largest instances, to get away from their toxic attitudes.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#65
post #49

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

No post body was provided.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#67
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.

people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently

Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#68
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.

People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those. But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is somethin…

I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#70

I liked Mastodon when it first came out. But nowadays it’s seems to be more like a Left wing version of Gettr. Wouldn’t use either.

[flagged]

Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.
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