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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#61

Post by throwawayacc4 »

twmiller wrote: post #51
woah wrote: post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there." My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can…

My observation is that the modern leftt wing social media user only thrives when there are 'conservative Nazis' around that they can piss off. Hence Lemmy, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the left wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to virtue signal over.

We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon is bringing ideological equality to the platform. For leftists/liberals, this equality feels like oppression after years of dominance and privilege on Twitter.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#62

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong ? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "e…

I think you're just putting way too much thought into it: Any server will do just fine (you can always move later, but only if you feel really attached to a given community), and any well-established server really just blocks servers full of Nazis and anime child porn.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#63

Post by bergenty »

Robotbeat wrote: post #19
metadat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources. p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!

That actually seems… pretty reasonable and probably a net good? Why are people so mad about this? The Twitter status quo seems incredibly toxic.

There’s a lot of incredibly racist commentary now. The toxicity is at a whole other level at this point.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#64

Post by zaik »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong ? - and the choice overload makes me just give up. And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "e…

You should join a server you think has a reasonable approach to moderating other servers. On any other service the administrator can also prevent you from seeing posts, this is not specific to Mastodon at all. For private messaging other standards exist, for example XMPP+OMEMO.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#65

Post by twmiller »

throwawayacc4 wrote: post #61
twmiller wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there." My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can…

My observation is that the modern leftt wing social media user only thrives when there are 'conservative Nazis' around that they can piss off. Hence Lemmy, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the left wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to virtue signal over. We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon i…

I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can virtue signal to people inside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) virtue signaling going on in the fediverse, for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the left getting the same sort of kicks out of pissing people off that people on the right seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#66

Post by pera »

coffeefirst wrote: post #43

In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out! In practice it's still a desert. The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there…

> In practice it's still a desert.

That's not true anymore: I am currently following over 100 academics and scientists who decided to migrate over the past week, they are very active and as a result my timeline is much more interesting and engaging than Twitter.

I have never seen such a big exodus in my 25+ years online, this is historic.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#67

Post by ocdtrekkie »

andai wrote: post #39
amelius wrote: post #4

Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?

Yeah, that's the point. Mastodon was created because its developers thought Twitter didn't have enough censorship. I don't mean to trivialize their achievement, but I thought that was pretty funny.

The thing is, Mastodon isn't adding censorship: Anyone has numerous servers to choose from that will let them say whatever they want, but other people have the choice to go to servers which don't federate with the other one.

Free speech is the right to speak, not the right to force everyone to listen. The federation model codifies this.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#70

Post by Robotbeat »

bergenty wrote: post #63
Robotbeat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems… pretty reasonable and probably a net good? Why are people so mad about this? The Twitter status quo seems incredibly toxic.

There’s a lot of incredibly racist commentary now. The toxicity is at a whole other level at this point.

The content moderation policy hasn’t changed. I mean, I guess some far right folk think Elon’s their man. They’re sorely mistaken (as can be seen by the outrage/despair of Nazis when Elon said he’s talking with ADL representatives).
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