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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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81–90 of 289 posts

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

#81
Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864.

Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.

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

#82
Eugen is playing almost all roles singlehandedly and last said he was making around 35k a year. "I do software development, devops, accounting, customer support, project management, product design, public relations, and moderation for 36K per year..."

please help fund the project to ensure further stability.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670

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

#83
Is there any space nowadays for tech that is essentially free of politicized rhetoric? I really don't care about democracy or decentralization on my social media platform. When I first discovered Tumblr, MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, AIM, and Twitter I didn't care about any of their techno-political underpinnings.

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

#84

Who do Mastodon's boosters believe is going to be installing and running Mastodon servers?

I am a scientist and I've setup a mastodon instance on my own server, with remote file hosting on S3. It was pretty painless and in a few days 200 non tech-savvy people have joined and started contributed. Some migrating from twitter, some joining social media for the first time.

It is great.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing even remotely objectionable there? It's no secret that twitter has been a money-losing toxic cesspit for years. Making the moderation fair and transparent will go miles all on its own.

How was the moderation unfair?

Allowed to tweet things that are objectively against the rules if they politically lean a certain way.

Outsized attention given to harmless shitposting at Hollywood actors while Iranian terrorists are allowed to post propaganda unchecked despite reports.

Selective application of rules against things like "hacked content" used against certain politicians and organizations with certain political leanings but not others (in one case leading to the censorship of a .gov domain even over direct messages).

Verification badges issued to nobody journalists and sometimes for monetary compensation in contravention of their stated policy.

The existence of shadow banning which was lied about in Congress before leaked screenshots of the backend tools showed that multiple kinds of shadow bans exist.

Manual manipulation of the ostensibly algorithmic trending list.

It is hard for me to even imagine a way in which Twitter's moderation could possibly be any less fair or transparent.

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

#86

I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.

All the better; if the cool people can’t adopt a social network due its quirky names they’re not the kind of people I want I my timeline anyway.

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

#87
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finally joined yesterday to a niche (academic) community that is moving from Twitter. 18k migrants in the 30 hours since it opened up with virtually linear growth. I can search other similar niche communities and they are seeing similar growth. It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.

What's the community of academics? I haven't joined Twitter specifically because I think it's a horrible medium for communicating science or meeting with academics. Can you point me there?

Just from a quick look, no claim to completeness, intentionally including also small ones:

https://fediscience.org/

https://vis.social/

https://mstdn.science/

https://astrodon.social/

https://mapstodon.space/

currently not taking signups:

https://scholar.social/

https://scicomm.xyz/

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

#88
post #41
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…

Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform k…

The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US today as a result.

The press in the US had unmoderated free speech for over a century until the FCC was established, and print publishing still does. That's why the New York Times bought the first Gatling guns: they were inciting violence (specifically, the Civil War) and justifiably feared that rioters would try to lynch them. Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. Freenet still does.

It's not a bullshit idea. Just an unpopular one.

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

#90
Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect.

I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber.

We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation.

This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are uncomfortable and that’s ok. It should be.

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