> co-ordinated instance-level bans, rouge moderators
I think that’s another big issue with Mastodon - poor accountability.
I know some are going to view “accountability” as an oxymoron when it comes to Musk-owned Twitter. But, while Musk positions himself as a maverick who couldn’t care less about what the media thinks (and the “mainstream” media especially), it seems likely that their negative feedback played a significant role in the reversal of some of his dumber decisions. His whole “I don’t care what the media thinks” routine resembles the poop emoji with which he responds to their inquiries-such a juvenile response is a sign he really does care about what they say, even if only to a certain degree-if he completely didn’t care, he’d just ignore them entirely, or even have some intern respond promptly with inane non-committal unquotable PR blather
So yeah, the media provides some accountability for Twitter, however imperfect-even under Musk. By contrast, the media provides very little accountability for Mastodon-it is very fringe, the average person has never heard of it, why would they pay much attention to it? And its decentralised nature makes accountability by the media potentially even harder, since there’s no Musk to ultimately hold account, just an opaque collective of obscure individuals who wield power behind closed doors
Another dimension of accountability is regulatory-for better or worse, social media is an increasing focus of regulatory attention worldwide, and you can guarantee Twitter is near the top of the list. Musk may try to dodge them, but he can only dodge so much, and in many cases (especially those regulatory requests which don’t appear to be associated with his political opponents) he may just comply from the start. By contrast, most regulators are going to ignore Mastodon, because it is too small to merit their attention, and its decentralised nature makes it much harder to regulate.
Of course “if you are unfairly banned on one instance you can always move to another”-but that’s at the minimum a major inconvenience, and what about the problem of cross-instance bans? I know they are claimed to be only against the far-right; but even if that’s true, what’s to stop “ban the far-right” from evolving into “ban the moderate right” and then eventually even “ban lefties who deviate too much from the party line”? Yes, that’s a slippery slope argument-but accountability mechanisms play a big role in stopping people slipping too far down life’s many slopes
If you trust the average Mastodon administrator is on roughly the same page as you, maybe you don’t have much to worry about; if you lack that confidence, is it still worth investing your time in it? With Twitter, even if you don’t trust Musk to do the right thing, at least you know there are real (however imperfect) mechanisms to hold him to account. The same mechanisms for Mastodon are arguably a lot weaker