Mastodon really is crumbling — and it will only get worse

I am 100% serious with the title, despite the appearance of click-bait. Mastodon has a serious structural rot that is only worsening as time gets on. I think this is for a few reasons which I will outline below.

Ironically, I don’t feel safe posting this directly to the fediverse because of the very forces I’m about to describe. I’m not worried about the cancel crew, I just don’t want to deal with hostile interactions right now. I might link to this post but it’s less likely to get hate mail I suspect if I do it that way rather than write this all up in a giant thread on fedi.

What I am presenting is largely anecdotal opinion, although it has been gathered from countless others (I’m not going to name any names, they deserve better than harassment or people trying to change their views and in the process merely reinforcing them).

Background on myself

I’ve been on Mastodon since April 2017. I was on “fedi” (well, the ostatus fediverse) before that, on long-gone instances I forgot the name of. I was on Mastodon in the very early days of its development, when content warnings were brand new, blocking/silencing was seriously broken, and fedi was just getting exciting due to press coverage. Before this, I was on IRC since 2005 and an IRC operator on a small network (it’s not glamorous, trust me).

The problem

Fedi has a problem as the title says: it’s crumbling. It’s a lot less vibrant than when I joined up, even back when GNUSocial roamed the earth (it was a pile of shit trying to imitate Twitter and mostly filled with people banned from Twitter for GamerGate and going too far, even for Twitter’s lax standards of the day).

It actually baffles me why so much of the Mastodon userbase can be traced back to the Tumblr/Twitter leftist crowd, when Fedi’s beginnings were on a network largely consisting of ultra-right people thrown off Twitter. I can only speculate, but I suspect the main reasons are they believed they would be safer (which is a joke), and many themselves (or their friends at least) were banned from those platforms for similarly shitty behaviour.

But it’s a mistake to believe that Fedi is safer at all. In fact, in many ways, it’s worse.

Fedi is the least safe place around

The thing about Fedi is that due to its nature, it has a low bar to entry. Anyone can make an instance at any time for not a whole lot of money. There are tons of far-right instances littering the place, and few admins can truly keep up (the worst-kept secret amongst Mastodon admins I would say). Most of the userbase just blocks them on an ad-hoc basis and moves on (or doesn’t notice them), but the fact that the Nazis haven’t really taken over the place is only by their mere incompetence.

To illustrate the problem, I will tell you about this: the largest instance on the Fediverse.

Oh, no, not mastodon.social. They’re big, but not as big as the largest. The largest is Pawoo, with around a million users last I checked. It’s owned by Pixiv, a Japanese company (think Japanese DeviantArt). And if Fedi knew even a rudimentary level of Japanese (this would require widespread non-Western cultural awareness they do not possess), they wouldn’t have joined in the first place. Japanese nationalism is everywhere on Pawoo, and the admins largely don’t care (granted: I don’t pay much attention to it and filtered it a long time ago, this may not be the case any longer). There is a certain irony I love about the largest Fedi instance being a commercial entity, despite the English speakers of the Fediverse largely eschewing corporations and brands. They also allow loli and (fictional) artwork of children, which is not banned in Japan but is a grey area in the US as advised by legal counsel for IF (I personally don’t want to test it, if you want to, have fun, leave me out of it).

Pawoo mostly sits there, under the radar, because they don’t speak English, and many instances blocked them a long time ago (I remember the great Pawoo discourse of 2017). There are tons and tons of other instances that most people don’t even know about that spew things that are far worse. We at mst3k actually have a pretty big list, and it ain’t even close to how many are actually out there. I just block them as I see them. Granted, many of those instances are long-gone, but there are many more to replace them.

The faux-woke crowd is making fedi less safe

I know this one is going to get me flamed and called racist or whatever the fuck, but so be it.

Now, full disclosure: I am partially Romani, Native American, but mostly (and certainly culturally raised) white, but I’ve listened to what other PoC have to say on this matter.

Fedi has a really bad problem: race-based trolling. There is a huge contingent on Fedi that is taking advantage of white guilt to troll the ever-loving fuck out of people.

I know this sounds like an amusing thing and is very much a “so what, they’re white” moment. But I assure you, it’s anything but funny, and it’s causing minorities to be shed from Fedi.

Let me give a specific example: in mid-2020, a Jewish non-binary person was harassed by a member of one of the instances that host many of these trolls. People were still reluctant to do the right thing and block the instance, because they didn’t want to be called racist. The thing is, you can be a minority and still be a fucking dickhead, and you can also still be racist (without even realising it!) and act in bigoted ways against other minorities (go look up the Cherokee freedmen controversy for a really, really, really bad look into how far this can go). But nothing about your skin colour or ethnicity says “I can troll whoever I want.” Anyone who tells you otherwise is a troll and you should block and report them. If their admin won’t do anything, remove them.

The thing is, these kinds of games cheapen real racial justice. These people are less interested in racial justice for all and more interested in getting a rise out of people. And people are too afraid to stand up to it. This is a cancer silently driving people back to Twitter. I don’t think it’s the only thing stacked against Fedi, but it’s a huge one.

The cancel crowd

I’m going to say it: the canceldon crowd are obnoxious. They’re a holdover from Twitter and Tumblr. I won’t go into the whole “why cancelling is a waste of time” thing, but suffice it to say: cancelling doesn’t really fucking work, and it’s just a nice way of saying “doing what 4chan does to people it hates, but poorly.” Which is to say, harassment and trolling people. And of course people think it’s okay, even when they fuck up and sometimes cancel the wrong person or have bad info or got led on (this is never discussed, of course, and there is never an apology).

These people are literally making Fedi inherently less safe for everyone, and are no better than the crowd that used to be on Fedi (and still are to an extent) before Gargron decided to co-opt the Fediverse for his own gain.

The people who write the software are fucking dickheads

I’m going to be honest with you: Gargron (the guy who makes Mastodon) is an asshole. His reputation precedes him, so I won’t go into detail. However, I found out from a former IRL friend of mine (who will remain nameless) that he once asked her if he could continue to refer to her by her dead name. Said friend referred to Gargron as a “shitty liberal,” and I do not mean in the US sense.

The people at Pleroma are not much better. I mean, Alex Gleeson, enough said.

The only two relevant pieces of Fedi software are Pleroma and Mastodon. ActivityPub is such a horrible protocol, and Mastodon has butchered it so much, it’s impossible to make an interoperable implementation without man-months of work. To reimplement Mastodon from the ground up would be a nightmare. And forking Mastodon sounds great, but you’re up against a huge pile of technical debt. You could fork Pleroma, but then you’d have to know Elixir (a language few people know).

Also, the last time a major fork happened in Mastodon (aside from Glitch), it was mostly a group of non-developers who hoped they could cult their way into a dev team. It didn’t work.

I wanted to fix this problem but I decided it wasn’t worth it, and you’d have to be up against a community who is watching your every mistake and will find a reason to pillory you if you fuck up.

“Mastodon” never developed a culture of its own

You know, if you leave a container of yoghurt out for 4 years, it develops a culture. That’s more than can be said for the Mastodon part of Fedi, which has never outgrown being an offshoot of Twitter and Tumblr.

This is to its detriment, as it’s not a compelling place on the surface. People come in waves, and most leave again when Twitter and Tumblr rights its wrongs. I’ve seen this happen multiple times.

Mastodon users would do well to stop treating Fedi as Twitter, but of course, Mastodon and Pleroma as platforms basically both treat Fedi as Twitter expanded universe. It’s no coincidence Gargron has joined Twitter’s federation initative. I have no hopes Fedi will develop a meaningful distinct culture before its too late.

The tools to protect users are rotten fruit in an opaque bag

Note: this was edited in after the fact. I meant to include it in the original.

I’m going to say what many admins lack the bravery or vision to say: the tools to protect the users of Mastodon are inadequate. Pleroma got this better, but many Mastodon users cancel any Pleroma user on sight (as I explain below).

The filtering sucks (it displays “filtered” unless you choose to permanently delete any posts containing a keyword). The default guide for setting up ElasticSearch (the thing that enables search) had (may still have for all I know) no mention of using a firewall or listening only on localhost (Gargron pushed back on requests to mention this), which would enable anyone in theory to connect to the database and search any post if it wasn’t secured, was outright appalling. Mastodon can’t be configured for a whitelist-only mode, although awoo.social notably uses a fork that whitelists by default. The fact there is no real shared blocklist support for blocking instances is a gaping hole that means each instance sort of ad-hoc blocks what it finds or gets recommended (I do have to admit, given the current culture this could be used for brigading and real shitty behaviour). There was a blocklist run by someone named dzuk, but the partiality of that was questionable at best, relied on one person maintaining it, and was still a manual process to update.

I think this deserves its own mention too, despite the controversy I know it will generate: the CW system is inadequate. People often abbreviate things, which assumes a native command of English and a knowledge of the lingo used on Fedi. This does nothing to help current users. Tagging posts as sensitive and filtering by at least hashtag would be a better answer (as well as using a CW), but this would require users to do it. Right now, users are told to simply use a CW and that’s the end of that. A lot of people open the CW’s without realising, often on knee-jerk or not knowing what they meant, getting more than they bargained for. I myself have fallen victim to this many times. It’s really not a great state of affairs and there has to be better. Of course, pointing this out usually leads to being ignored at best, or at worst cancelled, because how dare you attack the most sacred and perfect of Mastodon features (/s).

We truly can do better on this front, with not much difficulty, but it would require Gargron’s cooperation. I can assure you, this is extremely unlikely.

Cancelling people for using different software is uncool

Note: this was edited in after the fact. I meant to include it in the original.

The so-called “cancellation” of people using Pleroma has to end. It is self-defeating and has the general feel of “well my shit don’t stink” (as I mentioned above, Mastodon certainly has many issues of its own).

I will grant that Pleroma the project is run by dickheads who care more about contributions and donations than they do about the character of the contributors. This is hardly a mindset unique to Pleroma, however. Much of the software you use every day was written or partially designed by really awful people. A prime example is JavaScript (used by most websites these days), which was created by a homophobe, Brendan Eich (he gave money to a California proposition which successfully banned gay marriage in California, albeit temporarily). Would you stop using the web, simply because it relies on JavaScript? Hell, who knows how many horrible human beings have contributed to the operating system and other software you’re using? There’s no way to know the number, but it’s certainly non-zero.

Now, I will also concede the userbase of Pleroma has a lot of toxicity in it as well. This is a side effect of absorbing the GNUSocial crowd I mentioned above. But tons of Nazis and awful people run Mastodon instances, too. I don’t want to name examples as to not give them the search engine points they crave, but the blocklist at mst3k as I linked to above has a lot of them.

I know this all sounds like “whataboutism,” but really. Plenty of legitimate users who are definitely not shitheads (including BIPOC, trans, and non-binary users) use Pleroma. There is no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater, except for silly tribalism and a sense of false superiority for using a piece of software that has a reputation for leftism only by its use by lots of leftists (certainly not its creator).

The mindset is toxic

Fedi politics are like all politics: awful. It’s a bit like being at a leftist version of the family Thanksgiving, listening to Uncle Scott go on this year again about how we need to abolish the police, that what the world needs is to run exactly like they think the Internet works, listening to Grandma go on again about IPFS, Aunt Debbie going on and on about Free Assange.

The thing about family Thanksgiving though is that it ends. Fedi’s blabbering does not end.

But we have a solution! We can content warn (CW) our posts. Of course, there’s a problem. The same people who insist you CW anything about sex (or not even post about it) feel the need to post politics without a CW. I am absolutely not against CW’s (I think they could be a vastly better system than they are now, but that’s outside the scope of this article). It grows tiring having the same shit shovelled into your face day after day. Filters are hardly a substitute (and those work horribly anyway).

Follow my example: I try to CW all my politics. Because I know this can grate people badly. It isn’t out of respect for Nazis or centrists or whatever. It’s out of respect for my friends who maybe don’t wanna hear about my thoughts on reverting welfare reform and raising the poverty level or something.

The bottom line about the politics is this: people grow tired of it. It’s one of the big reasons people leave. Just, please CW your damn politics. It isn’t that I don’t care, it’s that I’ve been a leftist for a very long time and I already have heard it all before. Even if I agree, I try not to circlejerk too much.

Fucking with Wesley Crusher wasn’t really that cool

Yeah, Fedi ran off Wil Wheaton a while back. They thought they were hot shit for getting rid of a celebrity. They were right, minus the hot part.

Too bad he was the most minor of minor celebrities. Most people don’t even know who he is. He didn’t really deserve that harassment or be told “shut up Wesley” repeatedly.

There ain’t much to say here, it speaks for itself. Harassment isn’t cool, kids. Y’all need to grow up if you think it’s okay to just harass someone like that.

Can it be fixed?

I don’t know if Fedi can be fixed.

It will continue to crumble as long as something is not done to address the problems. I’d be sad to see it go (it has been a wonderful support network for me for the past few years, as I’ve battled homelessness and job loss). But I already see the writing on the wall.

I guess I could always do what thousands already have and just go back to Twitter. But please don’t make me do that.

Maybe a replacement for Fedi will come along and help with the shortcomings.

Nothing will ever be a panacea

My expectations for a social network are not for it to attain perfection or enlightenment. I know a perfectly safe environment online is a pipe dream. I also know that you can’t get rid of every shithead.

But it doesn’t have to be this bad. There’s no reason for it. There’s always room for improvement, but the gap shouldn’t be so wide you could fit a country through it; that’s the gap between Fedi and perfection right now.

I dream of a better world, not a perfect one. This is the one reason I still use Fedi, despite all of this.

33 thoughts on “Mastodon really is crumbling — and it will only get worse

  1. mc February 3, 2021 / 10:03 am

    You just hate people …

  2. Mastodonuser February 3, 2021 / 10:24 am

    Thanks for your opinion. I read other statistics, showing that the number of Mastodon users increases, while the number of actual active users decreases even more. So many accounts become inactive after several days or weeks. And of course, filter bubbles also exist in the Fediverse. People happily reshare black-and-white opinions, and live the toxic “us vs. them” ideology. The Fediverse suffers from exactly the same problems as any other social network.

  3. DC February 3, 2021 / 11:21 am

    Gargron is an extremely problematic individual. I knew him IRL. I have no idea if he’s a good developer or not, but he’s not a good leader.

    He had founded another community called The Colorless which he had to exile himself from due to his own views, notably being extremely conservative, xenophobic (“The reason I hate Macs is because Steve Jobs is an arab”) and adding tons of NSFW lolicon pictures to its community, which drove some people away.

    After a couple years of problems this community ended up being given to a common friend which handled it for a few years.

    • Flo August 25, 2021 / 10:25 am

      How can he be homphobic when publicly he regurgitates all the left-wing BS and MSM talking points. I felt he was extremely off-putting. And tbh pro censorship of differing opinions. I am German as well, good to hear about these issues tbh. I am still on twitter, but twitter is shadowbanning certain topics and accounts. It’s just harsh. Another alternative I’m looking towards is panquake…

  4. Sebastian Lasse February 3, 2021 / 7:37 pm

    [Personal opinion]
    My art teacher said “If there is a pimple we squeeze it out”.
    For me it feels like you identified the fedi pimples and delivered.
    I agree to any single word.

    and

    Esteemed Fediverse!
    NOW
    Please co-sign the new Policy Proposal in the official ActivityPub forum
    https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/policy-proposal-socialhub-community-values/1391

    Please watch the Talks of the official ActivityPub Conf
    https://conf.activitypub.rocks/

    Please, if you care or code, let us come together – right now.
    Well, once a week, next up: Saturday 4pm CET
    https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/2021-02-06-social-cg-meeting-demos-diverse-clients-and-generic-servers/1364

    Solutions are diverse.

  5. Sebastian Lasse February 3, 2021 / 7:43 pm

    addendum / correction

    Well, not every single word, ActivityPub is a nice protocol.
    There is space to improve.

  6. Ex-Mastodon User February 4, 2021 / 2:51 pm

    Hi. I would rather have responded by email rather than a public comment, but I couldn’t find a contact link.

    In short, I think you’re generally right. Mastodon is unfixable because social media, as we understand it, is unfixable. Short-form posting is only sustainable within small, closed communities of users who know each other personally. It can’t scale to a global or federated system. Microblogging is the worst, but even without length limits, anything with the same immediacy will have the same problem.

    The fediverse actually is less safe than Twitter in at least one way: inter-instance grudges and cancel-wars are a thing, and instigating them is profitable for people grifting for clout (and trying to convert clout to money via Patreon and such). This played a part in l’affaire Wil Wheaton, but has also been ongoing between BIPOC instances and tenderqueer instances over CW policy.

    In short: quit Mastodon, quit all social media. It’s garbage and it’s not doing you any good.

  7. Breth February 4, 2021 / 3:29 pm

    I agree, brother

  8. Anon February 4, 2021 / 6:22 pm

    You have cancelled everbody you disagree with
    I mean jewish disagrees with everybody else, atheists disagree with everybody else, muslims disagree with everybody else, christians disagree with everybody else, I think you just are another guy who wants to force everybody to agree with him, but you want to look like you don’t

  9. Fox Bear February 5, 2021 / 2:23 am

    While I think this is an amazing post for pointing out pressing problems with the Fediverse and Mastodon in particular, I feel the general movement of decentralization and community-run social networks and software should nonetheless be pursued wholeheartedly. There seems little choice in our world of increasing fascism and corporate monopolization to put up with a lot of shit in order to get at the real P2P strength of the internet. Yes there are bad people, plenty of Nazis and big egos on many of the instances, but there is also a lot of independent voices, huge programming talent, and a lot of genuine goodwill from those who believe we need an alternative to the American corporate web on one end, and the total surveillance society offered by China on the other.
    I think the points of this post should be vigilantly addressed so we can get better ActivityPub and Fediverse apps and instances in the future. It seems like the only way forward.

  10. Just another Mastodon user February 5, 2021 / 2:24 am

    Well-put and insightful. I’ve had dreams of making new (fediverse) software for a while, but this post makes clear that trying that without expert knowledge of social dynamics and the history of this sort of thing is doomed.

  11. Anonymous February 5, 2021 / 2:25 am

    The recent defederation drama between weirder earth and other three instances only confirms this. It originated as drama between a few individuals, and individual blocking may have sufficed, but (some of) the involved admins escalated the problem and lots of people got angry.

    And then there was the harassment campaign against the fedilab app author for not doing enough to block gab users (nazis) from his app last year (which became a moot point after the nazis forked the Tusky app into Husky). I was among the people who talked against it, and got myself burned too.

    Sorry folks, but if you think Mastodon is a peaceful place, you haven’t been paying attention. And yes, it only gets worse and worse.

    More than one friend of mine had to move accounts due to harassment, and they only post followers only. Abstract / anime avatars and avoiding racial details in profiles is becoming a de facto standard. Your list of followers and followed is sensitive data now, and if you don’t lock your account, you’re gonna have a bad time.

    We need more block sharing tools and switching to a “no federation” (aka whitelisting) mode by default, but Gargron has been reluctant to work on this.

    Meanwhile, harassers are having the time of their lives and everyone else suffers.

    • Reader October 28, 2021 / 7:36 pm

      I suspect the only real alternative right now is Gab. They only have a bad reputation because of the hit piece articles being written on them but if you actually got to know people, your see how much is made up. The CEO actively promotes both being loving and caring to each other along with free speech at the same time which is nice for balancing things out. They ban harassment and anything illegal while allowing the rest.

  12. Fox Bear February 5, 2021 / 2:43 am

    To be clear I don’t agree with all the criticism here especially lines like “The people who write the software are fucking dickheads”
    That’s harsh.
    But sometimes you have to pick and choose what might be valid criticisms in what otherwise are mostly rants.
    Anyway after a few rereads, maybe I should not have weighed in… Bye…

  13. tallship February 5, 2021 / 4:03 am

    What a pussy.

    Great authoring though, and defense of your hypothese and suppositions. Had you written this as a term paper I would have given you high marks, but on the merits of your arguments alone I’mma be generous here and give you a “C – -“.

    See minus minus 😉

    You literally grovel and beg for somebody else to do something and come to your rescue before you have to “return” to the monolithic silos of Twatter and Faceplant in bondage and servitude.

    I don’t really give a shit what your political leanings are, and whatever they are I indeed respect your decisions to believe those ways, as long as you know why you believe those ways.

    Further, I truly do appreciate that you endeavor to cleanup the cacophany by, in Mastodon parlance, applying *CW* tags to your PolySci.

    But the Fediverse is thriving, moreso everyday, in spite of your lamentations.

    I recommend you consider resolving to abandon email as a communication medium, because there are spammers out there vying for you, probing for your vulnerabilities…

    Wait! I just described exactly what the big boy monolithic corporate silos are doing with your express permission! Yah, you really are a fuckin’ pussy if you believe that the Fediverse is about Mastodon or the shitty little racist Nazi’s that develop the crippleware Tusky client, coz it’s not. It’s not even about ActivityPub.

    The Fediverse is about the concept of going forward to a place we inhabited previously in a world we were able to share with those who observed the rules of civil discourse, and netiquette, along with those who don’t or won’t. Like… FidoNET and Usenet, or The Well, or Compuserve, The Source, or Prodigy.

    Why? Coz that is the online version of the IRL world, and by virtue of posting this pathetic discourse of gloom and doom you have demonstrated that you’re much stronger a person than the pussy you portray yourself as.

    If you want someone else to believe in moderating the world as it arrives in your mailbox, at your workplace, and the afterwork hangouts you like to frequent, you are sorely mistaken in that hopefulness, waiting for someone else to right what you perceive as the injustices of culture and Society since Mesopotamia.

    It is the participants responsibility to filter (I mean this in the real sense, not the shitty sense that you rightfully highlight in your article) unwanted list bullies, trolls, scammers, and spammers from their own respective inboxes. It always has been that way and it ***always will be***.

    There are so many different aspects to the Fediverse that you simply ignore, where folks coexist happily – Friendica, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Epicyon, Misskey – not merely Pleroma and Mastodon, and no one gives a shit if a shitty person created a great technology, especially considering the source (you) for determining that they’re shitty people… Along with perhaps a few of some like minded acolytes of yours.

    Get a grip. Put your big girl panties on, and get on with living your life freely, or surrender your addictive brain to Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. They’re going to sleep just fine without valium regardless of your choice.

    Because, in the Fediverse, you can simply ignore and filter out the things that don’t float your boat and get on with continuing to build your happy place in the online world with those of whom you wish to share that place with. Anything else is bolshevism and wrong think, where you summon up **the Dark Side of The Force**, complete with your neighborhood friendly thought police, and where you and your cronies get to fantasize about a time in the future that you can actually control how other peoples are allowed to think.

    I wish you well. Don’t be a pussy. Be part of the solution that affords everyone to exist independent of the subjugation that the monolithic silos enforce.

    Kindest regards,

    @tallship@Pleroma.Cloud

    .

    • \o/ February 28, 2021 / 5:07 pm

      Thank you! This post doesn’t ring true for me at all. Maybe it was an accurate description at some point?

  14. bill February 5, 2021 / 4:53 am

    “You just are another guy who wants to force everybody to agree with him, but you want to look like you don’t.”<- second this coment

    IMHO you need to behave like an adult and grow up, go your own way, why do you look so much at others? you look like an old gossipy woman.

  15. selfagency February 8, 2021 / 4:53 pm

    anyone in this thread smoke weed?

  16. wall o' text masonry department February 8, 2021 / 7:27 pm

    alright so. listen.

    as one white person to another.

    it is never a good look to declare that those meanie PoCs are using their identities to hurt our poor white feelings. “taking advantage of white guilt” is not really something that happens, and characterizing it like that – while knowing full well there’s the constant racial violence of calling PoC on mastodon “tokens” who are “weaponizing their identities” – is, uh, a bad look. it’s also just adding more towards the problem instead of fixing it.

    speaking of adding more towards the problem instead of fixing it, you’re leaving out a big chunk of the CW discourse. namely, that “cw that for politics!!!” was getting used against non-white users very cruelly. as in, literally friends of mine getting chased off the website. people were demanding that any post that even mentioned vaguely something political – which was a lot, given that “existing while black” was a lot of the objectionable content – be CW’d so it could be ignored.

    in other words, it was telling non-white people to shut up about their suffering so that it could be more easily ignored by white folks. this is rather uncool, and not just a little bit racist.

    honestly it seems like your article here is mostly similarly half-baked.

    if you’re gonna try to refute an idea, you have to actually know what the idea *is* first, yeah?

    you have to actually sit down and ask people why they are doing what they do, and genuinely listen to their logic and motivations. you don’t have to agree with them. you just have to listen to them as, well, worthy of the respect of being listened to. even if you don’t particularly give a shit about them, you can give a shit about your own logic and your own arguments.

    and i think if you did that, you might find some clarity on the situation. you might also find some allies. for example, the idea that it’s too easy for shitlords to find you on the fediverse? yeah, that’s a pretty good one. it’s also one of the ones that many PoC have noted when deciding mastodon just is no longer worth it. when the barrier to entry of someone harassing you is so low, it becomes grating. and in that clarity, people can start talking about potential solutions – like moving some parts of the fediverse not to federate by default, but instead having an option for instances to only federate on an allowlist basis instead of having to keep an ever-growing list of blocks.

    heck, you could even get a bigger picture on things like “why did wil wheaton get such bad treatment”, answering that with “many people are deeply suspicious of any attempted corporate takeover, and this particular celebrity banks on his personal brand in ways that ain’t so great sometimes”. or just. like. “yogurt already has a culture, that’s why it’s yogurt and not a glass of milk”

    shame we ain’t there yet though.

    tldr your mastodon is crumbling article is crumbling, and here’s why: it’s half-baked

  17. Maps April 2, 2021 / 6:49 am

    The vitriolic condescending machismo being used by a few commenters here to try to mask their masculine insecurities is the perfect example of what the OP wrote about. Nothing OP said (other than allowing himself to be manipulated by his white guilt, let alone even having white guilt, cuz that’s just silly) is about being tough or growing up. It’s about the problems that online anonymity naturally creates, and what needs to be done to deal with those issues and to try to make social networks worth using. IRL people rarely treat each other the way they do anonymously online.

    Here’s the solution, tough guys: eliminate anonymity.

    You’re never truly anonymous to authorities online, and everyone knows this, so let’s be real here, most users just want anonymity to avoid being held responsible for their online actions. You want to really put those “big girl panties” on? Stop hiding behind online anonymity safe spaces. Cuz trust me, no one thinks you’re even remotely tough or badass when you’re using an anonymous profile online. We all just look like 40 year old agoraphobic Chuck in mom’s basement when were anonymous online.

  18. jbschirtzinger July 23, 2021 / 8:49 pm

    Your basic analysis is right–I am not enamored of the fediverse but I am less enamored of other forms of social media, especially having been deplatformed by some “well fucking meaning liberals” on Facebook for a “perceived idea” about who and what I was. It cost me a business and we had to move.

    I think the protocol for the Fediverse is messy, and I do not think it is a safe harbor. The only thing that I think it offers is the possibility of owning one’s own data. Of course, I’ve had instances disappear in the night as though the Gestapo came to town…

  19. Anon August 10, 2021 / 2:51 am

    I say this with genuine good will – if you want people to believe you have changed, then you need to show it instead of simply stating you are a better person. Do you still genuinely believe that bs about white fragility? When it comes to politics, the only people I see who don’t always CW is BIPOC or disabled people talking about lived experiences, and even then often the worst is CWed. BIPOC writers have bemoaned that they are expected to CW lived experiences in similar think pieces, ironically linked along with this one. So which side is right? The few white people I’ve seen who do leave politics out in the open do it so frequently that it would be easy to just avoid them, because hey you don’t have to follow activists!

    I’m not saying that the post should be taken down. Only that you could have come back to edit this to publicly distance yourself from any views you no longer hold, if you no longer hold them. Elsewise, where have you changed? Where did you grow?

    But if your views haven’t changed, then claiming to be a different person from the one who wrote this is fallacious.

    I’m sorry. You’ll probably see this as concern trolling. I hope things get better. I always like to believe things can.

  20. DonnaKC8 August 21, 2021 / 7:35 pm

    This is a fantastic article. Thank you!

  21. Sister EDI January 18, 2022 / 11:16 pm

    Well, I have more fun on Matrix and on MeWe. Mastodon is hard to find good content and community in imho. And the article is so many directions harsh and judgmental and doing ad hominem arguments that it takes some work to pull out the good points and ignore the rest. And it has a lot of good points.

    • Noël February 18, 2022 / 7:24 am

      Agreed, there are some good arguments, but most of the stuff is kinda meh.

      As for the content problem, if you are living in germany, there is a lot of stuff you can follow for nice content. A lot of universities, institutions of the state and media is currently opening mastodon profiles and actively publishing content. I personally really like opening Mastodon atm, its filled with some content thats interesting to me and i personally dont see a lot of toxicity about politics and stuff.

  22. @lucasrausch@social.linux.pizza September 29, 2022 / 12:26 am

    Mastodon is good for school people because it’s on CLOUDRON and super easy to set up! It also is linked, so my friends on masto can contact me on social Linux pizza. So yes, you just hate people and you are probably are a TWITTER USER. GO BACK TO TWITTER YOU DUMB PERSON

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