Annie D

So people keep asking why I haven't joined Mastodon yet, and I thought I'd write up something I could link to. It isn't an angry screed against Mastodon or anything (if anything, I hope the platform flourishes in the wake of Twitter's slow collapse), but more just a collection of thoughts about why joining that platform for me in this particular moment is difficult.

the actual policy is far more restrictive than what the Twitter Support account tweeted. This fucks over every single artist on the platform, of course.

Cohost isn't included. Congrats on the sudden huge competitive advantage

Just think about how many times the internet could be a better place if some dickhead mod didn't say "Well TECHNICALLY he didn't do anything WRONG." like social spaces are the text of a Magic: the Gathering card.

No. Throw the guy out.

I have a similar rule on my spaces. I think I stole the wording from authorblues, but my exact wording is

"Rule Zero: Don't make me want to ban you"

Kinda a fun little way to say "I ban whoever I want even if you never broke any real rules"

....Now I just gotta get more into the energy of actually using that rule and not feeling bad about banning assholes lmao, that's the real hard part

and it might be the post i still get the most people thanking me for writing (by which i mean, like, two a year)

but i think nowadays it would be much shorter and clearer. "don't be a dick" is kind of fuzzy and context-sensitive, after all

my current rule zero is don't make the space worse

The difference in response between generative art theft, and generative text theft, makes me feel some kind of way and I don't like it.

Especially because even I hadn't thought about it until recently and I'm a damn writer.

To be clear: I think the backlash against so-called "AI art" is good, and deserved.

But why didn't that happen for generative text? We got whole websites running on this now and nary a peep of protest except about it's perceived quality. Have years of social media just devalued our perception of words?