about me
because I don't trust instance managers, at all. they have access to your DMs and can do whatever they want with your account? Sounds great sign me the fuck up.
yet NOBODY says "for example, pick this one. click this link to make an account". yeah nah go pick one yourself. the one i'm on? that one's closed registry, sorry
decisionmaking stress? hell no i'll stick with egghost
discord server admin drama but combined with the scale of twitter. yeah nah
god that's exactly it. it just sounds like a really bad time, especially if your instance manager is a control freak.
I was part of a mastodon instance back in 2020 and I was enjoying reading people's posts about gardening, permaculture, recycling, stuff like that. Then one day it was announced that the whole instance would be going away because the person who ran it had got in a fight with some other people who used it and basically there was a bunch of drama that affected about 3 people and for that reason the ~50 or so people in the instance could no longer access the great content that we had been sharing with each other. I don't know what that is, but it's not a social media platform.
Jesus that's awful. A nice community gone because of a pointless argument... That's definitely not a solution to the problems inherent to centralized social media, it just created different ones.
Right! And it later turned out that the small group of people had been fighting over roles and responsibilities of a hypothetical co-operative commune they were talking about starting together. But none of it was physically real and nothing material had been invested yet, it was literally just an idea that they had in their heads and they couldn't decide on who would be in charge of what. So poof, no more community. Absolutely wild.
my response to the hypothetical "do you trust elon" is "he doesn't care enough to pick me out of millions of accounts worth of DMs." the list of people whose privacy an instance manager can invade is significantly less daunting. so i would actually trust my DM's to be safer on twitter than on Masto, but i still won't use anything but an end-to-end encrypted messaging app to talk to people if i really cared that much about my privacy
I've also seen several Black twitter accounts posting about how they tried to port over to mastodon and were blocked / banned within minutes because of white fragility, ie. they wanted to talk about issues like systemic racism without having to wrap it all in content warnings. (I don't have the links to hand but if anyone is super interested I can try to dig them out from twitter.)
On the one hand, I sort of get what mastodon people were saying about how the general culture in many instances is to wrap every post in a CW so that people can just scroll on by if they want.
But on the other hand, I think it's a good fucking point that if you choose to scroll on by posts about stuff that doesn't affect you because you're not feeling it that day, that's going to lead to the de-amplification of marginalised voices. A good point people made on twitter was that the George Floyd murder was all over twitter and it was (almost) impossible for people to simply opt out of hearing about it. Mastodon would never be able to get that kind of traction for an important issue if it was all wrapped behind content warnings and the homogenous majority decided they didn't want to hear about it.
god the DMs are such a huge problem, even if you run your own single user server the feature basically doesn't exist if you care about security at all
it's so bad, I don't get why people are so trusting like that. haven't they seen what it's like to be online?? everyone sharing their stories in and around this post just adds to my dislike for that "alternative"
yeah aside from all the other things - the whole "join us, but over there" feels far more fragmented and stressful than just,,, not
i don't even like "tooting" i mean "tweeting" just feels natural to me, as a bird on the internet
