There is a lot of noise about Mastodon and if it’s up to the task. It probably isn’t quite, today.
But -- neither was twitter at the time, if you remember the frequency of “failwhale”. Early twitter was a rough and weird place, and Mastodon is in a similar spot currently.
But Mastodon deserves our patience, support, and a bit of grace.
Here we are, using a community managed and owned, open source social network. This is happening. And, it is with tool that has a strong focus on code of conduct, content warnings/consent, user and admin-level content moderation tools already built in, accessibility tools, decent translations, and a path to try and sustain this by keeping each server’s community to a manageable size (theoretically).
Mastodon is not a drop-in twitter replacement. It shouldn’t be. It’s a federated group of server admins banding together to give something that’s currently algorithm, tracker, and ad free.
All these things we as human rights advocates have been hoping for and asking for, and here we have an open source platform which listened, and which is facing a daunting onslaught of people trying to replace twitter with it all at once.
RiskFromHome
joncamfield