Dan GillmorNov 23, 2022

If you're planning to leave Twitter because a sociopath CEO makes you sick to your stomach and is wrecking the place, please think twice before heading to another centralized service where you risk the same problem at some point.

Decentralized is the best way forward.

Show threadRyanNov 23, 2022
@dangillmor Maybe. I mean, I like it, but there is a reason things consolidate. Nobody did email better than Google; all the little webmail providers dried up for the most part or eventually moved to cloud exchange. Social media is all about where your friends are. The decentralized nature means that you’ll have some users with great experiences and others with poor experiences. Maybe the moderation on your instance is non existent, or maybe it’s staffed by small-pond-syndrome sheriffs who get excited about wielding any kind of control over anyone for once in their lives. Maybe your instance is highly secure and privacy focused, or maybe it’s run by someone who goes to the Geek squad to learn how to install Outlook. These are all things you don’t necessarily know about an instance before you join, and so every user gets a crapshoot of an experience. Until a big player comes in. If mastodon really takes off, that’ll happen here. Oh sure, you wouldn’t HAVE to use the mastodon.google instance, but it would be safe and secure and well moderated by professionals instead of Nazis or 17 year old neckbeards and it’ll be up all the time and it’ll be fast and so everyone will move there anyhow.
Show threadTL Ibson

@bigstormpicture @dangillmor

I hate that this feels accurate.
Like democracy, decentralized social media would need constant vigilance. Engaged community. We aren't very good at that.

Nov 24, 2022 at 5:10amWeb
Show threadRyanNov 24, 2022
@TagTeamInt @dangillmor I mean I picked a security themed instance with some of the scariest (in a good way) technical professionals in the world running it, and it’s been around for years and years. And yet I still had some random moderator recently nuke a comment of mine about the idea of mastodon federation blocklisting because it disagreed with his own personal philosophy (it was later restored after appeal without explanation by another moderator). If the instance I’m on can’t figure this relatively easy stuff out about user experience and why people use social media to begin with, I have low hopes for mastodon in general.
Show threadTL IbsonNov 25, 2022

@bigstormpicture @dangillmor

That, in my mind, is a reason to drive the #Fediverse model. There can be an "instance" (of random foolery) but it can't corrupt or degrade the whole 'verse. There's opportunity for mods to learn from each other and, if the don't, it's a fairly easy migrate to a smarter place. (according to my limited understanding of how those works.)