NirdigantaNov 25, 2022

Been following this critique with a lot of interest & have a hot take.

Mastodon is unbearably white only if you're unbearably American. It's refreshingly not yet Americanized for many from the Global South with American Discourse™️ all over our TL.
🧵

https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/

The Whiteness of Mastodon

A conversation with Dr. Johnathan Flowers about Elon Musk's changes at Twitter and the dynamics on Mastodon, the decentralized alternative.

Tech Policy Press
Show threadNirdigantaNov 25, 2022
This is not to say that "make your own instance" isn't racist or that Black users haven't been subjected to racist frames of CWs/TWs or had their posts censored. But Black Twitter also thrived under a centralized tech regime & is a little lost with decentralized UX/UI designed specifically antithetical to Twitter.
Show threadNirdigantaNov 25, 2022

If Black Twitter emerged as offline Black discursive practices leveraging Twitter's technological affordances (cf. Brock, 'Distributed Blackness') then migrating this collective to Mastodon, i.e. anti-Twitter will be fraught.

I am also struck by Flowers' framing of Black Twitter as a "gathering place" & "commons." This is an American luxury. Indian Twitter is a morass of censorship, RW trolls, misogyny, hate speech. Mastodon has been a respite for many who don't experience Twitter as a commons.

Show threadNirdigantaNov 25, 2022
Like I haven't yet come across Sanghi Mastodon, which is incredible to me. I think the decentralized logic, the various instances, the RW's inability to manipulate trends & go viral all work in our favor. Mastodon is a potential haven-in-the-making for Indian progressives.
Show threadNandha
@SevenDeviled Two attempts were made. One was an instance called Inditoot, which was defederated right during the 2019 migration. They still pitch another instance called Tooter, which sprung sometimes in mid 2020, and many longtime Indian users blocked the instance right then. Not sure if .social and .online have defederated now.
https://mastodon.social/@ionhandshaker/105264210763646558
Nov 25, 2022 at 6:25pmWeb
Show threadNirdigantaNov 25, 2022
@ionhandshaker This is some fascinating digital history & very much worth keeping our eye out for before they start organizing to propagandize here.
Show threadNandhaNov 25, 2022
@SevenDeviled I've been using it for sometime now, and the antiviral design of Mastodon makes it difficult to amass people in large numbers, and that makes it difficult for the conventional Hindutva playbook. Let's see how things play out. And from an Indian perspective, the discourse has largely been anticaste so far, not populated by the standup comedy style caste based jokes that you saw on early Twitter. Been hopeful about Mastodon for a few years now. Don't know how it'll turn out.
Show threadNirdigantaNov 25, 2022
@ionhandshaker Yes, I feel the same. And it's less stressful than twitter where the feeling of being bombarded is pretty regular for me.