Mastodawn

Chad Loder Nov 27, 2022

Twitter was never a healthy "public square" for most of us. Let's not rewrite history while eulogizing the hellsite.
Twitter was a frightening battleground where we managed barely to claw out an uneasy existence amidst the worst violent neo-Nazi extremists who constantly published our home addresses, threatened our kids' lives, and sent hordes of racist trolls into our mentions.
The same principles that allowed us to survive uneasily on Twitter will be required here in the #fediverse. Community defense, thoughtful pressure on moderation policies, and eternal vigilance.
There are no safe spaces but those we make safe through constant effort. We keep us safe.

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jhamby Nov 27, 2022

@chadloder This is exactly right. I remember GamerGate and the various other signposts along the way that others have mentioned already. I'm currently rereading The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, about how #SocialMedia was designed to maximize engagement, including by getting us all riled up and become a battleground for all sorts of disinformation (which travels much farther and faster than the truth).

Mastodon's not designed to addict, nor to rile us up. But abusers will abuse the affordances.

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jhamby Nov 27, 2022

@chadloder I'm using the technical term "affordances" now after Dr. Johnathan Flowers used it 46 times in a recent interview on The Whiteness of Mastodon: https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/

The reason he used "affordance" so many times is it's the shortest word to represent "the quality or property of an object that defines its possible uses or makes clear how it can or should be used" (from Google). The affordances of Mastodon discourage aggression, but don't discourage, e.g. passive-aggressive attacks.

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

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jhamby

@chadloder What's funny is this stuff is getting my UX design juices flowing because we're all now responsible for trying to shape the direction of this social experiment we're participant-observers in. Very different dynamics from the ad-supported for-profit social media companies I've worked at (and work for now).

Like the crypto nerds talked about "being your own bank", we're gonna have to "be our own UX designers" for this thing and learn terms like "affordances" and "interaction design".