So Seth Abramson is one of the sloppiest public thinkers I have ever encountered, who circa 2016 helped invent the rhetorical style of the buckle-up-for-some-politics Twitter mega-thread. He has advised people who listen to him that they should avoid "Mastodon" (he means the Fediverse I think).
https://post.news/article/2IanIj231d7nc5bxqOxIJpFfGwe
I cannot overstate how much this means we are doing something right over here.
Interesting take here in one of his comments. How exaclty is the admin going to know that he might have made a mistake if he isn't contacted? Mind reading?
@indri @fuzzychef @darius So basically what we have got here is a situation where if you cop an attitude and get snarky you might get banned. Even if you were or are a big deal on the bird app.
He is not a customer and this is not a failure of customer service. This is him being a jerk.
@YusufToropov @indri @fuzzychef Counterpoint: banning people from social media because they're snarky about the admins/service/owners seems... bad?
Like, Elon could ban half of Twitter with that logic. He still might! And we'd presumably think that a bad thing?
Anyway, this is Seth Abramson we're talking about, so who tf knows what happened. But "get snarky and you might get banned"? Eh.
@indri Yeah, I dunno...
The message he got was that "You can still login to request a backup of your data," but I don't know if that also means being able to access the settings you'd need for initiating an account migration.
Yeah maybe if you ask the admin and they're willing to individually enable you to (but that seems like a big if?).
Then you could take your followers with you, but everything you tooted so far would be gone forever. (Not a problem in this case, but it would in others.)
@indri I get what you say about "a private citizen volunteering his time and money" — they run and pay for it, so they can do what they want, right?
But I keep thinking about the question what that means for people fleeing Twitter because they don't want to depend on the whims and (intransparent, inconsistent) decisions of one guy.
The social risks of a similar structure on a single Mastodon instance would obv be infinitesimally small. But to the individual user the downsides are the same, no?
@indri Sorry, just want to make clear I'm not comparing whoever the admin of Seth's instance is with Musk, obv! Pretty much anyone is likely to be a better human being than him... 😊
Just that, if the Mastodon offer is, like — "with us the admin of your instance can also throw people off just cause they feel like it, or you talked to them wrong — but don't worry, our guy is a good guy" — that would be.. not so persuasive maybe? 😁 Dunno.
Darius Kazemi
Berkubernetus
indri
Yusuf Toropov
Joost