If we want people to move away from centralized platforms (and we should), the way we do that isn't preaching the technical superiority and expecting that to win hearts and minds.

Folks on social media aren't looking for the best tech, they're looking for tech that helps them access community with a minimum of friction.

@gwensnyder I think many Mastodon design decisions and cultural norms aimed at reducing "toxicity of discourse" are coming from a privileged place: someone wants to reproduce, say, the atmosphere of Usenet circa 1990, when not many people were there yet--but this was also a very white male techie little world with low stakes.

I say this even knowing that I personally prefer kind elevated civil conversation to bare-knuckle fights. But I'm also suspicious of my own motivations when I prefer it.