FACTS ABOUT MASTODON

If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:

1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.

2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.

3. Picking your server instance is super important.

Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY reactionaries who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out whenever this turns out not to be the case.

Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because the admin of your instance is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.

In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.

4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.

You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis by unfortunate historical accident. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.

There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and started his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.

The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.

There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.

5. Any bozo who complains about your posts with assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.

6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.

7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets so they can wreak EVIL.

So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and Misskey (and forks thereof), is in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.

UPDATE: once enough other fedi software adopted quoting, Mastodon finally put it in, implemented gratuitously differently because fuck you.

8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.

9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.

10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.
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EDIT: this post is attracting some very dumb reply guys. Consider *not* posting debate club fatuity.

Except there seem to be several prominent non-whites users who would like to have QTs for various reasons that seem quite legitimateโ€”at least to this relative newbie of a couple months.
@elight oh who are these non-whites you're talking about? *checks self* Oh you mean, people like me? Nope, not all of us want it, and in fact many of us detest it.
@liztai I've got no skin in this game; I'm seeking to understand and connect conversations.
@elight a lot of people are using the "but minorities/black twitter/marginalised want this" argument. But they are not asking said groups if they do. That's the problem. It's a particular thorn for me. Sorry, it's getting to me!

@liztai I'm sorry for inadvertently causing harm. โค๏ธ

I would love to see more passive protections. Filtering is too reactive. I suffer this too, at times.

@elight and I'm sorry for being so reactive. I think the QT conversation has been unnecessarily combative and has put me on an edge. I think this thread is a really good way to get educated on online harassment and why Quote toots are such a concern for some: https://hachyderm.io/@liztai/109579790937151212

Believe me, I used to QT to call out people. Then I realise the real damage it causes. I do not want to do it to anyone else ever again.

Elizabeth Tai :verified: (@[email protected])

Content warning: Quote Toots

Hachyderm.io

@liztai ... Fuck.

Cultural anthropology background had me nodding my head while cursing along through the whole read.

The abstract: We're damned careening out of control in the iced virtual hell of social media most any time we engage in anything even vaguely resembling as human discussion.

It makes sense. The internet turns other people into abstractions. Humans evolved for tribes of people they relate to in person. People who are ideas are "other". Evolution wires most of us so that "others" default to threats. It takes concentrated effort to overcome this programming, e.g., something akin to a significant ongoing habit of loving kindness meditation.

Even when not threat, an "other" is far easier to objectify. Studies show humans, on the whole, feel less empathy for people who are not part of their "tribe", like them, than those who are.

I'm a meditator and even so I still struggle with the above more often than I'd like to admit.

I keep coming back to: social media is Pandora's open box. ๐Ÿ˜ž

@elight yes! Such an insightful comment, and thanks for reading it. I doubt many do when I send it to them lol.

The way social media is structured kinda stokes tribalism and some features like QTs and even retweets are adding fuel to the fire (desire to gain popularity, points etc)

I'm SURE QTs can be used for good. but ... I don't know, just too many opportunities for it to be misused.

@liztai As the article noted, intent doesn't factor into it. We can mean well yet still cause harm.

See my messages earlier that caused you pain, for an example.

One person may receive support whereas another apprehends a source of attack.

It's almost as though we weren't made to communicate and reason at this scale...

That's often what frightens me about technological innovation. We evolved to be this recursively complicated tool user. Biological evolution cannot keep up with our technological evolution. The tools we build are guaranteed to have unintended consequences.

@elight Yeah, if you read books like Jaron Lanie'rs Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari that social media is set up in the way to push our biological buttons, and how our behaviour is changed without even you realising it. It's terribly subtle, which is why it's scary.