Naunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

TLDR: Mastodon is very white, male, status quo, global north, and designed in a way to limit its potential for use in social movements.

Mastodon feels very different from Twitter, deliberately. It is truly like Live Journal. It is about people who are happy with their social circle and who think of virality and discoverability as a problem. They just want to communicate with the people they know, and limit other things. Ironically, it is more like a private gathering than a public space.

Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

In this episode of #OnTheMedia where a senior Mastodon community member says basically that they limited things that caused virality because they thought that was one of the worst things about Twitter, and then kinda shrugs when he says something like "Of course, that means that Mastodon couldn't have supported social movements like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter." He also concedes that Black Twitter folk have been made to feel unwelcome, but ... eh.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-mastodon-may-take-twitters-weary

Mastodon: The Platform Taking Twitter's Worn and Weary | On the Media | WNYC Studios

What happens when you slow down socializing?

WNYC Studios
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
Basically he was smug and entirely uninterested in the use of social media for social change, and was happy to jetison it all. He compared Mastodon to his private BB with guitar nerds where anything you wrote was read by 100 people and that was fine.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
Mastodon does have a history of being Queer friendly (one app even asked me if I wanted to join an instance which was for Furries) but that gets used as a shield when people point out how unfriendly these spaces are to lots of other people. Heck, I saw parts of Black Twitter return to Twitter and say they would rather deal with the Nazis where they had community than stick around on Mastodon. It also does have decentralized moderation which makes it easier to ban Nazis.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
What it lacks is the ability to Quote Tweet, that is to add your own comments to what somebody may have said, which is often used in social mobilizing. It also doesn't have full text search. This was all done intentionally. But as a result, it's much harder to reach out of your networks to other people. I used Twitter to follow multiple social movements, as well as to learn about people in other countries. Mastodon isn't useful for any of that. And it doesn't want to be.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022

So I'm here. But even though my friends are awesome, I don't have any new ones I've made on Mastodon (unlike Twitter), and it is overall pretty boring and unlike Twitter it makes building a network feel like work. At the same time, it is of much less use for work. I have almost no Africa network, I have little interaction with journalists, and because the network is more closed, I learn less.

Whatever. It's fine but it's not a substitute for Twitter at all.

Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
The social science server looks interesting and maybe I should go over there. That would be different and better in some ways.
Show threadPamela OliverDec 28, 2022
@naunihal I'm on sciences.social and would be interested in discussing the pluses and minuses of different servers. Appreciate this thread.
Show threadJay UlfelderDec 28, 2022
@pamelaoliver @naunihal I'm on one of the random large instances. Almost all the accounts I follow are on other servers, but I was able to reconstruct a lot of the network I regularly use on Twitter pretty quickly over here, so it hasn't seemed to matter much where I'm housed. Almost never look at local or federated timelines, just the 'home' one and a work-specific list.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
@jayulfelder @pamelaoliver I had only an overlap of 200 people and even though I asked the software to autofollow them, it worked only for around 160. Apparently there are problems following across instances? Not sure ...
Show threadPamela OliverDec 28, 2022
@naunihal @jayulfelder I'm pretty sure the network experience is different on a small server. I could auto follow a list. But I think it takes more active work to expand outside your own silo starting from a smaller instance.
Show threadNaunihal SinghDec 28, 2022
@pamelaoliver @jayulfelder This is why I'm on mastodon.social! I thought it would make things easier ...
Show threadPamela Oliver
@naunihal @jayulfelder Here is one copy of the decision tree I've been looking at https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/zqstn1/what_makes_up_my_timeline/
what makes up my timeline?

Posted in r/Mastodon by u/irkli • 157 points and 34 comments

reddit
Dec 28, 2022 at 7:34pmWeb