Mastodawn

Ro Apr 29, 2023

So there's been a Bluesky vs. Masto convo in my mentions for the last couple of days, and it's made something very clear.

White men have this strange loyalty to Mastodon but not a better fedi itself. And they project this loyalty onto anyone that even considers Bluesky, no matter what cultural background they come from.

I have my own reasons for not considering Bluesky, but there's this nasty implication that Black and Brown people should be grateful for Masto despite the fact people loyal to that project have repeatedly run us off with no remorse.

This massive cultural gulf is at the core of why the fedi can't get out of its way and be the next evolution on public social media.

There's enough room here for everyone to have their communities, but the willful ignorance that often leads this discussion and projects in the fedi has us running in circles.

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Bill Woodcock Apr 29, 2023

@Are0h

I think Mastodon, per se, the specific open-source project, is a straw man, and one which encourages un-useful debate. What matters, in my opinion, is the difference between open protocols and proprietary ones. Twitter is a closed system. ActivityPub, whatever its defects, is an open protocol. Mastodon is one of many implementations of that protocol, and it's not a particularly good one, it's just one that got a bunch of Euros thrown behind it early on.

My hope is that enough people will try to implement ActivityPub that they'll realize how broken it is, and will put in the work necessary to make it useable. In the process, Mastodon per se will become an historical footnote.

My fervent but utterly unrealistic hope is that _next_ time people will put the work into building good new tools on top of good already-debugged open protocols, rather than building crappy new tools and deciding that whatever they did along the way constitutes an open protocol.

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Ray Kelm Apr 29, 2023

@woody @Are0h What if the problem isn’t the tools, but just human nature? When we get enough people together in one place, and allow indivduals to express their views (a good thing) with a large enough sample of people, then we’re going to have some people who express hateful views (a bad thing). And those people might have an influence that is larger than would otherwise have been possible, since we’re building these systems with global reach. We might be able to limit the impact of those people using tools, but the fact that they exist is unlikely to change in the short term.

I don’t think segregation is the answer here either. It might provide some “safety in numbers”, but it also paints a big target for those who want to express their hate.

I suspect that this is really a problem that can only be truly “fixed’ through long term societal change. Technical solutions might provide a short-term band-aid, but still leave the underlying cause untouched.

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Ro Apr 30, 2023

@rayk @[email protected] Harassment, bigotry, and hate are not human nature. They are choices.

Comparing the setting of boundaries regarding safety to segregation is absurd.

And it's always funny to me how the least targeted people on the web, white men, run out of ideas to improve the quality of communication for everyone that isn't them.

It's always all this whataboutism without actually trying *anything.*

This post exemplifies how there is no real will to do anything other than hand wring and feign hopelessness.

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Bill Woodcock

@Are0h

I dunno. I'm a white guy who's put most of his life into trying to make the Internet work better and be more available for as many people as possible, most of them not "white," by dint of demographics. But things have gotten a lot worse than I hoped or expected over the last twenty years, and I really honestly am at a loss as to how to effect improvement. I know what needs to happen, but I don't seem to have enough traction or leverage or whatever to get regulators and prosecutors and tax collectors to do their jobs, or regular folks to discriminate between free-as-in-open and free-as-in-you're-the-product. I keep trying things, but I get more pessimistic with each passing year. Too many people too quick to sell out, too many others complacently enabling them.