FeralRobotsJust glanced at the front page of Twitter (which I do maybe once a week), & 3 of the first 20 tweets on the anonymous timeline are from Musk.
2 are from Andrew Tate.
I mean, just in case anyone wondered how it's going over here.
Since I don't have accounts anymore I only know about Twitter culture from the anonymous home feed or from replies to tweets shared over here. Here are some things those tell me:
* Musk still has the 'Stroke Elon's Ego' setting tweaked up pretty high.
* Algo is really aggressive now about promoting toxic assholes, including rapists like Tate.
* LOT of black folks still on Twitter. Golly, I wonder why that is - couldn't possibly be because Mastodon communities were so hostile to them last fall.
* Musk still has the 'Stroke Elon's Ego' setting tweaked up pretty high.
* Algo is really aggressive now about promoting toxic assholes, including rapists like Tate.
* LOT of black folks still on Twitter. Golly, I wonder why that is - couldn't possibly be because Mastodon communities were so hostile to them last fall.
Being hostile to #TwitterDisapora was a CHOICE old-school Mastadonians made.
& esp being hostile to black folks, but also AFAICS to queer & trans folks coming from a different cultural context.
Instead of 'we don't have quote tweet, sorry' it was 'you're wrong & BAD to want that.'
Instead of 'please tag posts about racism/transphobia/politics so I can use filters to pretend everythings's fine' it was 'CW all of that or your're a horrible person who deserves to be defederated.'
The #Fediverse, & particularly the #MastodonFediverse (which we should really make a habit of distinguishing), have never really dealt with the consequences of that choice to be hostile.
FFWD to now as old-school #Mastodonians whine about high interest in #BlueSky, while doing nothing to address one of the key drivers of that interest: #Mastodon's cultural hostility to outsiders.
TBF I think Gargron has gotten that there's a problem from very close to the beginning of the big influx. But he's only one guy, & it's infamously difficult for an open-source project to do product design. & that problems wildly exacerbated when we're talking about a massively-distributed community of communities with 9 years of culture-formation under its belt.
🍄🌈🎮💻🚲🥓🎃💀🏴🛻🇺🇸@FeralRobots is there a specific incident that happened last fall? I caught some of the QT discorse, but never heard a racial component. If anything it seemed to me that marginalized people are pretty much in agreement that QTs cause more harm than good. Did I miss something?
@schizanon
If that's your take, then yes, you missed something.
Check out #MissedQuoteBoost for tip-of-the-iceberg* of illustrations of what's lost by not having quote boost. Earlier in the time stream you'll find links to discussions of why that mattered more to black people.
_
*only fairly geeky folks used that hashtag. others got fed up & left.
If that's your take, then yes, you missed something.
Check out #MissedQuoteBoost for tip-of-the-iceberg* of illustrations of what's lost by not having quote boost. Earlier in the time stream you'll find links to discussions of why that mattered more to black people.
_
*only fairly geeky folks used that hashtag. others got fed up & left.
@FeralRobots My take is that QTs are often used for dunking. I'm fine with that, but I'm an anon, and a white american cismale IRL--I'll cop to the dunking I get-- but I can see how others would feel differently.
@schizanon They have been often used for dunking; but they have also often been used for what I just heard someone refer to as "yes, and"-ing, & "this made me think of this other thing"-ing, & those are things you can't easily do by other means. You can see examples of this in the #MissedQuoteBoost tag.
Dunking on Twitter evolved over time, too, & was very often accomplished by screenshotting - where the screenshot gave brigades everything they needed to do their brigading.
@schizanon & in fact, if you dig deep into #MissedQuoteBoost, you'll see that one of the main communities that got demonized for wanting to quote boost was black people coming over from Twitter. I.e., not white male.
I follow a bunch of trans folks, & I've seen a sharp divide between ones that came over from Twitter & ones that were here before. Those that came over often seemed to find the local attitudes toward quote boost & CWs to be puzzling. As though they were trying to suppress comms.