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.