@dangoodin @slut @kurtisj @dangillmor No not at all. I'm saying that journalists aren't leaving because they feel they have an audience on Twitter, be it ever so and increasingly deplorable. And because mastodon can't deliver them an audience which is centralised and captive they don't see the value in it. I feel if you ask a journalist or a politician or an advertiser to choose between morality or an audience, they will always choose the audience.

And the problem is that one of the things I love about mastodon is that I am not a captive audience for all of those egotists. And I don't wish mastodon to ever evolve into that. I would like mastodon to be a place where I follow those that I respect.

Mastodon is a peaceful village square, Twitter is Times Square where you are imprisoned in stocks and buffoons shout at you. When everyone is in the village square, what will the buffoons do?

@DrFriendless @dangoodin @slut @kurtisj @NateSilver538
Is Mastodon a peaceful village square because it is inherently morally better, because it is more flexible, or because it hasn't become as popular so far?

For all the problems that could appear on Twitter, I had a curated feed that mostly (but not entirely) was comfortable. I was occasionally challenged, but I never had to deal with outright abuse. Maybe this is partly from being a cis white male, but I'm not sure how easily my name translates to that, and my avatar is a South American llama.

@DrFriendless @dangoodin @slut @kurtisj @NateSilver538

Many of whose who have stuck their neck out further than I have dared have come under fire. Part of that is undoubtedly because Twitter is a single realm. There are ways for Mastodon instance operators and I think individual users to block entire other instances. But what if mastodon.social or other major server becomes a problematic instance? It's not that easy to block without losing the platform, and we have Twitter Redux.

@DrFriendless @dangoodin @slut @kurtisj @NateSilver538

We have routinely seen new platforms coopted by everyone from edgelords to outright Nazis with varying levels of success, and I am skeptical that Mastodon as a platform is immune from that. It has the additional challenge that it's not hard to create an official-ish looking presence. Every time I look for someone I followed on Twitter, I get back half a dozen servers that apparently automatically repost anything tweeted by an equivalent Twitter account. It's not hard to slide in some fake stuff under that name. It's going to take a lot of work to avoid undermining the entire platform without establishing a new per-domain presence.