Mastodawn

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

bluesky are hilariously evil as a company. rationalist vibecamp crypto bro dipshits with nazi pals. their USERBASE, however, is awesome. i expect the company is wondering how the hell they deal with being the land of queer shitposters who bully people like Ian Dunt off.

Glitch (over count 1999)

@davidgerard they'll probably just proceed to alienate that userbase away with time by making incomprehensible project decisions.

honestly im mostly disappointed in those queer shitposters because if you're moving from birdsite to bluesky and stick around even once you know the hostile nature of the leadership... idk, it feels like at that point you're just a glutton for being alienated by big tech?

i mean if that gets them going sure, but i'd personally prefer a healthier approach.

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

@glitch frankly bluesky works for the job in ways that mastodon just doesn't seem to.

all platforms will die, along with humanity and civilisation. shitpost while we can.

i'm actually surprised bluesky has remained fun this long.

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 3, 2023

@davidgerard i guess, but i somehow still can find more respect for the people moving to say, cohost, than the people moving to bluesky.

like youre moving to a platform that's still centralized (cuz decentralization is one of those things only tech nerds like me care about, its something im willing to concede on) but at *least* you're not sitting with leadership that openly thinks the people who want you dead are a valid voice to be heard.

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

@glitch i think you're fundamentally in error to treat the dynamics of the platforms as fungible. the observable evidence is they aren't.

also, "sitting with leadership that openly thinks the people who want you dead are a valid voice to be heard" is literally most of twitter's history

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

@glitch like, you're sitting on mastodon telling people on another platform that they should move to your preferred platform, i'm sure you can appreciate they are unlikely to take that seriously

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 3, 2023

@davidgerard at least twitter has the excuse that people like jack were just genuinely stupid libertarians at the time who invented mass t&s over many years (which musk pissed away with the acquisition). same deal with reddit. to put it mildly, the average persons stance on moderation was a lot looser back then.

the idea of completely deplatforming only seriously took off as an "acceptable" opinion after it became clear how many social media sites were responsible for the mess that was 2016 US elections.

and no, like i said - i can bring up more respect for people that move to cohost (or heck, even back to tumblr if we're being honest here). i don't care if you move to fedi or not; for many people it's not the right answer and i get that. what i *can't* comprehend is why people would, after leaving a site because the owners openly despise them, move to a site where the owners would again equally despise them.

also - i realize you might be trying to annoy me here but i do not use mastodon thank you. i have not bought into Gargrons vision for the social media network mastodon, i prefer the fediverse tyvm

.

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

> people like jack were just genuinely stupid libertarians at the time

Jack personally stopped Richard Spencer from being banned. He is cryptofash in the techfash tendency, like his peers.

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 3, 2023

@davidgerard yes but at the time, at least the general perception wasn't on that side of the coin. the perception was that he was a stupid techlibertarian rather than an cryptofascist.

the acknowledgement that "hey, these social media sites are hosting nazis is like really bad" to the general public only happened after 2016 (if you want to get specific, only after unite the right in 2017 where twitter banned jason kessler for organizing that whole crap).

the "wow, jack was just doing damage control/really wanted people like spencer to stay" is for most people 20/20 hindsight.

David Gerard Jul 3, 2023

@glitch i think at this point your point has gone past coherence

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 3, 2023

@davidgerard its definitely drifted off-topic. shouldn't have gotten caught up in talking about jack.

still dont get why people would want to use bluesky of all websites though. like... almost any other social media is better.

Rep Rap Ryn :3 Jul 4, 2023

@glitch @davidgerard having talked to some folks who talk mad shit about Mastodon being hard and having bad UI, being queer doesn't make you immune from being a corpo simp.

Some folks can't fathom using an internet based on consent, paying for the actual stuff that runs it, and communities being self managed instead of a bunch of underpaid mods being forced to look at the worst stuff all day.

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 5, 2023

@reprapryn @davidgerard had a day to think and i don’t think it’s quite corpo simpery for the shitposters. many of the shitposters ive seen move to bluesky (used to follow a small chunk of them on twitter) aren’t corpo simps, at least not nominally.

rather, i think the reason they move to bluesky is that they just want to be a bully, and fedi comes down way harder on bullying and toxicity (mostly due to how its moderation tooling is set up) while bluesky explicitly doesn’t give a shit.

most of them don’t actually want the nazis completely gone, not as easily as fedi allows for it (while fedis mod tools aren’t great, the ability to suspend any direct instance interaction is a very good dampener on toxicity). they’re perfectly fine with the corporate whack-a-mole, but if it’s not there, that’s fine too. their popularity came from ridiculing nazis, they’re not about to give that up.

i don’t want to name specific people on this, but it does stand out that the queer shitposters whose biggest claim to fame was “lol, look at me ratioing this dumbfuck nazi” are the ones mostly on bluesky.

fedis mod tools (as well as having a history of defederating these types of instances from regular instances due to “friendly fire” - see witches dot town for an older example i happen to be familiar with) reduce that kind of interaction, which helps keep toxicity down.

bluesky pretty much doesn’t moderate and allows that kind of content to fester and get as popular as it was before. hence why they flock over to it and want to claim its superiority over mastodon - they want their audience and fedi doesn’t want to give it to them.

at least, that’s my current theory.

Rep Rap Ryn :3 Jul 5, 2023

@glitch @davidgerard sounds legit.

Dunk discourse and that sort of shitposting isn't fun to me. And it sounds like even a modicum of moderation and they will get nuked too.

David Gerard Jul 5, 2023

@glitch @[email protected] you spend way too long ranting in complete confidence about a site you have never looked at

Glitch (over count 1999)Jul 5, 2023

@davidgerard I have enough confidence that blueskys current popularity with queer shitposters is explicitly because the (lack of) moderation encourages dunking on Nazis rather than the moderation actually banning the Nazis.

I'm confident about it because I specifically blocked most of the initial group for constantly dumping their "funny dunks" in my twitter feed (indirectly through friends RTing them), making that site even more toxic than it already is on a regular basis.

David Gerard Jul 5, 2023

@glitch yeah that's great thanks