I’m seeing folks from #Sudan on #twitter despairing that the site’s new limits, and its general m*sk-era brokenness, will compromise their ability to stay updated on the catastrophe unfolding in their homeland and share emergency info.
Once more: mastodon/fediverse needs to think seriously about how to expand to users in Asia and Africa and how to handle emergencies #twitterdown
An infuriating story about how Musk’s changes to Twitter—restricting API access, gutting the engineering team + more—throttled disaster response in the #turkey #syria #earthquake. https://time.com/6254500/turkey-earthquake-twitter-musk-rescue/ Mastodon + fediverse need to expand beyond northern Europe and the Anglophone world, and consider what emergency response on this platform would look like; the lives of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. can’t be reliant on a billionaire’s whims
Good question! I don’t know, because I’ve never run a social network before—but I do know that who uses it and what they’re able to use it for are the result of deliberate decisions. It’s not an accident that masto is overwhelmingly anglophone and/or Northern European, or that discoverability is low even in an emergency
I listened earlier today to a Twitter space in which a Nigerian journalist said he’d attempted and failed to use Mastodon https://mstdn.social/@robotman/110641275799783143
I’ve now lost track of my mentions, but: thank you for engaging! Feel free to loop in folks who know more about these issues than I do, and to continue to highlight instances that have users in Asia and Africa.
Something that’s been jarring for me compared with Twitter is how few people on here are posting anything in Arabic, and how most Middle Eastern people I know from Twitter gave up quickly on the idea of joining Mastodon
Arbella Bet-Shlimon
CrazyMyra