Roni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023

During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.

Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.

I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.

#MastoAdmin #Fediverse #SocialMedia

Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023

Btw, I've gotten really harsh criticism for just saying "Be kind"... that won't stop me from saying it. We can always be kind and I can say "be kind" out of kindness. Encouraging to kindness is not rudeness and I can't wrap my head around it why would it be anything else than focusing on the positive side of things.

There are always people who focus on negativity, pessimism and hate. Whatever hits me, I choose to smile. #Positivity #Kindness #Attitude

Show threadOcéane
@rolle Yes, it happens with abuse survivors…
Aug 5, 2023 at 11:08amWeb
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023

@oceane Sure. I'm an abuse survivor. Encouraging to kindness is not downplaying experiences.

I like what Eddie Jaku, a holocaust survivor said in his book:

“I do not hate anyone, not even Hitler. Hate is a disease which may destroy your enemy but will destroy you in the process. You may not like everyone, but that doesn’t give you the right to be nasty to them. I don’t love everyone but I hate no one. There is no revenge; ­staying alive is the only revenge."

Agree 100%.

Show threadOcéaneAug 5, 2023
@rolle So, I'm an abuse survivor too! And I also think that what we call “bullying” is abuse, 100% of the time. The abuse survivors I'm talking about are also abusing people, especially infrastructure maintainers.

1. The problem here is of course the Reddit migration in which Facebook has contacted major infrastructure maintainers to have private meetings under NDAs. I have a French-speaking draft somewhere on my computer…
2. These people are targeting infrastructure maintainers because, of course, they concentrate too much power. Which is of course why Facebook has contacted them, to (1) get a grip on the Fediverse, and (2) put them under pressure. They know we would abuse them because that's how Facebook works, they even have tons of data and they can conduct research on unconsenting users if they need to.
3. This isn't an excuse but having unfortunately to hear the French political discourse on “online hate” I know that focusing on individuals won't solve anything (and isn't meant to). We could and I think should focus on why these people are still abusive after years of presence on the Fediverse: I know that Twitter is abusive, I've made a relatively popular blog post about it (it has about half the views of my entire blog, so that's “relatively” in its literal meaning). I think that Mastodon, as a Twitter clone, also does abuse its users (as does the software that I'm using right now, Firefish) and that we should focus on how this software is still abusing people. IMO, it's because Twitter only fitted to a fraction of the population use cases' – it wasn't usable by most of us but still had to to stay economically relevant. So the entire Twitter experience is very different according to who uses it, what are their professions and relationships to people and institutions. The people who are basically manipulated to use it but shouldn't are scammed, on the long term, through institutions – which is abuse. And Mastodon absolutely takes on being a Twitter clone and absolutely can't help itself from abusing people as a Twitter clone.

The internet doesn't have to suck, it's only a matter of platforms. I don't really wonder why…
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023
@oceane I don't fully agree on the "Mastodon is a Twitter clone" part though.
Show threadOcéaneAug 5, 2023
@rolle Mastodon, like Twitter,

(1) makes access to information rather scarce, leaving us at waiting for information to fall into our timelines, and putting us in concurrence for our neighbors' attention, which is useful to Twitter, in various ways,
(2) broadly speaking, only provides affordances to be to rich people. Teenagers with a low cultural capital, including mentally disabled ones, only have affordances to seem (cf. Debord, 1970). For example, a biography is pretty different according to your own symbolic capital (your personal projects, or whatever you've founded come as examples among others). What can you put in your biography when you're just a blue collar worker who doesn't compete for economic/cultural/social/symbolic capital in any field (Bourdieu, 1984)?

Bourdieu, Pierre: “Distinction”, 1984
Debord, Guy: “The Society of the Spectacle”, 1970
Show threadRoni Rolle LaukkarinenAug 5, 2023
@oceane Ok now I have no idea what you're talking about.