So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.
I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.
But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.
Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"
I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.
That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.
If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.
Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.
This. Fucking. Sucks.
And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.
So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.
Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.
And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.
But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.
I would hope you'd be concerned by that.
But at this point, it feels like that's what people want. There is no desire to make this platform more usable for people with larger audiences.
Christ, just the fact that notifications aren't stacked makes using this really hard as someone with a sizable following.
If the culture is that anti-growth, if it's to remain that fractured and rudderless, I don't see a fun future here.
Fin
@Weirdaholic @metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify There are things that an instance moderator can do and things that an individual user can do, but they are less effective against a diffuse or persistent campaign of abuse (or both.)
There's also a lot of gaslighting where people talk about abuse and everyone who doesn't see it goes "Really? Are you sure it's that bad?"
@aris_tgd @metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify I guess people have to learn, that things can exist, even if they can't see them... :/
It's quite interesting, though, how bad we seem to be at handling moderation collectively.
@metrogn0me_gr @Weirdaholic @TechConnectify this is why I mentioned that people are working on these problems, but those systems are not in place now, and people's livelihoods depend on having them. If one system doesn't provide them, people will look elsewhere.
The answer to why people are using social media networks other than Mastodon is that their needs aren't getting met here and they don't have time to wait.
@metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify
I think the big difference is the amount of followers.
When you have tens of thousands of followers, your toots tend to get amplified, and amplified toots tend to get more attention, both good and unfortunately, quite bad.
@TechConnectify honestly your admin is supposed to be able to help you with that, and same with the admins of other instances and if they refuse to help then other instances are supposed to defederate from them.
I'm really sad to hear that it's not working for you, and wish it was working better but do not have any solutions.
@michaelgemar Twitter, for one! If for no other reason that it could automatically detect most harassment and make it hard to find or shadow ban it completely.
But that would be introducing an algorithm to the things you see, which people don't want
@TechConnectify Huh — my priors would have been that Twitter was bad at that sort of thing.
It’s really unfortunate there are no good current solutions on Mastodon. Its nature does allow for lots of experimentation, including by…instances…, but the fix clearly doesn’t exist yet.
@[email protected] From the lived experience of many Black Twitter users: There are *more* overt nazis on the Fediverse than on Twitter. There is *more* anti-Blackness on the Fediverse than on Twitter. Eg, The nonsense that happened to Ro last week, would not stand on Twitter. The *checks notes* close to 40 million Black Twitter users, including almost *checks notes* half a million Black trans users, would put a stop to that. Quickly. Mastodon is not necessarily less of a nazi bar for Black folk.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify
The linked post doesn't miss any point.
The post is written from the perspective of a Black person. In particular, me. 🙋🏿♂️
I don't care that you've never seen n*zis on your timeline. I've seen them on mine.
You're really replying that it misses the point, because it doesn't center your perspective and experience, and instead centers the perspective and experience of the person that wrote it?
Please tell me I'm misunderstanding your point here.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify
🤔 I genuinely can't tell if you're trolling, or are just really, really, slow on the uptake. I'm going to assume good faith, (which is the explanation that you're just not as quick on the uptake as other people).
What I'm doing to attract the Nazis, is being Black.
The Fediverse nazis like to find Black people to harass. In particular, Black women, but in a pinch, a Black guy like me will do.
also, the experience on a small instance like chaosfurs is very difference from a larger instance where, guess what, a lot of people follow Nazis and some people actually *are* Nazis. And most people are on large instances.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify
Even if your questions are in good faith, I'm not a good starter Black person to be in conversation with. I can't be your 1st Black friend.
I don't enjoy talking to people who are declarative in their ignorance, ie starts from "This Black dude is missing the point!" then to "OK, tell me where I'm wrong!"
It's exhausting, and there are so many ignorant people that I would never get through the day.
Find you a "Black friend 101." That ain't me.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify
I wish you well on your listening and learning journey but I won't be joining you on it. So please untag me.
Good luck! 👍🏿
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify
🤦🏿♂️ You're replacing what you *think* the Black experience would be, with *detailed, first hand, lived experience* from actual Black people?
Do you see why that's worse than simple ignorance? Ignorance is just not knowing.
I don't write my threads for people like you. That would be a big waste of time. I write them for people that don't know, but want to listen. Big difference.
Speaking of not listening, I'm muting to protect my peace. Be well!
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify So, lemme try a different tack here(after dropping Mekka)
I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. I’ve NEVER seen a Nazi post in my timeline1️⃣.
Now I can tell you why that is2️⃣, but imagine if I just told you “well, YOU must be doing something to bring them to you” or “there are no Nazis on Twitter because I don’t see them.
That’s how this sounds.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify 1️⃣ unless it was reposted by someone else to point it out, get the account reported, etc.
2️⃣ because I have/had my Twitter controls pretty tightly set and only used third party iOS Twitter apps that granted even finer control and NEVER used the “for you” timeline.
@Hurgotron Note I NEVER said there are no Nazis on Twitter. Just because I don’t see them, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Same with Mastodon. Just because YOU don’t see them doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It just means it’s not an issue for YOU (because they’re leaving you alone)
I took my steps BEFORE the nazis became an issue and I never thought about my settings until people started noting there was an issue and I started wondering why I wasn’t seeing it on Twitter.
@Hurgotron Ok glad you wrote the last part, because I was neither trying to show how good I am at Twitter, nor was I trying to say that Twitter isn’t a fucking morass of hell right now(it is).
There are a ton of threads on issues that Black/queer/BIPOC (Black, Indigenous & People Of Color) had on Mastdon.
(And be utterly clear, similar crap is happening over on BlueSky as well)
I’ll see if I can turn up a couple of the threads, I’m sure I bookmarked at least a few of them.
@Hurgotron @jdp23 @michaelgemar @TechConnectify The mechanism by which these groups find people to harass is, I imagine, pretty simple;
Go check out hashtags for popular posts.
Basically, they’re doing the same thing that someone looking to diversify their feed would do, except that their motive is to harass the people they find.
As someone who is YT and mostly masc presenting, they’re gonna leave me alone, someone like Mekka, they target.
@michaelgemar
There are lots of alternative clients/servers that aren't Mastodon with the potential to handle this better. (E.g. Firefish has interface-plugins) Unfortunately the whole Fediverse is not a mature system yet so we are all still finding our ways.
Because technically this is a non-issue, just fork and improve the system, done. But a) most people aren't able to do that and b) even if some did it getting the people that need it to use it is hard.
That's an interesting aspect of Twitter I've never really thought or heard about, presumably because I read dramatically more than I post. Was it just that negative-sentiment tweets would get hidden behind the "Read More" button or was there more than that?
... and if there was a Mastodon client that brought similar functionality but ran the algorithm client-side, would that be interesting?
@TechConnectify @michaelgemar well, that depends on who you are, really.
as a queer, neurodivergent person, I never had the benefit of those algorithms actually working in my favor. Heck, I experience less harassment in here than I did on Twitter!
Your home instance matters perhaps more in terms of “who it federates with” (and not even fediblock-wise, just the general crowd gathered around it), and less in terms of “who’s on it” / “what’s the moderation like”.
Anyhoo - I’m really sorry to hear that you’ve gotten treated like this. It’s hard to find a solution to this that doesn’t equate with wide, biased censorship, but I think that as a community, we should try and find ways to make it more bearable…
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