If I was to nominate the two things I find most striking about Mastodon they'd be:
1. the ability to edit posts after posting; this (as my followers will know) is a facility that I use a lot (and thanks to my great crew of typo spotters);
2. the norm of civility that we all maintain; of course trolling & slamming is not completely absent, but at least in my timeline & discussions/conversations civility have been the over-riding characteristic of my exchanges.
ha ha, the case of 1. immediately demonstrated - thanks for the typo spot!
@ChrisMayLA6 I’ve seen it noted that the civility follows the “social contract” formulation of tolerance.
E.g. people join, feel “safe” enough to start making transphobic comments, refuse to listen to polite responses and requests to please not, and then get chased out of the fediverse screaming “so much for the tolerant left!”.
I feel this is not an ideal solution, but I’m not sure how else it could go while still maintaining said social contract.
Of course, they are always welcome to create their own shard of the fediverse. That’s the whole point of the fediverse.
Indeed, when I've mentioned civility here before there have been comments that this might also be peculiar to my constellation of followers & discussions, but not seeing beyond my own interactions I'm unable to judge other than from my own direct experience
@ChrisMayLA6 I mean, I’ve personally had to block a couple of people who were just being awful. But by and large I consider the “constellation” thing to be a feature rather than a bug.
I’ve watched one person be hounded of because they insisted on making transphobic comments from their own personal instance while claiming it was “civil debate”. Again, not ideal but also not entirely sure that’s a bug - if they want to be bigoted they can create their own shard of the fediverse.
My own belief is that a lot of issues with people being uncivil comes from attempting to force a social network that puts us in contact with much greater than the ~150 people our brains are designed to deal with.
Also, what counts as “civil” in some spheres is very different to elsewhere - on a giant, flat social network people have “mates” discussions on the same forum as public debate, and it’s not always clear where the boundary lies.
Yes, that point on what counts as civil is key I think as @jwi pointed out there may also be a demographic element at play - my network may be skewed towards the civil?
@ChrisMayLA6 @jwi there’s a few ways I could interpret “demographic element”, so I may respond wrong here, but I think I’m essentially agreeing.
But I’m also saying that that clustered network is a feature rather than a bug, and people trained by big networks to think of them all as one place may be misinterpreting that.
Or in other words, people on the internet are always going to be awful. But the clustering on the fediverse gives a greater opportunity to create non awful sub-networks.
Yes, I think we *are* on the same page
@ChrisMayLA6 I concur wholeheartedly with both points you made, Chris.
The worst thing I can say about my time on Mastodon is that I've been called an idiot twice in 3 years.
Insults and foul language directed at me were a daily occurrence on Twitter.
My experience has been broadly similar, even when I have disagreed with people and they with me, things are always similar. In this I find that Fedi is more akin to real life, and that is perhaps due to their not being any rage baiting algorithms.
There are of course exceptions, not least people migrating from toxic platforms and bringing bad habits here...
@alexadeswift @ChrisMayLA6 Those folk get short shrift from me.
And the block button. :)
Likewise!!!
@ChrisMayLA6 I like all the features that enable my home feed to be as tailored to my wishes as possible.
I think Alt Text and CW use are wonderful plus points of mastodon.
@ChrisMayLA6 I’d agree, although it’s also possible we’re not in a group that attracts abusive types. Mastodon structure means we don’t always see all the replies other people get, hopefully that will change.
This could be an effect of non-algorithmic networks not sending up troll flares to attract trolls, damping aggression rather than actively generating conflict and maximising it.
Similarly, it may just be too hard for paid interests to widely penetrate a damp system.
yes, and as others have suggested/implied, the federated, fragmented network is a feature that undermines easy trolling rather than a bug (as other networks might see it)
@ChrisMayLA6 These two features are fantastic - but there's another that is an order of magnitude more important - and enormously more satisfying!
And that is that the messages in my feed arrive raw and unfiltered from the people I follow in the order that they write them.
No algorithm.
No manipulation of what I see.
No idiot box in my pocket.
Nirvana!
People on the Fediverse are simply nice, in general, I find.
I'm fortunate to be on a good instance though, who I'm sure do a good job of keeping the forces of darkness away.
I genuinely feel fortunate to have this polite, inclusive corner of the internet as I do, as I'm otherwise quite socially isolated.
I'm sure many people here spent time on bulletin boards back in the day, and the civil vibe on here feels not dissimilar to the assorted forums I used to frequent in the 90s.
You are so spot on with this indeed…
And both are in fact about quality in discussion, thinking a layer deeper beyond the surface. Beyond the moment…
And as a third I would say the absence of algorithms, the fact that you seed it yourself by following people and those following you.
@ChrisMayLA6 I thought editing posts was a "nice to have" feature, until I tried Bluesky. Now I realize how *crucial* it is.
If not just for fixing silly typos, it's especially important for fixing the alt text if I make a mistake or omit an important detail.
So in a way, it's an accessibility feature.
also ...
no algorithm tricking you into seeing posts that the algorithm wants you to see.
vanity seekers hate mastodon because your followers are real and it's harder to make the follower count number be artificially high.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
TM
Jens-Peter M. Zemke
JW
Faye
Alex P Roe 
Petra van Cronenburg
Peter Brown
Steve Woods
Alexa Devreux-Swift
Broadfork
Peet Tetteroo
AM💙🏴
BashStKid
Britstralian
Shivviness
xs4me2
Haji Mokhtar Stork
warning low flying owls
Nick
Steve Williams
Khleedril
Stefan Bohacek
Marianne
(^^)