extropicone of the biggest things i internalized from gnusocial is that i don't have to passively accept whatever changes in lifestyle that big corporations decide to push on me. i don't have to passively accept ANY technology changes. i get to decide what technology i use and how i interact with the world through it. that was a big insight for me, and watching the mastodon timeline i'm seeing 100 thousand people slowly coming to the same realization. it's pretty powerful to watch and it reminds me to have empathy when they say shitty things about mastodon vs. gnusocial or the pre-existing community here. they are still recovering from their twitter stockholm syndrome. it's been a while since i've seen first hand how much social media is fucking up the brains of the world.
jmz🦀(CARCIFIED)@extropic there was also a while there where certain elements in the GNUsocial sphere were actively antagonistic towards mastodon.social–& of course visa versa. As usual, the ones who make the most noise make the first impression, & what I saw in my first few weeks of the masto PTL was newsbots, gross hentai, MRAs, nazi memes rolling in from GNUsocial. It took a lot of weeding & a bunch of defederation for me to learn that GNUsocial wasn't exclusively a gamergate/channer refuge!
there are a lot of things i could say about that, but i think the most important is this: behind every screen and every post is a human being with human emotions. nazi meme spammers make themselves unpleasant to talk to for a lot of reasons; fear, especially of rejection, as a way to test who is "in" or "out, etc. if you spend the time to talk to them and treat them like a human, you will often be surprised by what you find. if you treat them like garbage, you will only get garbage back. and if you filter them, you deny yourself and others the opportunity to learn and grow from each other. having to engage with those elements is what allows us to actually be human on gnusocial. recreating the twitter filter bubble here will just repeat the cycle.