4 ms·

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the l

by woah 4y ago

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there. Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.

ipaddr 4y ago
Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs
- duhtritus 4y ago
  Just wait for the Anti Defamation League or another partisan organization to release a dynamic blocklist of Mastodon servers to allow leftist admins to outsource all their moderation decisions. Leave it to the Twitter secessionists/expats to build a whole layer of centralization and control on top of a decentralized, federated system.
Ericson2314 4y ago
It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs. I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!
- kzrdude 4y ago
  It might be good for everyone to know that "DMs" on mastodon are not even secret, anyone can sniff them if they read the traffic between two instances.
  - easrng 4y ago
    That's not true. The two instances (and potentially their admins, though there isn't a UI for it) see the DMs, but the connection between instances is HTTPS.
paulgb 4y ago
I think you’re underestimating the number of people hedging their bets on twitter not for ideological reasons, but because a company left with a billion dollars in annual interest is going to have to squeeze that out of whichever users remain. Whether it is through ads or fees, the dynamic on the site will change substantially.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zimpenfish 4y ago
> He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. He technically does, doesn't he? Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, IIRC.
- easrng 4y ago
  It doesn't federate though.
kaba0 4y ago
Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform knows that “unmoderated free speech” is just shitposting. Also, I don’t see how death threats, n-words and the like would contribute to any discussion.
- kragen 4y ago
  The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US today as a result. The press in the US had unmoderated free speech for over a century until the FCC was established, and print publishing still does. That's why the New York Times bought the first Gatling guns: they were inciting violence (specifically, the Civil War) and justifiably feared that rioters would try to lynch them. Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. Freenet still does. It's not a bullshit idea. Just an unpopular one.
  - moistly 4y ago
    > Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet became a hell hole. Regulation is, IMO, preferable to seeing unsolicited illegal pornography in one’s social media firehouse. I will argue that no civil society has ever had a truly free press. To my knowledge, there has never been legal press publication of the images Usenet propagated.
twmiller 4y ago
"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there." My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.
- throwawayacc4 4y ago
  My observation is that the modern leftt wing social media user only thrives when there are 'conservative Nazis' around that they can piss off. Hence Lemmy, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the left wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to virtue signal over. We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon is bringing ideological equality to the platform. For leftists/liberals, this equality feels like oppression after years of dominance and privilege on Twitter.
  - twmiller 4y ago
    I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can virtue signal to people inside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) virtue signaling going on in the fediverse, for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the left getting the same sort of kicks out of pissing people off that people on the right seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      I’m just grabbing my popcorn and can’t wait to watch the inevitable splits. Each of the communities will split into 2, will split into 2, etc. They just can’t help themselves.
    - 4y ago
BlueTemplar 4y ago
You might want to look at what happened when Gab switched to Mastodon, and/or when Trump basically made a Mastodon server called "Truth Social", which was some years ago... (Note also that you are not much of a (societal) liberal if you don't value freedom of speech. But therefore this isn't so much of a left vs right than a top vs bottom issue...)
mcv 4y ago
> The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. I think this represents what's really going on. Firstly, Musk is not a "free speech absolutist". The issue is moderation policies. Every single platform moderates. Even 4chan. Any platform that doesn't, gets overrun by spam. If not spam, then by bots, or trolls, or something else that makes normal conversations impossible. Moderation is about sign-to-noise ratios. Everybody, both left and right, wants a good signal-to-noise ratio, but they disagree about what they consider signal and what they consider noise. The problem with Musk's takeover is that he sounds like he doesn't have the first clue about how moderation works and what all the concerns are. The things he says about Twitter keep contradicting each other. It undermines a lot of people's faith in his leadership, and therefore the future direction of Twitter. And that's the attraction of the fediverse: it offers real freedom of speech, and you get more control over moderation. Everybody wins. > Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance He already does that. Truth Social is Mastodon. So is Gab. It's just that Truth Social blocks every other instance, and everybody blocks Gab.

by woah 4y ago

ipaddr 4y ago

Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs

duhtritus 4y ago
Just wait for the Anti Defamation League or another partisan organization to release a dynamic blocklist of Mastodon servers to allow leftist admins to outsource all their moderation decisions. Leave it to the Twitter secessionists/expats to build a whole layer of centralization and control on top of a decentralized, federated system.

Ericson2314 4y ago

It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs. I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!

kzrdude 4y ago
It might be good for everyone to know that "DMs" on mastodon are not even secret, anyone can sniff them if they read the traffic between two instances.
- easrng 4y ago
  That's not true. The two instances (and potentially their admins, though there isn't a UI for it) see the DMs, but the connection between instances is HTTPS.

paulgb 4y ago

I think you’re underestimating the number of people hedging their bets on twitter not for ideological reasons, but because a company left with a billion dollars in annual interest is going to have to squeeze that out of whichever users remain. Whether it is through ads or fees, the dynamic on the site will change substantially.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

zimpenfish 4y ago

> He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. He technically does, doesn't he? Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, IIRC.

easrng 4y ago
It doesn't federate though.

kaba0 4y ago

Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio... There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform knows that “unmoderated free speech” is just shitposting. Also, I don’t see how death threats, n-words and the like would contribute to any discussion.

kragen 4y ago
The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US today as a result. The press in the US had unmoderated free speech for over a century until the FCC was established, and print publishing still does. That's why the New York Times bought the first Gatling guns: they were inciting violence (specifically, the Civil War) and justifiably feared that rioters would try to lynch them. Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. Freenet still does. It's not a bullshit idea. Just an unpopular one.
- moistly 4y ago
  > Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet became a hell hole. Regulation is, IMO, preferable to seeing unsolicited illegal pornography in one’s social media firehouse. I will argue that no civil society has ever had a truly free press. To my knowledge, there has never been legal press publication of the images Usenet propagated.

twmiller 4y ago

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there." My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.

throwawayacc4 4y ago
My observation is that the modern leftt wing social media user only thrives when there are 'conservative Nazis' around that they can piss off. Hence Lemmy, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the left wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to virtue signal over. We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon is bringing ideological equality to the platform. For leftists/liberals, this equality feels like oppression after years of dominance and privilege on Twitter.
- twmiller 4y ago
  I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can virtue signal to people inside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) virtue signaling going on in the fediverse, for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the left getting the same sort of kicks out of pissing people off that people on the right seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    I’m just grabbing my popcorn and can’t wait to watch the inevitable splits. Each of the communities will split into 2, will split into 2, etc. They just can’t help themselves.
  - 4y ago

BlueTemplar 4y ago

You might want to look at what happened when Gab switched to Mastodon, and/or when Trump basically made a Mastodon server called "Truth Social", which was some years ago... (Note also that you are not much of a (societal) liberal if you don't value freedom of speech. But therefore this isn't so much of a left vs right than a top vs bottom issue...)

mcv 4y ago

> The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. I think this represents what's really going on. Firstly, Musk is not a "free speech absolutist". The issue is moderation policies. Every single platform moderates. Even 4chan. Any platform that doesn't, gets overrun by spam. If not spam, then by bots, or trolls, or something else that makes normal conversations impossible. Moderation is about sign-to-noise ratios. Everybody, both left and right, wants a good signal-to-noise ratio, but they disagree about what they consider signal and what they consider noise. The problem with Musk's takeover is that he sounds like he doesn't have the first clue about how moderation works and what all the concerns are. The things he says about Twitter keep contradicting each other. It undermines a lot of people's faith in his leadership, and therefore the future direction of Twitter. And that's the attraction of the fediverse: it offers real freedom of speech, and you get more control over moderation. Everybody wins. > Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance He already does that. Truth Social is Mastodon. So is Gab. It's just that Truth Social blocks every other instance, and everybody blocks Gab.