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> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or

> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?

jeffbee 4y ago
Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  > Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not abide by the rules they set, every user has the possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team actually does its job properly. This is undoable on Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general statement of > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. holds any actual merit.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though. Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
  This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

jeffbee 4y ago

Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.

phoe-krk 4y ago
> Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not abide by the rules they set, every user has the possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team actually does its job properly. This is undoable on Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general statement of > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. holds any actual merit.
rsynnott 4y ago
> The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though. Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant