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This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter a
by tomku 4y ago
This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter addicts and left for Mastodon have become Mastodon addicts. They've kept all the self-destructive attitudes they learned on Twitter and view Mastodon as better precisely because it lets them indulge with less out-group interference.
I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology.
The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.
- asim 4y agoGood rationale and I agree with all of it. Looks like Mastodon has become the self reinforcing echo chamber of the far right for any group. Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? There's a feeling of safety in that lack of challenge. A lot of people will say twitter is an abusive place and I don't disagree but to never have your points of view ever challenged again is incredibly dangerous. It's the path towards ignorance. We as humans are imperfect and constantly learning. Part of that means accepting that maybe our opinions or viewpoints could be wrong and taking a step back to think about it when someone does question the things we say. Now there's communities on Mastodon where that will never happen again. It'll be something that creates a new type of privilege. The privilege of choosing to be and believe whatever you want without anyone ever telling you you're wrong.
- lapcat 4y ago> Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? No. Some people don't view social media as "debate club". We never signed up for debate club. I personally signed up for Twitter at a software developer conference, and I used Twitter to meet other software developers, social network, and exchange information related to tech. I had no interest in debating politics or whatever. Twitter is possibly the worst possible place in the world to debate politics, given its format. It's a weird assumption that Twitter is the best or only possible place to have your ideas challenged. Go to school. Ready a book. Talk with people you know. Tweeting sound bites at rando strangers typically goes nowhere fast.
- asim 4y agoThat's not what I'm saying. It's that the people that were challenged chose to put out their thoughts in a way that welcomed it. If all you're there to do is meet fellow developers and network is should be no issue. I never ended up in situations of devolving debate. Not once. But there's a lot of people who want to put out their strong thoughts without recourse. If you use a public platform to make bold statements which 50% of the world will oppose and it welcomes comments as twitter does then you should expect to be challenged. Again it's not about saying twitter is debate club. For the majority of people that's not the case for the outliers it is though and they don't like it.
- lapcat 4y agoI'm not sure I understand what you're saying. If people want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people are debating. If they don't want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people aren't debating. Everyone gets what they want. That's good, isn't it?
- asim 4y agoYes people should go to a place where healthy discussion is fostered. I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter. If you're going to tweet publicly then it welcomes commentary, it's part of the system. If people want to put out their thoughts in an echo chamber then Mastodon is probably a better place for it.