4 ms·

I do understand (and suffer from it from time to time, too) the reflex to put labels on bubbles. But in this case, I'm probably the wrong addressee since I'm re

I do understand (and suffer from it from time to time, too) the reflex to put labels on bubbles. But in this case, I'm probably the wrong addressee since I'm regularly confronting myself with world views spanning over allover the political spectrum. I'm actively researching for data and arguments from other bubbles than mine and regularly learn something new through that. With toxicity I was referring to the ill-fated activist groups sh*tposting things about each other and newspaper headlines crafted to produce anger-driven traffic. Something, which doesn't give me anything but depressions.

sbuttgereit 4y ago
We're talking about the same toxicity. I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir. But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...: "New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun. Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest" (https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465 https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465) "Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context. No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight." (https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093 https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093) "Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep" (https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content) "The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids. Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*" (https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work). And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made. This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically. So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).
- nforgerit 4y ago
  Interesting! I guess then my usage of Mastodon is making it the "zero toxic" thing it is for me. - As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters). - So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website. - I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools). - Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff. - I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.
  - sbuttgereit 4y ago
    I think my main issue with your original post is that you expressed what you've achieved as a generality and not as the result of your specific, active curation of your Mastodon experience. That you can achieve warm, cozy, and non-toxic with active curation is not something I'd dispute. But I'd maintain that experience is not the default experience and I'm not sure that's so different to what you could also achieve with Twitter either (I could be wrong here, been along time since I used Twitter). To be fair, I'm not sure that anything trying to have the reach and be of similar purpose to Twitter can escape some flavor of Twitter's fate... whether that is leftist or rightist dystopia being irrelevant to the point. And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.

sbuttgereit 4y ago

We're talking about the same toxicity. I do agree there is less shitposting, but there's a fair amount of it nonetheless. Many other of those activist posts are toned down here... because I expect their expectations are they are largely preaching to the choir. But just scrolling through the "toots" (again, at mastodon.social) on the main landing page I get...: "New Yorkers yelling at nazis is fun. Proud Boys bloodied and jailed during NYC drag queen story hour protest" (https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465 https://mastodon.world/@StillIRise1963/110051510087068465) "Nate Silver's brain seems to be broken. The "data guy" is literally citing a Twitter poll as if it's meaningful in a political context. No wonder ABC News is trying to sell off FiveThirtyEight." (https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093 https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/110052597467670093) "Yet another wealthy #GOP donor turns out to be an accused pedophile, groomer, and sex trafficker. You'd almost think the party's obsessive focus on demonizing drag queens and library books was a crude act of misdirection. #USpolitics https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep https://apnews.com/article/lazzaro-rep" (https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 https://newsie.social/@stevesilberman/110050892922689946 ... mastodon.social showed this to me while scrolling, but clearly this is an example of federated content) "The neo-Nazis are creeping around, kids. Remember, every neo-Nazi/MAGA chud/Jordan Peterson fan is a real person with feelings and gross insecurities who is also a loathsome cnt undeserving of a second of your time or attention unless you are a law enforcement agent working in counter-terrorism. Block immediately, report often.*" (https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 https://beige.party/@GrimmReality/110051420547135356 again, federation at work). And the replies are, as far as I could tell while casually browsing, all reinforcing.... none at all trying to moderate the severity or civility of the points being made. This isn't that different than what I saw I Twitter over the years, except there you saw it from many different sides of various debates. And note that my comments aren't about the issues being discussed: it's chiefly about the way they are discussed: toxically. So I'm sorry, I don't doubt your intentions and that you really do feel more at home and welcome on Mastodon. But it's not because federation has solved the problem of Twitter-like toxicity: it hasn't, not at all. It's maybe reduced it a bit because the filters for ideology are greater (whether those filters are implemented by administrators refusing users or federating to certain servers or because Mastodon is only attracting people of a certain mindset).

nforgerit 4y ago
Interesting! I guess then my usage of Mastodon is making it the "zero toxic" thing it is for me. - As said, I'm hosting my own instance, and I understood in the beginning that I don't just want to see the federated stuff (mostly weird sexualized anime images with way-too-young characters). - So I manually searched through catalogs of instances listed at the website. - I went through most of those instances, searched for users with followers and read their first couple of posts to see if they're human and interesting by any means (e.g. I happened to stumble upon a librarian instance and have learned so much about their day-to-day worklife and tools). - Now I'm following like 900 people and have ~270 followers. That's more than enough to fill the no-algo timeline with interesting stuff. - I'm only using the Home timeline and almost never the federated one, sometimes searching, hashtags etc.
- sbuttgereit 4y ago
  I think my main issue with your original post is that you expressed what you've achieved as a generality and not as the result of your specific, active curation of your Mastodon experience. That you can achieve warm, cozy, and non-toxic with active curation is not something I'd dispute. But I'd maintain that experience is not the default experience and I'm not sure that's so different to what you could also achieve with Twitter either (I could be wrong here, been along time since I used Twitter). To be fair, I'm not sure that anything trying to have the reach and be of similar purpose to Twitter can escape some flavor of Twitter's fate... whether that is leftist or rightist dystopia being irrelevant to the point. And to be fair I've even toyed with the idea of setting up Mastodon instances (though probably using different server software) focused on strictly civil/professional discussions as part of the rule set. But of course this leaves most of the "federating" part of the equation off the table and leads me to my next observation. The only social networking that I've found that is genuinely warm and cozy, by default, are some of the Discourse communities. They are absolutely small, disconnected islands of community, but by being topical and smaller I think they avoid the toxic by default characteristics that broadly generalized communities devolve into. Of course, Discourse communities can be built around toxic content, too, but you just don't sign up: what you see is what you get. I think this more topically focused social media is really the best way to avoid the cruft compared to the open community approach.