Bartholomew Gallacher
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2018
- Messages
- 6,827
- SL Rez
- 2002
Well the thing with Mastodon is that it is federated, yes. And so far only had a small fraction of the amount of users Twitter has. In October 2021 Mastodon finally reached around 1 million users, meaning it took roughly six years to gain this user base.
For comparison: Barack Obama has around 133.3 million followers right now.
So there is much room for growth. For Mastodon one thing is crystal clear: it matters which server you are joining, because every server defines its own rules about which topics are allowed and not, meaning they are moderated and stuff might be censored as well.
And also don't think that Mastodon is a nice place, or better than Twitter. It is not. Actor and writer Wil Wheaton joined in 2018 Mastodon, after he shut down his Twitter account. His experience was dramatic and really bad, in his opinion Mastodon back then was actually a worse place than Twitter.
Shortly after he created his account, the admin of that server got 60 reports about it and shut it down.
To quote him: "I thought that if I left Twitter, I could find a new social network that would give it some competition (Twitter’s monopoly on the social space is a big reason it can ignore people who are abused and harassed, while punishing people for reporting their attackers), so I fired up this account I made at Mastodon a long time ago.
I thought I’d find something different. I thought I’d find a smaller community that was more like Twitter was way back in 2008 or 2009. Cat pictures! Jokes! Links to interesting things that we found in the backwaters of the internet! Interaction with friends we just haven’t met, yet! What I found was … not that.
I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go fuck yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.
I respect and support that person’s decision, because it’s a private server and it’s run with their time, energy, attention, and (presumably) money. I don’t agree with it at all, and I think it’s deeply unfair, as well as rewarding abuse of a reporting system that’s meant to protect users, but it’s their site and it’s their rules, and I can’t say I blame them. The people going after me were pretty awful, and I can only imagine that an admin would get fed up with them, too."
wilwheaton.net
For comparison: Barack Obama has around 133.3 million followers right now.
So there is much room for growth. For Mastodon one thing is crystal clear: it matters which server you are joining, because every server defines its own rules about which topics are allowed and not, meaning they are moderated and stuff might be censored as well.
And also don't think that Mastodon is a nice place, or better than Twitter. It is not. Actor and writer Wil Wheaton joined in 2018 Mastodon, after he shut down his Twitter account. His experience was dramatic and really bad, in his opinion Mastodon back then was actually a worse place than Twitter.
Shortly after he created his account, the admin of that server got 60 reports about it and shut it down.
To quote him: "I thought that if I left Twitter, I could find a new social network that would give it some competition (Twitter’s monopoly on the social space is a big reason it can ignore people who are abused and harassed, while punishing people for reporting their attackers), so I fired up this account I made at Mastodon a long time ago.
I thought I’d find something different. I thought I’d find a smaller community that was more like Twitter was way back in 2008 or 2009. Cat pictures! Jokes! Links to interesting things that we found in the backwaters of the internet! Interaction with friends we just haven’t met, yet! What I found was … not that.
I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go fuck yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.
I respect and support that person’s decision, because it’s a private server and it’s run with their time, energy, attention, and (presumably) money. I don’t agree with it at all, and I think it’s deeply unfair, as well as rewarding abuse of a reporting system that’s meant to protect users, but it’s their site and it’s their rules, and I can’t say I blame them. The people going after me were pretty awful, and I can only imagine that an admin would get fed up with them, too."
The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it.
As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network tha…
wilwheaton.net
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