Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it

by jboynyc • 9 years ago

52 45 9 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

ryanx435• 9 years ago

So it's twitter with less content.

vnchr• 9 years ago

Less Nazi content, in particular

dv_dt• 9 years ago

But is this by integral design, or just by current circumstance?

busterarm4• 9 years ago

I wasn't aware that Twitter, or really anyone in 2017, had a Nazi problem.

INTPenis• 9 years ago

Less users would be more appropriate, given the title.

The more users, the more diverse people you'll run into.

But I thought the article described it in the wrong way. Mastodon was down. Well one instance was down for the author because some big names had signed up on it.

The emphasis should be on it being decentralized. A modern day IRC where any community can run their own nodes and communicate with other nodes.

Running big communities is a challenge regardless of technology, just see Freenode for example.

I remember running IRC Networks back in the day, it required time, money and organisation. Sometimes even donations.

blowski• 9 years ago

First time I've heard of Mastodon, but I really hope it takes off. Social networks are now too integrated into modern life to be completely owned by private corporations.

daliwali3• 9 years ago

Since it's decentralized that means there wouldn't be an effective way to ban someone from the network without consensus. Anyone, "Nazi" or not, would be free to post offensive content without a central authority policing users as is the case with Twitter. I don't think this is actually a solution that certain users and most advertisers want.

pbtflakes2• 9 years ago

Mastodon.social would ban them, and if other instances don't police content sufficiently then Mastodon.social doesn't have to federate with them.

busterarm4• 9 years ago

That doesn't sound very decentralized to me.

daliwali3• 9 years ago

It would defeat the purpose of federation if there's a different server for each political persuasion. Why bother with federation if you don't want to see anything you disagree with? Each server would be its own hugbox.

zephyrfalcon2• 9 years ago

"We" are not using it for the same reason nazis are not using it: because hardly anyone's there. It needs critical mass first. Once that happens, nazis/trolls/etc will find their way there too, I'm afraid.

guelo• 9 years ago

Nazis are banned by policy.

FreeFull• 9 years ago

I doubt that Twitter's policy is very nazi-friendly either.

tomjen3• 9 years ago

That worked well for the Rhineland.

zephyrfalcon2• 9 years ago

Yes, but according to the article, Mastodon only has 35K users at the moment. The question is how they're going to enforce this policy when/if it reaches Twitter size (hundreds of millions of users). When armies of trolls show up making hit-and-run accounts, that's going to be hard to combat.

Then again, Twitter has been notoriously uninterested in fighting this kind of problem. In fact, they don't seem to care much at all what their users think (editing tweets, anyone?), probably because users are not a direct source of income for them (but advertisers are). This is different in the case of Mastodon. It would be interesting to see what kind of solution they might come up with.

mod• 9 years ago

If we use it, the nazis will come.

PS: this reads just like a big old advertisement.

PPS: the scrolljacking is real on this page.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

VICE lost me as a reader when they overhauled their sites and made them shitty to unusable. I would have stuck around using reader view, but their writing quality has gone down again too.

rmc3• 9 years ago

If we use it, the nazis will come.

Mastodon.social explicitly bans nazis:

The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in revocation of access to the service: Sexual depictions of children Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism

metaphorm2• 9 years ago

Twitter addicted journalists have started to perceive their tweeting as one of the most important aspects of their job. This is not good for journalism or society.

You know what a better solution to Twitter problems would be than "clean" Twitter? No Twitter. Just drop it. This is a problem not a solution.

LordWinstanley3• 9 years ago

Twitter seems to have become an alternative to Reuters or AP for most journalists the days. Even major newspapers and news organisations seem to 'back up' their articles with numerous quoted tweets —as if the half-baked shite spewing out of Twitter in response to World events was some kind of confirmation of a story's authenticity.

metaphorm2• 9 years ago

it's pretty disturbing. I wish I had better insight into the causes of this but from where I sit (an outsider in a different industry) it looks like a noxious combination of race-to-the-bottom, intellectual and professional laziness, lowered standards, groupthink, and institutional corruption.

Neliquat• 9 years ago

Who is worried about nazis? Really? Any why take any default political stance as a medium. About as smart as voat's strategy of going the opposite direction.

mindcrash• 9 years ago

Nazi, noun -- A person with a opinion "we" do not like/agree with.

See also: libertarian, classical liberal, conservative.

Update: -3 points for mocking the world view of, apparently, a shit ton of people these days? Damn...

synicalx• 9 years ago

Mustn't disagree with the hivemind, it bites

jitl• 9 years ago

Why is this flagged?

Grue3• 9 years ago

There's a popular adage that technology only becomes useful when it starts being used for porn. The reason is that, when the technology was thought up, the idea was not to use it for porn, but for something else. However the fact that the porn industry has independently found the technology useful, despite it not being targeted at them at all, shows the true potential of the technology.

The same can be said about social networks, except swap porn for nazis.

LordWinstanley3• 9 years ago

So, you complain about Twitter's inherent lack of freedom, then offer an alternative which "bans nazis"? Given the frequency with which internet debates end up invoking Godwin's Law, that sounds even worse than what it's trying to replace. Who decides who's a nazi?

I'm also confused by the distinction (or relationship) between this and GNUsocial. The article seems to suggest that Mastodon is an instance of (or at least compatible with) GNUsocial. The Mastodon FAQ seems to suggest it's a completely separate and incompatible thing.

FWIW, there are already several longer established GNUsocial-based almost-clones of Twitter out there, offering more than Mastodon seems to. Personally, I use Quitter, to scratch my FOSS 'twittering' itch:

https://quitter.no

progval• 9 years ago

Mastodon uses OStatus to communicate between instances, so it's totally compatible with GNU Social. I checked it myself.

LordWinstanley3• 9 years ago

What I would like to see from any of these FOSS alternatives to Twitter is a way to import your existing Twitter archive.

I don't know if it's colossal arrogance, or colossal stupidity that makes so many developers launch their "Alternative to Hugely Successful Product X" without giving people any way of bringing across their existing "Product X" content, that they may have spent years creating.

ksrm• 9 years ago

Why on earth was this flagged?

Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?

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