I Was Wrong About Mastodon

https://escapingtech.com/tech/opinions/i-was-wrong-about-mastodon-moderation.html

by rbanffy • 4 years ago

16 1 4 years ago

Sloppy• 4 years ago

Some of the article's conclusions seem over simplified. Mastodon has federated moderation, some servers have almost none and others have strict rules--kind of like group message boards. The only rule you can apply to Mastodon of the future is huge variation--any rule of huge variation is an oxymoron :-) Some servers will be cesspools, others polite affairs...

The things that seem interesting about M are around "no algorithm" and separation of user groups by server membership. These help address the huge need to restrict the reach of messages, which is ignored and made worse by Twitter policies and algorithms. Twitter makes more money if people click on infuriating anger producing tweets and spend more time online reading and making them. They advantage this by teaching their algorithms to promote this type of content.

Mastodon has no algorithms and begins with a way to draw boundaries around reach by server-user spaces. It will stay this way until someone wants to make advertising money with Mastodon.

Twitter could drop ad revenue and the algorithm that feeds it brains but would then go bankrupt. They are a cancerous, leperous, zombie, unable to stop eating brains.

Give me a reasonably polite Mastodon server (keep your cesspool server) over feeding my brain to the zombie "bird".

I Was Wrong About Mastodon

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