Tag: Mastodon

Here’s an interesting essay from the other day, written by Erin Kissane (who has a couple of other Masto meditations) on the theme of why people have stopped using Mastodon… basically she popped the question on Bluesky (still waiting for that invite, JACK), collated the 500-odd responses she got back, and the title “Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t” kind of sums up the whole thing. An excerpt:

The most common—but usually not the only—response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 replies—had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured. Some people mentioned that they tried Mastodon during a rush of people out of Twitter and got what they perceived as a hostile response.
About half of the people whose primary or secondary reasons fit into this category talked about content warnings, and most of those responses pointed to what they perceived as unreasonable—or in several cases anti-trans or racist—expectations for content warnings. Several mentioned that they got scolded for insufficient content warnings by people who weren’t on their instance. Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work. […]
There obviously are unwelcoming, scoldy people on Mastodon, because those people are everywhere. I think some of the scolding—and less hostile but sometimes overwhelming rules/norms explanation—is harder to deal with on Mastodon than other places because the people doing the scolding/explaining believe they have the true network norms on their side.

There’s definitely something to this. One of my own least favourite aspects of Masto is the evangelising (one thing about Twitter is I almost never see anyone arguing how great it is; no idea if this is also true of Bluesky or Threads, cos as noted I still haven’t had an invite to the former (JACK) and I can’t even download the Threads app to see what it’s like cos my phone is such a piece of shit the Google Play store refuses to add it); it’s like, yeah, if we’re happy on here we already know why, we don’t need to be further convinced and you just look like you’re trying to convince yourself more than anyone else… and the bit about “true network norms” is a part of that, a sort of “the way, the truth, the life” thinking; we’ve found a thing that works for us, therefore it’s the way everyone should follow.

The responses I’ve seen so far on Mastodon itself have been interesting, including one chap who seemed to miss the point of the exercise and take some offence at it:

Like, good for Wyatt and the other people who have no issues with Mastodon, but… they weren’t the subject of Kissane’s question. The question was about people not happy with their Mastodon experience, and about 500 people on Bluesky reported dissatisfaction. Think that it might be YOU, Wyatt. Anyway, he attracted a certain amount of irritation, leading to a bit of a pile-on… of the sort you might have found on Twitter. Who says Mastodon’s nothing like Twitter at all…

Found an interesting article about what the author considers the failure of the move away from Twitter to Mastodon and other “fediverse” services. I myself was among the Twitter migrants to Mastodon after the Oolong takeover last November (https://aus.social/@inanimatecarbongod should anyone care), but I’m one of those who stayed; I know quite a few friends and other Twitter folks who set up accounts that they then didn’t use or barely used, and who consequently remained on the bird site. Which I also did, cos I’d intended to be one of those people who terminated their association with Twitter entirely, but time went on and too many people I knew kept using Twitter and so have I, though vastly less than I used to.

I dislike the moralising tone some Masto users take about people still on Twitter, that by staying there they’re basically enabling the latest coming of fascism or some similar formulation, much as I disliked the harrumphing against those Twitter users who found the new layout of Masto rather less intuitive than the old place. Cos when I first checked Mastodon out after the Tumblr “no more porn!” meltdown of 2018, it confused the fuck out of me. How the hell did this work? What was this business about instances? Though when I went to finally try it out last year I actually found it a lot easier to sign up and use than it first looked.

But what did Masto actually offer apart from a social media platform not being run by an actual fascist enabler? This is a question the article asks, and it finds Masto wanting, particularly when it comes to the decentralisation thing. I found this particularly pertinent:

Then there’s the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you’re linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won’t see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter’s handling, which is where you search for a username, can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.

Yeah, this for me has always been a major stumbling block for Mastodon. On Twitter you can just do things like this without the rigmarole that Masto insists on. That comparative ease of use is going to be a bigger draw for people to stay on Twitter than all the talk of decentralisation is a draw for Masto. The latter is a lot more pleasant to be around than Twitter, and I’ve encountered a bunch of people worth following there, but, to be honest, I’m not using it an awful lot either. In that I have a bit over 2000 posts on Masto since November, but my own original posts are very much in the minority; I find I’m a lot happier reposting other people’s stuff than I am making my own. (Much like how I’m using Twitter, in fact.) What energy I’ve got I want to use here rather than anywhere else.

Anyway, worth reading the whole article, though I was kind of struck by one of the comments:

Mastodon appears to be very welcoming to LGBTQ folks, communists, socialists, scientists, Apple users, and not so much to Democrats not right of Bernie, Microsoft, Corporations, Windows, and positively hostile to Nazis and associated Republicans.

This is basically part of the commenter describing their experience of Masto, and I’d say it’s fairly accurate… I’m just not sure about that last clause. The commenter is not actually pro-fash, it should be said, but I just find the wording a bit… odd. I mean, many Republicans are worth being hostile to, and there’s no reason not to be hostile to Nazis. Just seemed an odd thing to point out.