meta thoughts
literally-have-yet-to-get-out-of-my-bed wake up take:
mastodon has a lot of the same problems as twitter because mastodon /is/ twitter, and as time goes on the problems will continue to converge due to this
meta thoughts
mastodon solves one problem (run by a single for profit corporation) but at the cost of a great number of other problems:
- who you can see is now subject to wildly divergent and inconsistent rules across every setup
- rules are arbitrarily enforced and often have no way of appealing or even knowing of violations
- users are at the whim of the owner and instances can (and have) vanished with no warning
meta thoughts
it also still has the same disadvantages as any microblogging system;
- general lack of organization (unless you make 50 accounts)
- only real option to see updates is "the firehose" timeline; easy to miss things from quiet people
- still encourages and runs off of the "viral content feels good" engine, esp with changes to show boost-reply-fav counts
meta thoughts
my "favorite" problem is the dogpiling one, which is aided directly by how things work in these formats
- someone posts something ill-advised
- everyone sees it; checking for updated information is Effort and users never do that, but wow i could score points by dunking
- user gets dunked on by a bunch of people, some of whom actually wanted to help, because nobody is aware of anybody else doing it
- "wow this feels awful, fuck it"
meta thoughts
like at least in forum threads there's usually an impetus to read the rest of it before jumping into replying to an old post, but here there's often no real way to do that. esp if the post is private or replies have been dms
meta thoughts
quoting someone else (🔒):
"i had a thought about this earlier: centralized social media is, in a way, social homelessness. it razed our small communities and put us all in open lots; we try to make homes here, but in view of everyone else, who can see us and judge us. mastodon isn't immune to this either."
while we have "local timelines", how many of you actually pay attention to yours? unless you joined a specific theme instance in the first place, i'd wager not many
meta thoughts
@Xkeeper i actually watch the local timeline here about as much as i do my main one
one of the appeals of this place for me was that local timelines on instances that attracted you would likely have others who you'd mesh well with--and that's part of the reason i kinda don't care for massive instances
i'm probably very much an outlier though--like, i also use tweetmarker on birdsite so i don't miss anything by people i follow (which also means i limit how many peeps i follow)
