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Maybe, but it seems to me like this is an entirely predictable result. The people moving to Mastodon are (anecdotally, based on my observation) mostly the people who were most zealous in their political opinions. Which is to say, they are the ones who were by far the most likely to start purity spiraling and attacking people they don't like. Essentially, Mastodon got an influx in some of the most censorious Twitter users, so of course they're going to be censorious when they get to their new platform.
If you've been online for a while you've probably seen this story before.
I remember the split of Atheism+ - basically atheism + an even more strident version of the progressive politics that most liberal atheists already shared - from the general New Atheist/Skeptic camps after Elevatorgate and how its forums spiraled so fast into policing every single element of speech and turning into a circular firing squad.
If anything the more shocking thing is how this mindset - which was mocked as fringe at the time- slowly became so pervasive on the Left, even amongst the alleged grownup orgs and people.
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But the key is that their censoriousness worked on twitter despite them having less direct power, which is why people like Silver didn't criticize them until they were safely gone. Something about twitter (and reddit) allowed radicals to organize to hurt people without spiraling into self-destructive turbo-insanity the way they are on mastodon.
The presence of various outgroups and a mechanism to punish them provided them with a lightning rod for their free-floating anger and an incentive to band together. Now that they are among themselves, they have to turn on each other if they want a good fight.
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Silver started picking fights with his followers last year already, at least over the Covid issue, where he became a supporter of ending the restrictions quite a bit before it was a liberal consensus in the United States.
I didn't know that, thanks. That must have legitimately taken a lot of courage, and explains why he has so many dedicated mastodon-and-mask-in-bio reply trolls to every tweet he makes now. That struck me as an odd hatebase for him to have picked up.
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