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Ooh, I’m glad you made this writeup. There’s quite a dose of schadenfreude in seeing a different group faced with seven zillion witches.
If I understand the structure of Mastodon—I’m envisioning a certain Bugs Bunny clip—then this is not working as intended. It’s unhinged and hilarious, yet not terribly surprising.
What’s most interesting is the determination of activists to import Twitter culture. Their course of action is supposed to be defederation. The offender only loses access to instances which can’t tolerate something, not to his home turf. This obviously runs counter to the sense of “justice served” inherent to cancellation.
I think the stable equilibrium, here, is aggressively unresponsive instances focused on easily-legislated moderation. Journal.based accepts all links to mainstream publications, doesn’t moderate for content, and doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. Then journal.host can filter on top of that or just flounce and federate with someone who will.
It’s not clear that Mastodon will actually converge on such a solution. If the userbase is homogenous, perhaps because of selection pressures on those who leave Twitter, there may never be demand for apolitical instances. Is there any point in moderating an instance that’s not meant for end-users? Do hosts see some benefit from additional layers of federation? Wait, how’s Urbit doing lately?
There’s another stable state where the platform collapses. A sufficiently fragmented fediverse offers all the risk of social media with little of the benefits. This will happen if activists consistently implode any server large enough for a brand to put in effort.
Which brings us to Raspberry pi, facing the more traditional problem of amateur PR. It’s amplified, not created, by the shiny new format. I think the appropriate response is to find new, more general instances (after booting the current PR guy!) rather than beg back into one of the Soviet republics. If no such instance exists, though, what reason does the company have to hang around in the fediverse?
There’s a certain irony in saying this about mobs, well, petitioning their sovereigns to align interests and uncover perpetrators. You can even see their attempts to claim “non-destructive” goals of making the world safe for
democracyLGBT. Everyone likes to claim the moral high ground.More options
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