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Top-level
@bradpilcher @mairhart Well, I am very curious about several things. Community acceptance and support of minorities. Moderation response. Harassment risk. Just plain curiosity. I decided to do this little test after reading several threads on the bird app claiming this platform is hostile to minorities. 8 comments
@bradpilcher @mairhart Oh, I dislike the traditional algorithm-based social media culture very much too! I have learned a few interesting things thus far. Hate and trolls have actually taken longer to arrive than expected. The claims I saw might be either exaggerations or the product of picking the wrong instance. Many users here, understandably, reel at Twitter-like engagement. 👍 Mastodon users seem to lean on the progressive side. @dragoncrown @mairhart I tend to agree that notions of Mastodon as a lily white gated community seem overblown. Perhaps I’ve been lucky in picking a good instance and making sound choices on who to follow, but I feel like I’ve seen much more trans and non-binary visibility here than on any other social network. If there is anything off putting, I’d say it’s the slightly higher UI and cultural learning curve here than elsewhere… (1/2) @dragoncrown @mairhart …and a knee-jerk defensiveness and aggressive willingness to shame in order to enforce those cultural norms. Of course cultural norms tend to evolve, and the influx of so many new users is like adding a few thousand tanks of nitro to your engine mix in that regard. I can only imagine the anxiety and fear that must provoke amongst older Mastodonians. (2/2) @bradpilcher @mairhart Quite true, and speaking of instances. Here is a finding I'm bracing myself for once this post spreads enough. If I'm right, picking the right instance based on it's community rules does a LOT of heavy lifting keeping minorities safe. Picking the wrong instance could lead to an immediate bad experience. @dragoncrown @mairhart Topic makes sense. I thought about a topic-specific instance for about 5 seconds, but honestly I just picked one that seemed sufficiently large, stable, well-moderated and resourced. My assumption was basically that bigger would be better in terms of being less likely to ever have to migrate instances. That just seems like such a pain, though I haven’t had to do it yet (hopefully ever). |
Gregory's Server
@dragoncrown @mairhart Ok. I get it. I can think of better ways to explore that question than this, but I’m just a newbie here. Clearly you seem to have run afoul of the culture that dislikes algorithms and anything that feels meant to game said algorithm. Beyond that, what do you feel you’ve learned from the experiment so far?