@darius

🎯

@darius he gets paid by the word, right?

@darius Could not agree more. I observed his whole drama over on the other site. “Something BIG is coming!!” (never something that couldn’t be found a bunch of other places) We don’t need that over here, he’s welcome to the new walled garden funded by a16z.

@darius oh no, anything but keeping us from "seeing journalism" whatever that means lmao

@darius I really love the whole uber-privilege argument of "If they can suspend me, what will they do to you?".

@darius My god, he spilled *so much* ink just to say "I got banned and I'm mad about it"

@darius Since he first showed up, he's been a self-promoter whose posts are all clickbait aimed at increasing the audience for his paid outlets. I'm so glad he's staying away from Mastodon.

@darius Is he the Time For Some Game Theory dude? Bc I can't click this link without knowing first if I have to steel myself for an alcohol and cocaine fueled rant that loses the thread like 2 paragraphs in

@darius if i wanted to see a guy jack himself off like this I'd simply look at the mastodon.lol local feed

@darius isn't he like, very publicly a former national security advisor turned internet propagandist?

@darius i really love this is the point these people keep bringing up over and over, while at the same time Bari Weiss is over at twitter just casually perusing through people's dms

@darius oh he's never been sold on decentralization (because he profits immensely from centralized rage machines). Bleh.

@darius Everyone who's pleading with people to stop crossposting and filtering like mad to keep Twitter links out of their TL here is desperate to know how you can get people suspended for linking one time to one other social media website.

@darius Not going to waste my time reading a novel-length post from that guy, but i did a quick skim and I didn't see him addressing the obvious question: did he *ask* the admins why his account waa suspended?

@darius

@darius I had a look at this article just to check if he expressed surprise and dismay that the admins of the server could read his DMs and YUP, this genre of dork just cannot get over how weird and novel it is that server admins can read that stuff, while Bari Weiss is posting screenshots of internal Twitter moderation tooling with a "DIRECT MESSAGES" button on every profile

@darius "one of those niche Mastodon “instances” that has eldritch requirements for users"

is ... is he talking about oulipo???

@darius I cannot be bothered to read most of his incoherent brain dump but it’s kind of wild that he notes getting booted off that instance, and then writes seven paragraphs trashing good features that foster better social media, especially defederation. Then again, not wild—he thrives on attention.

@darius BREAKING NEWS: author of purplest prose left heartbroken by "the American poetry community"

@darius
:brain1: I can't figure out the business model
:brain2: it doesn't seem to be ad-supported
:brain5: do you just pass the hat around?

@darius sorry sorry last one i promise

@darius Ugh what a repetitive, confused read. The comments are hilarious though.

@darius Did it occur to him that joining an instance for journalists might have been his mistake?

@darius so…he’s complaining about exactly everything Elon is doing on Twitter…

@darius I wouldn’t conclude ANYTHING from what S*th *br*ms*n says! The guy is a lunatic.

@darius "It's time for some game theory...1/897"

@darius Seth's post is an amalgam of various rushes to judgement without much effort to understand the issues. Agreed, very sloppy.

@darius He's all happy on Post....

@darius

The filtering mechanisms are working :)

@darius I’ve had some sharp and heated exchanges with him over this post and others. This was his own doing—he never verified with a rel=me link (check the source code on his website) then wonders why an admin in Europe takes down what looks like a fake account with thousands of followers and almost no posts. He should be thanking them instead of bashing them and the service.

@darius He seems to have been on mstdn.social. I wonder if @stux has issues with the accuracy of his account. I suspect something could be omitted. This instance has seemed fairly no-drama so far.

@darius Friends don't let friends get sucked in by Seth Abramson.

@darius Lol, they smelled him coming a mile away.

@darius "My understanding, for instance, is that the sometimes-anonymous overlords of an individual Mastodon server can actually read your private messages without your knowledge... obviously as a lifelong civil libertarian I was deeply concerned."

He's.... he's on Twitter, right?

@darius @edbott Stopped following him “over there” pretty quickly.

@darius His epic Twitter threads on US politics were often worth a read, but, yeah. Wow. 'Sysadmins can read your private shit!' -- er, yeah...

@darius I think there's a beautiful irony in the fact that he wrote this on Post.

@darius I can't pick my reaction to this development and must crowdsource my wisdom.

@darius

I decided a few years ago that Seth was simply permsnently confused. He can't seem to decide what's right or wrong. No one needs that.

@darius I mean, the title is just so over the top... "harrowing"?

@darius What was the content he was suspended over? Curiously it’s not on the article. Just ”i haven’t violated any rules”. 🤔

@darius all I know is, every one of his tweets starts with “BREAKING:”, even if the news is a few hours old.

@darius Hes working Twitter for money and selling books. Hes vested a lot of time. Hes a fool.

@darius I saw this yesterday, or the day before. He is such a diva. He was here on Masto and I guess got booted, and now he's just whine whining his way on Post. He forgets that there are millions of other voices beyond his. Seth who?

@darius OK the whole vibe I get from this Post article is the problem is Seth, not Mastodon/fediverse...he just doesn't quite realize it yet.

@darius after I'd seen Seth mention post news for the Nth time, I asked why, and said it felt like a bit of astroturfing, and he Went Off!

@darius What a blowhard.

@darius lmao this owns

@darius Why is everyone who loves Twitter this much always on a social justice campaign. Why can't they just vote with their feet and leave quietly. Instead, it's a 4-page essay detailing their innermost thoughts on why they feel offended by something. Servers have owners and rules, simples. Don't like it, leave. You'd think an Attorney would understand how rules and laws work.

@darius Trust Post news? Don't think so. Yes, think for yourself. Everything is owned.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/who-owns-your-news-the-top-100-digital-news-outlets-and-their-ownership/

@darius @leigh He’s already announced over on Post that he “can’t wait” to block the the “haters” — meaning those who think he’s an ass and complain that Post is becoming Twitter redux because we have to see his stuff all over the place yet again. He'd best get started; he’s going to be block a lot of people.

@darius Thanks to Elon Musk for causing me to seek alternatives to twitter and land on mastodon. Home at last!!

@darius Hmm. He was banned from a general-purpose instance for seemingly no reason that he can understand. I'd call that a problem, regardless of your opinion of Seth Abramson.

The responses of "you can always find another server" are sad. Randomly de-platforming people with no clear policy is not really defensible.

Worse because as I understand it, banned folks are not given a way to move elsewhere and keep their followers - that requires cooperation from original server.

@darius @leigh “You’ll never have to read another Seth Abramson post again” is one of the best arguments I can think of for being on Mastodon.

@darius

There are a handful of these big accounts that can't let go of their ego. When they are brought down a peg this is exactly the kind of response I would expect. A whine and insult rant.

Mastodon is the best "open space" social media I have encountered.

If people don't like it there's plenty of other options.

@darius i've been following him on twitter mostly for trump takes (which i find interesting, but yeah… he could certainly be more concise) and has been a bit puzzled by his other content, but it's weird that he would be bad from that instance just for linking to post, i agree one admin messing up doesn't mean the whole fediverse sucks, but i understand he's a bit shocked by that action, and consider the power of instance admins to be too little checked.

@darius Now he's ranking the Twitter alternatives.

He's at least got Mastodon at third but LinkedIn as fourth???😂​

@darius Abramson was apparently suspended for pointing people to Post which I don't agree with. He also whined about whole instances being blocked without understanding why whole instances were blocked.

@darius I was looking for what was so harrowing and he acts like he’s never been banned from a forum before. baby shit

@darius Seth is a bag of bees pretending to be a person, but getting the boot without any warning or explanation is pretty bad community management. Of course, we only have one side of the story, so maybe someone did reach out and he missed it and is now just going for maximum drama. Who knows.

@darius I just started reading the post post, but the author was factually wrong or misleading in so many ways in the first few paragraphs that I stopped. 🤷

@darius It’s obvious the naysayers in the comments didn’t bother reading any of the Mastodon tips and just gave up to bitch.

@darius
Did he really get suspended for linking his post account? That seems fishy to me.

@darius Hello. I'll read it, but I'm wondering, what's his argument against it (why is it SO bad) and what are the arguments that refute his (I'm guessing" misunderstanding of federated spaces?

@darius Alas, he misunderstands what happened to him. Shades of Chicken Little yelling "The sky is falling". Yes, the #fediverse works differently. There is no central authority whatsoever. To fix things, you have to DIY.

@darius Surely it would have been quicker to just click the "submit an appeal" button and ask nicely what he'd done wrong?

@darius Darius, can you tell whether Seth "appealed" his dismissal? I might have missed it in his book length "post".

@darius it's things like this that keep improving my opinion of the fediverse 😂

@darius it’s all about money for some people. I love Mastodon and sincerely hope more people migrate here. It’s awesome. Really.

@darius Insult Abramson and his rhetoric and welcome to it but everyone (sure except the terminally online and we tech nerds) calls it “Mastodon” not “the fediverse” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@darius Seth is the reason there are Editors in the world. What rambling nonsense that makes what I could only summarize as being 1 point. That he continuously beat to death. 🤦

@darius

"I cannot overstate how much this means we are doing something right over here."

This! Thank you. My tiny instance is to "continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place"

Ultimately, we need folks to stick together for science and truth. Seems like the last bastion is #mastodon.

Coos County is redder than ever. Not hopeless. Depressing though. How ugly will it need to get before a swing back to "abnormal?"

#KeepPortlandWeird #StateofJefferson

@darius I get that he grates on people but I’m not sure it’s a good outcome for someone to get suspended and not understand why.

@darius So he's just booted without explanation?

@darius True! I used to retweet him until one day I got a clue. There are a few other celebrity tweeters like that who sound convincing at first ...

hmmm, is that how Fox does it?

Suck folks with a weak mind in and then turn them into a monster?

@darius [fans self] but I thought he was an insightful GENIUS lol

@darius I was feeling bored so I read it... and OMG is it one of the silliest things I've read this year.

@darius read the article, knowing nothing about him it smells very "missing missing reasons" https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html

@darius take a look over on r/Twitter sometimes and see how badly they want us to stay and be harassed.

@darius "a harrowing tale how people who did not have to listen to my bullshit decided to not listen to my bullshit"

@darius I had to pause reading that article from Seth Abramson a few times for my brain not to melt.

The "nicest" interpretation I can have of this article makes me think of him as someone that did not grasped the basics about mastodon and federated networks, and to read the freaking room, based on the amount of errors it has. That and bad journalism.

All other options pass by saying that calling him sloppy is too kind to him.

@darius Oh god we dodged a bullet there

@darius Sloppy thinking indeed: He attributes the decision of one moderator of one instance to the whole of Mastodon. He probably deserved it, but he can always find or create another instance.

@darius i skimmed some of that, my takeaway is a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology and society, but especially the techno-federati-society we party in daily.

@darius Clearly whoever is confused by the federated model after using email for years is not an intellectual giant. But he makes some points which I agree with. Somebody is still administering each server. You still have very little recourse against their actions. Zealous admins are partitioning the fediverse and it will be less useful because of that, and not a desirable place for institutions.

@darius I have heard some reads in my day, but calling someone "one of the sloppiest public thinkers...ever..." is an ETHER. My brain can't pull itself off the damned floor long enough to think critically about the content. 🤣🤣🤣 Good night, y'all. I'm done here. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

@darius I was so harrowed that I fell asleep.

@darius Who's Seth Abramson

@darius I wonder if he filed an appeal? I was suspended three times at the bird site, had to start over with a new account each time, and never got an answer of any kind when I filed appeals.

@darius Everything about that post about Mastodon is everything that makes me teeth grinding about his overheated postings on Twitter.

@darius I made it through maybe a third of that self-aggrandizing rant before I couldn’t read anymore. I guess Post is where you take something you could have fully explored in 3 sentences and turn it into a rambling diatribe. I’ll stick with #Mastodon, thanks

@darius never heard of him. Probably a compliment that he's not recommending the Fedi. Often "public thinkers" means "ppl who go on political rants on Twitter and get involved in arguments where the stakes are so low that no observer could possibly care"

@darius
> who circa 2016 helped invent the rhetorical style of the buckle-up-for-some-politics Twitter mega-thread

so he's doing all of us an enormous favour by making sure the sort of people who are brainpoisoned enough to listen to him stays away...

@darius

Couldn't Seth have just picked a difference instance and moved on. Does everyone have to bitch and moan when something messes up? Sounds like he didn't even try to find out.

@darius 🎯 that guy is a classic Resistance grifter who peddles falsehoods. Of course he doesn’t want people to go to a platform that offers decentralized knowledge 🥴

@darius Regardless of what we think of the quality of his work, isn't it a little concerning that he got banned (seemingly) arbitrarily? To his point, if it were from a niche server I wouldn't care, but if it's from one of the big ones, it does worry me. I think overall he misses the point of the fediverse, but still, his concerns about moderation seem legitimate to me.