@darius Maybe he should stay on Twitter.

@darius
A 200+ comment thread of people piling up on a guy for essentially being a nerd— not that he did something abusive or harsh to anyone— but “we just don’t like him so haha he got booted!” Feels yucky. I originally read his post just to try to understand how this whole thing works and I do find it concerning that your account can just be deleted with no reason given. “Harrowing” doesn’t seem terribly inapt, if I imagine it happening to other social media accounts I’ve had.

@darius
I have never understood the panic over "admins can read your DMs." Admins can also read your e-mail if they are bored out of their minds but I don't see anyone panicking over that. It has been said of all superusers: with great power comes great responsibility.

@darius never used Twitter. Just started using mastadon. I'm really enjoying it so far!

@darius Hilariously halfway down the comments he says he refuses to ask the admin why he was banned because that's "not his job", but apparently it is his job to write thousands of words of rant about it

@darius “Harrowing”??? 😆

@darius what Anna credibly long winded way to say “I’m butthurt”

@darius @rysiek such histrionics. My goodness.

@darius amen

@darius all I can say is, and I know he'll never see this (because he's been banned) but, if I had a mastodon instance I'd ban him on sight too

@darius how would he have lost access to his account though?

@darius bah, it's best to just ignore these people. They add nothing valuable to society.

@darius He is chilled to the bone after learning that the administrator of a server can access content on that server.

@darius What an intellectually lazy screed that was. He has no concept of word economy. Why use one word when you can use a thousand?

@darius Seth sure is making a big fuss for a libertarian who claims to be civil!

@darius what an enormous pile of word salad.

@darius It's like the men in the 90s who'd shout into cell phones to show how important they were.

@darius @jwz I don’t think that I can handle reading the entire article. What of it I read is painfully uninformed, like a child analysing the concept of taxes or the postal system after reading nothing about it.

@darius this is probably the most underwhelming use of the word “harrowing” I’ve seen since some kid on the XBox forums used it to describe being chat banned in COD for calling everyone homophobic slurs.

@darius blocked him on twitter early on, and now the dude is rampant on Post. Some have his number, others lapping it up. Tool.

@darius @jwz the followup where he notices that it costs money to run a computer is honestly even more spectacular. Like, this post at least is coherent, kind of. The „admins have a financial stake in their instance“ thing is just entirely baffling, a sequence of words that mean nothing

@darius "I have never had my social media account at any social media platform suspended. But it just happened at Mastodon" bahahaha.

There's no

@darius Mastodon has reached GandhiCon level 3 "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

@darius in the first part of the article he demonstrates some knowledge of how the service works, then here he throws it all away.

Imagine someone saying "I was kicked off of email for something capricious. Don't use email."

@darius

@darius everything I read there was basically a critique of the server he’s on rather than any evidence that mastodon is bad.

It’s actually inadvertently kind of an argument FOR mastodon as there are a ton of instances and you can pick one you agree with instead of being forced into one that doesn’t work for you.

@darius I asked #ChatGPT “What distinguishes a journalist from anyone else with an opinion and a social media platform?” and it said

“While anyone can have an opinion and share it on social media, journalists are distinguished by their commitment to gathering and presenting factual information and news. This includes conducting research and interviews, verifying information, and presenting multiple sides of a story.” Oops.

@darius Used to follow him on the bird site until I was so sick of seeing ONLY his mile-long threads, each one flagged BREAKING: even when he was just recapping something I read in the New York Times a few hours before. Unfollowing cleaned up my feeds in a major way. I'm just hoping he doesn't become that obnoxious-party-guest-who-never-leaves over on Post, because I think Post is kinda neat.

@darius I think he has a valid point here, though. If an often nameless and entirely unaccountable instance admin can wipe your account just like that, it could make for some very abusive power dynamics.

I’m left of this writer politically and have sworn off #Twitter for reasons he states. I’m unwilling to provide content to some billionaire narcissist playboy. This is it for me.

But we do ourselves no favors to pretend there aren’t issues with #Mastodon.

@darius When we get to quote-toot and translate foreign languages, even better for the 🐘 -verse.

He is the absolute worst on Post.

@darius I spend my time on Post and he makes it unbearable. I am so glad he is not here.

@darius

His advise: Do not use #mastodon because you might get banned and not be able to use it.

Got circular logic?

Love this: "... who circa 2016 helped invent the rhetorical style of the buckle-up-for-some-politics Twitter mega-thread."

A cherisher of the beloved pithy concise witty in as few characters as possibl tweet he is not

Seth: u r 2+ 4 @m, c?

@darius
Seth is definitely an arrogant grifter, but there are worse than him for sure.

@darius
are you serious? you don't realise that you're just confirming the points he made >:)?

@darius he did not take getting kicked off that mastodon instance well. He has since deleted his tweets from that time period.

@darius So I loathe Seth Abramson and his brand of self-aggrandizing clout-chasing, and I wouldn't miss his presence for a second.

So I'm not inclined to take his word for why he was banned, which he says was just for posting a link to his Post account.

But what did he get banned for then? Because it's true that it would be problematic if people were banned for just linking an account of theirs elsewhere.

@darius TLDR, he got banned from a single mastodon instance, and therefore no mastodon instance can be trusted.