 When you listen to The Verge's podcast and they're legitimately saying Mastodon is a "no girls allowed" club? And we don't want Facebook here because Instagram will bring women here?! What the fuck is wrong with these American tech pundits? Mastodon is the gayest, transest, most feminine social network I've ever seen. There are so many more outspoken, smart, odd, and downright weird women here than I've ever seen on any other social network. It's fucking great. 76 comments
@nuz Oh that undercurrent was definitely there. How could women *possibly* be on Mastodon, isn't that way too technical for their pretty little heads to understand?! Ugh.  @nuz @thomholwerda Non-technical woman here. I am pretty sure I'm in the vast minority. But we are definitely here! One thing I'm appreciating is the critical commentary against crypto/tech bros. I'd rather follow one weird interesting Mastodon woman than a million vapid women influencers on Instagram peddling garbage in skimpy outfits on Photoshopped bodies. I have never joined Instagram, and I'm insanely happy I never did. Instagram is downright dangerous to (especially) women's mental health and physical wellbeing by promoting fake, Photoshopped "beauty" standards no real person can possibly measure up to. Fuck that shit right into the goddamn sun.  @thomholwerda I'm on instagram for the artists, but the glimpses I get of the "influencer" culture are downright scary. @thomholwerda unfortunately there are huge communities on instagram that have next to zero representation here. Even with all the shadow banning bs. @onion @thomholwerda *edit=typo @onion @thomholwerda Edited the initial post. @thomholwerda Maybe that's the part they're hinting at, maybe they are in fact looking to get hooked on the heavily distorted images of influencers. @thomholwerda Guess you're in the wrong bubble on Insta. But never mind, wouldn't want to take away from your insane happiness. @thomholwerda Yep, I'm so glad I got rid of Instagram a few years ago. Both that and Facebook were awful for my mental health, and I dread the day if I have to go back for any reason. @thomholwerda I mean it's pretty great there if you have the patience to curate your experience to just the arts and weird looking architecture (and fiber crafts). But yeah the out-of-the-box default experience is very bad @thomholwerda Total crap. I’m a woman. I am much more comfortable here than I have been on any other social media platform. @Yup_Its_Holly @thomholwerda exactly. I’ve been an obvious woman on so many social media networks (I tend to show my face a lot) and Mastodon is THE ONLY experience I’ve ever had where I haven’t been harassed, sent threats, unwelcome “flirting”, or made to feel stupid / unwelcome. I was just telling my husband the other day that even though my posts over the weekend blew up a bit here I got literally 0 misogynistic replies. @Yup_Its_Holly @thomholwerda and I’ve also been so happy how many trans and non binary people there are on here! I had no idea so many trans women alone worked in tech and it makes me so happy looking at people’s profiles and seeing them openly state their identities and pronouns 🥹 @mariyadelano @Yup_Its_Holly @thomholwerda there are rather many of us. A friend once posited that if all we conspired, we could destroy the internet and tech world as we know it. I hope it doesn't come to that. ;) @mariyadelano @Yup_Its_Holly Hah you can't take a single step on Mastodon without bumping into openly trans folks being happy and themselves. It's such a joy to see! @mariyadelano @Yup_Its_Holly I also wonder if there's simply far fewer unpleasant men on here? All the men I've seen here seem more mature, often married, and just normal - whereas other platforms seem to attract a lot more weirdos and creeps. Of course, being married doesn't preclude being a creep, but it does filter out quite a few bad apples. @Yup_Its_Holly Doesn't surprise me, and good to hear! I'm sure women still experience problems on Mastodon, but from everything I've heard, it definitely seems substantially less than on other networks. @thomholwerda wait where is this??? I’m in utter disbelief (as femininely as I possibly can be because f those stereotypes)   @thomholwerda :-( I have friends on Twitter who still believe Mastodon is "anti-trans" (based on one incident years ago) and won't see otherwise when it clearly is not. @thomholwerda@social.tchncs.de I don't normally listen to the verge but I checked that episode out because someone said I was mentioned in it (I don't know if I really was, I couldn't catch it). All I heard was a gross -both meanings of the word- mischaracterization of mastodon and its community. I hated the condescending tone they had throughout the whole thing. @miriamrobern @thomholwerda @thomholwerda (I Googled but they make a lot of episodes of a lot of podcasts.... "Meta and Reddit prove the social web is over" sounds awful — is it that one? Also if you have any idea why I masochistically want to wind myself up by listening to this please do let me know 😅) @thomholwerda i listened to that episode and all i took from it was they probably tried out dot social, spent a bit of time on the local timeline and saw people getting harassed for not calling twitter the birdsite and dipped @thomholwerda I will say that Bluesky seems to have the most trans people, just based on how the feed looks. But it's not like Masto is any slouch on that front either.  @thomholwerda @cstross It's the same thing that led them to say Google Plus was a ghost town. There's no "engagement algorithm" suggesting randos so if you don't actually go out and look for people you don't find them. @resuna @thomholwerda @cstross G+ was probably the last time a corporation was somewhat good at building a social network, but the many of the media were basically trying to kill it from day one. @ncrav @thomholwerda @cstross They screwed up a few times, like with the way they accidentally exposed connections in the Buzz transition and their attempt to copy Facebook's daft "real names" policy. But they backed down and acknowledged they were wrong and fixed things as far as they could after the fact. Can you imagine Zuck doing that? But the press never acknowledged any of that in their general Google hate-on. @resuna @thomholwerda @cstross yes it wasn't at all incident free, but as you say their attitude/reaction towards many of their mistakes was way less elitist compared to the likes of Zuckerberg or Musk.  @resuna @ncrav @thomholwerda Ahem: Google also killed off the blogosphere—by trashing Google Reader as a central RSS discovery hub—to give G+ a free ride. Because of course G+ was *MUCH* better for privacy-invasive behavioural advertising than any collection of random blogs. (I'm not bitter or anything …! /s) @cstross @resuna @thomholwerda also true, I didn't use Google Reader much since I replaced it with live bookmarks on Firefox (that was unfortunately killed as well), but yes they tried to move people along from blogspot to their various attempts at social. I mostly used G+ for user content and the circles feature that allowed me to post differently to different groups of people.  @thomholwerda I think they are probably just telling on themselves. After all, you see the posts of the people you follow, no? @thomholwerda The Verge is owned by Vox Media, which is a publishing business that subsists primarily for commercial advertising purposes. Follow the money and their intent becomes clear @thomholwerda obviously from the same school of journalism that keeps saying Telegram users are all drug dealers, terrorists or both @thomholwerda my recent experience with The Verge’s reporting is that they’ll be happy to learn more and write more interesting stories. I’d drop them a line. @MostlyBlindGamer @thomholwerda I don’t know what reporters they got to do the podcast but these were reporters that really did not understand the ecosystem at all or the demographics that make up this ecosystem @weirdwriter @thomholwerda oh, I’m sure. What I mean is they can learn. It’s not the responsibility of any group to educate others about themselves, but something that can be done.  @MostlyBlindGamer @thomholwerda somebody could do it. These don't seem like people who are willing to meet halfway on things though, if they're starting out self-satisfied and falling back on stereotypes, I wouldn't expect much satisfaction. @MostlyBlindGamer @thomholwerda it's on here, I think I went from about 15 minutes to 20 They get the context very wrong imho. https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/5cda9490-4117-012e-1622-00163e1b201c @davey_cakes @thomholwerda cool, I’ll check it out. If the actual team isn’t willing to learn (I’ll assume they are, but you never know), one could always talk to their editors.  @thomholwerda They really don’t like Mastodon, and have badmouthed it at every opportunity. The feeds on Mastodon reflect what you put in them, not what an algorithm gives you, so their experience reflects on them.   @purplepadma EDIT: I should clarify - I think you're one of the awesome women here, not one of the tech pundits.  @thomholwerda I also got the sense that everybody on there also thought we were like an elitist rich kid club. They were just painting us as elitist and snobbish and more, but I also got the very strong feeling that we were like an all right machine or similar with no women allowed but that of course is far from the case, as you pointed out! They did say that they the #FediPact website was very pink and beautiful though! @thomholwerda I don't think I even know the gender, identity, orientation, ethnicity, or even the country of many people I follow (and many are bunnies). Many don't have it there, mostly I forget. I follow them if they post interesting/nice/funny/cute things, and whether they're trans, enby, or identify as a furry dragon is not going to change that. Also I find it interesting that this is one of the few places where I can find people being open about who they are with no harassment. @thomholwerda I listened to it, and it is so much stupider than you made it sound. Keee-rist. And can people get a new fucking concept to apply to conversations other than Eternal September please please please. @thomholwerda They are American tech pundits. That comes loaded with a ton of diversity-ignorant blogging-not-journalism each chamber baggage. Wott? Where the hell did they get that idea from? Never mind that it makes you sound like a man-baby who's still wet behind the ears, it just doesn't make sense. Amazing how an opinion can be instantly false on a moral and factual level. @thomholwerda it's probably because they're looking at the free speech extremist hellscape part of the fediverse. @thomholwerda@social.tchncs.de there is no algorithm to suggest people. So if you're a tech bro that likes tech bros and their tech bro opinions, you need to do a bit of extra work (or get lucky in accidentally following someone who's not a stereotypical tech bro) to find anyone who's not a tech bro doing tech bro stuff. @thomholwerda The Verge in particular tends to be very...wrongly opinionated in a lot of ways. They go for clickbait and have their preferences, and that spills into their articles quite frequently. Their Mastodon podcast segment was pretty awful because it borders on misinformation.  @thomholwerda media personalities do what they are told. and the people who pay them are corpos. :blobcatshy:
 @thomholwerda Proud to be doing my part to make the Fediverse gayer, transier, and more feminine! *salutes the trans flag* :blobfoxcofe_w: :heart_transgender:  @thomholwerda I could say more about this, but I think the replies are doing a fine job and I'm too tired lol. I'm just curious, were they casting this in a negative or positive light? I'm ready to obliterate my initial perception of their podcast (seeing as I had not heard of it before this, it's already pretty low in my mind) @thomholwerda by the way, as much as I know this is completely false, it still kind of stings and makes me feel like I'm in the wrong place. I wish I knew what led them to say that... I guess joining in a male-heavy region and never expanding their follower bubbles? @thomholwerda@social.tchncs.de they are really just painting the fediverse as a bunch of incels uh  @thomholwerda@social.tchncs.de looks at my timeline which is almost exclusively women interesting, techbros. you don't say.  @thomholwerda Honestly, I've been realising that mastodon just doesn't "click" for Americans. No idea why, but the moment a billionaire endorsed a new network, they flocked to it much more so than Europeans. Disclaimer, not all Americans, not all Europeans, etc, etc. |
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@thomholwerda i hate that i *instantly* thought "oh, so they think it's too technical and difficult for women to understand" and that there's probably a decent chance that i was correct to think that :zerotwo_dead: