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Zach Weinersmith

It really weirds me out how non-douchey Mastodon is. I have to use twitter for business, for now anyway, but I always feel a little antsy posting there. Like, even nice people sometimes seem like they're just itching to call you at as a moron or bastard. On mastodon, people talk and support. I wonder if the lack of QTs is a big part of it?

21 comments
Kye Fox

@ZachWeinersmith It's because we have emojo :dragncoolmlem:​

Zach Weinersmith

It'd be interesting to see if single individuals behave differently in the two contexts.

FredricT

@ZachWeinersmith I’d say that the main context change is that we have moderation in here. Real moderation, that is. Entire servers are easily banned. So less bullshit, less morons, it lessens the occasions to get angry.

Dr. Jens Foell

@ZachWeinersmith This is just guesswork from me, but I think the biggest factor is social context. I think even without QTs, the mood on Masto could turn sour, or the vibe on Twitter could go mostly back to normal, depending on people’s expectations of how the others on the same platform will respond

✿ Floby 💉😷💨

@ZachWeinersmith I can say that I do behave differently. Now that my mastodon timeline has enough content for me to follow, I finally uninstalled the twitter app because I hated how it made me behave.

River

@floby @ZachWeinersmith I've felt this too, of being on Twitter changing how I think and behave. Any thought that couldn't fit succinctly in a tweet without being taken out of context was abandoned. I was indulging in a lot of my worst qualities.

Doug Turnbull

@ZachWeinersmith I just came here and have felt exactly the same. The supposed “barrier to entry” is a great feature. Feels like the early web.

bobu

@ZachWeinersmith I think the slight tech barrier combined with interest-specific servers does a lot to weed out the wankers.

Pēteris Krišjānis

@ZachWeinersmith I feel when QTs come they will be used rarely and to the point - and I hope #Fediverse figure out how to keep dunking on to the minimum.
That network effect of pilling on is...bad. I know people love to gotcha bad people, but it is false sense of satisfaction and get carried away by mob is just not good in general. You really haven't helped everyone with your witty comment. And in opposite, pile-ons from fascists and sociopaths are just toxicity at it's worst.

C.S.Strowbridge

@ZachWeinersmith
I think it's just Twitter. I think Twitter is just toxic and if you are there, the toxicity rubs off on you.

River

@ZachWeinersmith posts here feel less like statements and more like just sharing your thoughts and invitations for discussion.

Nobody's trying to get popular—they're trying to talk about things they're interested in.

kolya

@cestfleuve @ZachWeinersmith
Nobody's trying to get popular because you can't get popular on a global scale like Twitter anyway. Even celebrities have a lot less reach here. That is a good thing. No single person should have so much influence anyway.

Rich Holmes

@ZachWeinersmith I suspect it's because communities tend to self-reinforce behavior. Fedi is not Twitter and it attracts people who want something not Twitter and people conform to the non Twitter behavior.

90% of online forums have toxic behavior (I just made that number up) but I'm on one forum where everyone's really nice and I am not sure why but I don't think it's the forum mechanics. I think it's just how social behavior works.

Jon

@ZachWeinersmith I’m curious about this too. Besides lack of quote tweets there is also no algo. Perhaps that means no culture of engagement baiting. Or maybe users in this context don’t see as much bad faith bait, and thus tend to interpret posts in good faith more often.

Rebelwarrior

@ZachWeinersmith it’s because it’s not popular. It’s attracting tech minded ppl (at least for now) kinda like the early web.

In part I think that’s why Threads has such high numbers - because it attracted all the influencers, peddlers and drama watchers there.

There is an article recently on the Atlantic comparing social media to the Tower of Babel and its very good.

Oggie

@ZachWeinersmith The answer to this is in several parts, I think.

First off, while the server you're on doesn't 'matter' in any real sense, it's still your neighbors, and they can vote you off the island, and if they are unpleasant, you can be tainted by association. So you have a vested interest in maintaining positive relations (or at least justifiable ones), among (reasonably) small communities. Smaller groupings of people are inherently easier to self-govern. 1/x

Oggie

@ZachWeinersmith
So it's a community of micro-communities, rather than just a wild swath. This leads to a lot more tonal shifts.

Secondly, and this is more important, there is a -lot- of moderation going on, you just don't see a ton of it. There are fediverse nazi servers, and troll servers, and everything, they just got defederated. A single person who's just problematic gets shunted off the non problematic servers too. The -effective- moderation team is actually huge. 2/X

Oggie

@ZachWeinersmith
It might not seem like this second part is true because you only know your server's mod/mods, but keep in mind there are thousands of servers, often with only 1-2k users (and some quite a bit smaller). My server, I'm not sure how many mods we have but I think it's ~10 (might be more?) with ~1.2k active users, which seems like a little, but 1:1000 would mean twitter with 10m users would need 10k mods- and it never had that.

Buy a beer for your mods! It's a rough job.

@ZachWeinersmith
It might not seem like this second part is true because you only know your server's mod/mods, but keep in mind there are thousands of servers, often with only 1-2k users (and some quite a bit smaller). My server, I'm not sure how many mods we have but I think it's ~10 (might be more?) with ~1.2k active users, which seems like a little, but 1:1000 would mean twitter with 10m users would need 10k mods- and it never had that.

Applemask

@ZachWeinersmith I could tell you to eat a dick if it would help

Riley S. Faelan

@ZachWeinersmith: No, the lack of an optimisation for "engagement" by the recommendation algorithm is probably the most significant factor.

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