Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

OK, here&#x27;s the problem in a nutshell: no one among <i>regular</i> people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at all that would convince any of Kim K or Kylie Jenner&#x27;s followers to go take a look at it. I&#x27;ll even go a step further and say that Mastodon is probably more for fringe groups than for the unwashed masses those fringe groups are trying to influence.<p>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can&#x27;t do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Is there some triple-I indie game that Mastodon will allow me to play in my browser? (Or triple-A non indie? I&#x27;m not picky. Just don&#x27;t show me a point and click please.) Post the link for that game, you&#x27;ll get a lot more people trying Mastodon. Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Or is there a new generation of FIFA stars on Mastodon? Or new generation of NBA stars? I mean, even a new generation of &quot;It&quot; Girls chasing NBA stars would be better for attracting users than &quot;thoughtful and local uncommented retweets&quot;. Which is not only what you&#x27;re asking me to get excited about right now, but is likely not even true. Boosts will be no more thoughtful than retweets, likely a good deal less thoughtful since Mastodon seems to be on a road that relegates it to fringe groups.<p>Right now, it&#x27;s like buying a large tract of land in Kansas and saying that you&#x27;ve started a new municipality. No we don&#x27;t have beaches, or theaters, or parks, or much of anything else, but everyone here is more thoughtful. so we&#x27;re <i>much</i> better than Miami, San Diego, or Minneapolis.<p>I mean, it <i>might</i> work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, &quot;HEY! We&#x27;ve got gambling and naked women!&quot;

From the article:<p>&gt; <i>Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn&#x27;t a Business</i><p>I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices.<p>If you can get a business or a project to the point where it&#x27;s stable and competitive and it&#x27;s funding you <i>enough</i> to keep going, then there&#x27;s a whole bunch of stuff that you don&#x27;t need to care about. That&#x27;s obviously not universal, but there are clearly downsides to large businesses. There are things that large business will always be worse at then a small business or personal project.<p>Again, I haven&#x27;t thought enough about this to make a cognizant point, but... it feels like something I want to think about more. Being a nonprofit or a small business or a completely non-commercial entity should in some instances give you a competitive advantage over other businesses. Facebook can copy every single feature and then some of Snapchat.<p>But Twitter can&#x27;t really copy everything that Mastadon is doing, because some of the stuff that Mastadon is doing is completely contradictory to Twitter&#x27;s entire business model. I feel like there&#x27;s something to be said about (if you&#x27;re in Mastadon&#x27;s position) figuring out some way to tie at least a few public-facing features into that nonprofit model that you know, 100%, your largest competitors will literally never be able to do.

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked &quot;Get Started&quot; and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them.<p>I&#x27;m a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won&#x27;t understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and multiple furry-themed servers. And there seem to be several overlapping Chinese-language servers -- which one should a Chinese newbie choose? And what prevents each server from devolving into a petty little fiefdom where the moderators abuse their power?<p>Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!<p>The Mastodon project is clearly designed for a technical audience, whether or not that is what they actually intended. Outside of the techie bubble the usability is just not there.

&gt; One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group.<p>&gt; How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn&#x27;t have retweets; it has &quot;boosts&quot;. Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there&#x27;s no option to add your own commentary.<p>I think &quot;Right problem, wrong solution&quot;. The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. In fact, putting forward bad ideas takes less time and energy than refuting them. This is why, usually, burden of proof is placed on the one making a claim. Otherwise people who value truth will be exhausted from the approximately 10 times the effort it takes to refute false claims and truth will never win out.<p>Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by &quot;retweeting&quot; them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity

This is a good article. I just wanted to take issue with this claim: &quot;Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can.&quot;<p>This is a common misconception. While public companies have some duties to shareholders they are not required to maximise profits as such: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders&#x2F;corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;what-are-co...</a><p>It&#x27;s important to be aware of this so that corporations cannot use this excuse to get off the hook for otherwise immoral behaviour.

The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything.<p>The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mastodon would probably look like one or two dominant native apps and something like a newsgroup server. Or maybe something like a really great RSS reader.<p>Questions about federation vs a walled controlled servive would be silly, because technologists are fighting it out to sell the best app. And of course a walled-in service is stupid because that would be as obsolete as Compuserve.<p>We’re all fighting it out on the web now. Well, except possibly on iOS and (grudgingly) Android. In some ways I think the web was how we geeks made survival on Linux possible, as we never had the mass to demand desktop apps.<p>Part of what I liked about the reimagining of email as social media was that it allowed for the return of the app. In the case of Mastodon, the protocols are presumably open and don’t preclude interaction via apps. So here the question of web or heavy client is not technical but one of point of view or preference.<p>This is all to say I kind of miss when we were chasing “the killer app” as opposed to competing for service share. When the focus was on the user’s desktop, any associated service was more or less seen as boring plumbing—-certainly nothing to have brand affinity for.<p>EDIT: Case in point, there’s another comment explaining that Mastodon doesn’t let you move instances and retain followers. In the 90s app-centric view of the world this is a non-issue, because following other people is the client’s job, for better or worse. Your computer crashes, you lose who you were following. If you want to publish who you’re following that’s you or your client’s job.<p>Giving up your social network graph to the service provider isn’t an issue in the heavy client model, because the 90s service isn’t going to pay to store that information on your behalf anyway. It wasn’t because the service viewed that personal information as “oily rags”; it was because they simply didn’t want to expend the resources to store it.

&gt;Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don&#x27;t like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you&#x27;re always free to pick up and move to a different one.<p>Last I heard, Mastodon didn&#x27;t support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they&#x27;ve cultivated a brand and a following and don&#x27;t want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they&#x27;d put up with it when they shouldn&#x27;t have to.

I recently joined Twitter and I have to agree that Retweets are the most cancerous part.<p>Accounts with many followers act like schoolyard bullies with their gang of yes men.<p>I still see federation as being too niche, but it doesn&#x27;t have to be that way! I think in an ideal situation, federated servers would rely more on physical location than on deviant niche hobbies or addictions.<p>The Smith family should have a server (or your neighborhood should) rather than cyberpunk.furry.foxes. Because the reality is that people are more than just one thing and the concept breaks down when you start discussing action movies or cryptography on your @steve@luddite.peace account.<p>I think secure-scuttlebutt goes for more of the real world location-based server concept a bit. But I think most people prefer the peace of mind of some kind of administration being possible if needed.

I think the term &quot;toots&quot; is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service.<p>Word of mouth (or &#x27;word of text&#x27;) is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words &quot;tweet&quot; and &quot;tweeted&quot; are replaced with &quot;toot&quot; and &quot;tooted&quot;.

I can’t quite get over this critiquing of Twitter’s Retweet system. I totally understand how it’s misused but all the benefits are overlooked too. I love retweeting with commentary for positive reasons. I find they are a great way to validate and engage people who reply. I never think of using them as a tool for shaming, so I would be sad to see the feature go.

Who names these things - cumbersome, heavy, ancient ... doesn&#x27;t look like they did even a cursory test.<p>I&#x27;m as anti-marketing as the next person but that doesn&#x27;t mean I&#x27;d call my child Shithead.

What Mastodon badly needs is a desktop client as good as Twitterrific that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching. Something like Pidgin&#x2F;Adium is for IM.<p>That way people can default to Mastodon where possible and fallback to Twitter where necessary.

I think it&#x27;s a lousy article with a poor title. It&#x27;s poorly written. It leads with the wrong info. It&#x27;s framing sucks.<p>But just as I was thinking &quot;The fact that Twitter is a business is a feature, not a bug&quot; they mentioned they are funded by Patreon. So, they are a business, and one that possibly has a more sustainable business model than Twitter. They just don&#x27;t call themselves a business for some reason.<p>I&#x27;ve done a lot of volunteer work over the years. Volunteers tend to be unreliable because they aren&#x27;t being paid. They are often bitter people because they aren&#x27;t being paid, so they want you to damn well be grateful as all hell that they do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Etc.<p>So, I&#x27;m less of a fan of open source than I used to be. If you want to do a thing sustainably, creating a business you are passionate about that can also pay your bills makes more sense than doing it for free. Getting the incentives right matters. Doing it for free means either you are independently wealthy, you are a bored homemaker or you actually do something full-time to pay your bills and this gets what little time and energy you have left over.<p>Maybe I need to look up the info on the guy who said he would answer my questions patiently if I had any and make &quot;trying Mastodon&quot; my new hobby for a bit.

I am interested in joining a Mastodon instance but I don&#x27;t know how to find the right one to join.<p>Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn&#x27;t built yet and the community can&#x27;t agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision.<p>I&#x27;ve tried some of these instance finder tools but they reveal that Mastodon instances are like 25% furry communities and other fringe fetishes and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games.

&gt; Well, Mastodon doesn&#x27;t have retweets; it has &quot;boosts&quot;. Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there&#x27;s no option to add your own commentary.<p>I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well<p>What <i>all</i> &quot;timeline&quot; social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want.<p>People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap.<p>Networks need the contrary signal, they need the &quot;WTF are you thinking posting this crap here&quot; signal.<p>Not censorship, but a &quot;tone down&quot; indication.<p>Twitter has been cutting down and restricting&#x2F;banning accounts which I&#x27;m not fundamentally against it but they are focusing on <i>one</i> side of the political spectrum. With that, I can&#x27;t agree.

This is about as useful to countering toxicity as, say, not supporting avatars and claiming your experience is superior to Twitter because no one can upload a swastika.<p>To start, the author doesn&#x27;t get the terminology right: A retweet on Twitter is the un-commented repost to which Mastodon&#x27;s &quot;boost&quot; is analogous, whereas a &quot;quote tweet&quot; is the thing Mastodon doesn&#x27;t have native support for. Twitter didn&#x27;t natively support quoting either until comparatively recently in its history, and there was plenty of toxicity on the platform before then.<p>Before native quote-tweet support, you would just see a URL to the tweet someone was commenting on, and you&#x27;d have to click to view it rather than seeing it expanded inline, which is no less possible on Mastodon. And since this is really up to the client anyway, there&#x27;s no reason a Mastodon client couldn&#x27;t auto-expand quoted &quot;toots,&quot; nullifying this supposed advantage.

I love Mastodon but the only thing stopping me from using it is the way they approach federation [0].<p>The &quot;ideal&quot; for me is to make an account on a centralized official Mastodon instance (with Keybase verification, if needed) and then be able to seamlessly join another instance without having to sign up for that instance separately to be a member -- and thus not having to make a per-instance account.<p>That way my account is created once, and I can jump between other instances OAuth-style.<p>I do like the fact that niche instances exist, but in my opinion it&#x27;s better to be known as [username@mastodon.social] even when being a member of [@niche.social] much like how Disqus or Gravatar works, in principle. At least the option would be nice.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootsuite&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Using-Mastodon&#x2F;FAQ.md#federation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tootsuite&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Using...</a>

We should remember that the retweet feature was originally created by the community, like, years before twitter implemented it officially. You&#x27;ll compose a tweet with the format &quot;RT @username &lt;quote post&gt;&quot; and broadcast it to all your followers. There&#x27;s no reason mastodon users can&#x27;t do the same. Right?

Isn&#x27;t the concept of local servers making it easier to create a bunch of echo chambers?<p>I haven&#x27;t even tried Mastodon because my understanding of identify is tied to a server rather than an email or a gpg key... so outside of your control (unless you run your own server). My understanding is that when the server you are currently using disappear, your current identity, history, etc... disappear too.

Could anyone share their thoughts about the attractiveness of a platform that says how many characters long your posts can be?<p>What I see on Twitter is that people are constantly fighting this limitation by writing several tweets in a row (sometimes marking them as parts of a whole message). I would think that’s an annoyance. So what’s the attraction?

Uuuuuh mastadon people, you know &quot;toot&quot; means &quot;fart&quot; for a lot of people, right? I laughed pretty hard reading lines like, &quot;...a middle ground between unfollowing someone and seeing every toot they ever make.&quot; Very unfortunate vocabulary choice there.

I&#x27;m yet another person who&#x27;s skeptical that this project and its instances will be able to solve any issues that currently plague the more popular, profit-based social media platforms.<p>In fact, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it worsens things. Let&#x27;s take the widely-known phenomena of &#x27;information bubbles&#x27; - where your feeds&#x2F;networks only serve you information that confirms something you already believe&#x2F;some worldview you already have.<p>Not only would a mastadon instance server be prone to attracting users of the same mindset - cross-posting from other sites would be problematic. What if posting on instance A doesn&#x27;t violate instance A&#x27;s content guideline terms, but does violate the content guidelines of instance B? Users of B are less likely to see certain content from A. In some ways that&#x27;s worse than the one-instance for profit networks. As much as I dislike the snarky reply to bad-retweet phenomenon - at least opposing ideas are being discussed there.<p>Plus, these instances can be run by anyone, and those people can set up any terms they want. Someone like Alex Jones could set up his own mastadon instance, and have his own content guidelines, and wrap his followers in an even &#x27;thicker&#x27; information bubble.

So instances are like subreddits? Having never used Mastodon I&#x27;m not entirely sure I understood what an instance is, but if they are just like subreddits then I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s a way better elevator pitch than trying to define them, and it also helps to show that people do like to congregate on a large platform around topics.

I hope mastodon could allow @domain.tld &quot;naked&quot; user names.<p>Much simpler to remember, also connects directly to personal website.

&gt; The Why: Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn&#x27;t a Business<p>This section casting twitter as being in &quot;the outrage business&quot; but mastadon not being a business at all doesn&#x27;t quite sit right.<p>Even though mastodon &quot;the open source project&quot; is &quot;not a business&quot;, there is an entity behind it accepting $ for it&#x27;s development[1] and presumably has control over the rules by which the main line development occurs and controls the brand &quot;mastadon&quot; and its website.<p>I think that section would be more useful and convincing if folks behind mastadon discussed how the money flows in twitter cause it to be in the &quot;outrage business&quot; and how the Mastadon maintainer&#x27;s money flows solve those problems.<p>[1] (Gargron - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;mastodon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;mastodon</a>)<p>(edits: grammar)

At the joinmastodon.org site, in order to get me started and in touch with likeminded individuals, it is suggested I define myself as a heterosexual or a white European.<p>No, wait, the terms are <i>LGBTQ+</i> and <i>Black American</i>, whatever was I thinking?

I tried to login, and this error gif gave me a headache. I get it, some error has happened, but this looping speed some sort of triggers me. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;oops.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;oops.gif</a><p>Mastodon needs more designers and a general sense of visual design. If not a keen visual design ethic, then at least a basic sense of &quot;visual obnoxiousness&quot; to avoid.<p>(Any Mastodoners watching, kindly pass on the message)

The lead point is about misuse of quote retweets. I don&#x27;t disagree that quote retweets can be misused in the way that the article says, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the primary use. And Twitter didn&#x27;t invent the quote retweet, users did and Twitter adopted it as an official feature. If people really want to use it, they will without official support.<p>The points about moderation I found much more interesting, and I wish the author had led with that.

It sure is!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@vegai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@vegai</a> if people want to gather followers together.

Being &quot;better than Twitter&quot; is not hard - Twitter is awful on almost any metric you can find. The only redeeming feature is has is that sometimes interesting people post interesting things there. Do they do it on Mastodon? I honestly have no idea - I&#x27;ve never once encountered anybody linking to a post on Mastodon, and I am a voracious consumer of content.

&gt; Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter<p>I sort of agree, it&#x27;s like Twitter users forming their own groups but it didn&#x27;t make me like Mastodon. I don&#x27;t like the name, I don&#x27;t like the fact I have to sign up for every group, every group has its own layout, which is confusing and I just don&#x27;t get the whole idea behind it. Sorry, I&#x27;ll stick to Reddit

I think that Mastodon has a lot going for it, and indeed It think an open source federated system is a great idea I hope to see succeed, but I don&#x27;t think that RT is the main problem with Twitter.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven&#x27;t had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore&#x2F;block things you don&#x27;t care about.<p>I also don&#x27;t think that &quot;there are people I disagree with also using this space&quot; === &quot;this place is toxic&quot; which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there&#x27;s certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.<p>Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it&#x27;s making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20&#x27;s something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.<p>These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.<p>Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)<p>This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.

This is way too long for an elevator pitch.

What I expect of a &quot;better&quot; Twitter:<p>- A timeline that shows what people I follow say, in chronological order<p>- no censorship, unless requested and enforced by authorities in <i>my</i> jurisdiction<p>- no notifications, no @messages (unless I follow them)<p>I don&#x27;t even understand how Mastodon really works or how it&#x27;s comparable to Twitter. Do people post onto channels? Do I have to join channels to read what they post on those channels?<p>To me Mastodon just looks like &quot;Twitter with more moderation&quot; and I don&#x27;t think the average Twitter user cares about that, because they don&#x27;t partake in mudfights with other users, nor do they care about other users getting into mudfights with one another.<p>Social Media isn&#x27;t actually that terrible to use, it just <i>looks terrible</i> when some journalist selects some particularly &quot;outstanding&quot; posts and proclaims the end of civility because of this technology.

&gt;Mastodon lets you or your moderators decide to block entire instances<p>If your instance operator blocks another instance, are they effectively banning you from following or viewing anyone on the other instance? That would be very stifling.

Do they have a search yet, that isn&#x27;t searching by a hashtag? Twitter wins here by default with proper search and filtering options. How am I supposed to find people talking about something?

I guess I don&#x27;t understand why so much effort is put into these federated social networks rather then starting with a blog and rss perspective to build the same kind of network.

I tried the gamedev Mastadon, but it’s entirely hobbyists and students.<p>I want a platform where I can interact with peers. I’ll go to where ever that is. But so far Mastadon is not the place.

Too bad the Mastodon devs hate SRV records so much. The reliance on WebFinger for federation is the biggest blocker for me deploying an instance on my personal domain.

Is mastodon a one man show? I was interested but I had doubts when I saw those posts on their discourse about the project governance.

If X is better than Y, is stating so necessary?

People went to twitter specifically for the outrage. I think the alternative to twitter is nothing.

Aside the point a little bit, but I just made a mastadon account today and I&#x27;ve already seen a few dozen female accounts that exist solely to promote their patreon&#x2F;gofundme accounts. The exact same type of negative atmosphere that plagues snap, IG, and twitter.

Let me know when Mastodon can take RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and etc. feeds as inputs. The platform needs to have a way to import content to bootstrap an instance without having a lot of friends.

Worse UI and fewer users, can&#x27;t recommend.

I&#x27;m just never joining a social network that requires me to &quot;toot&quot;. Sorry.

I also enjoy micro.blog

&gt; As a result, Mastodon users basically never boost toots to say how wrong they are, and there isn&#x27;t an issue with armies of followers descending on the original author.<p>Because Mastodon is full of like-thinking people, and the ones they&#x27;d strongly disagree with aren&#x27;t joining.<p>This isn&#x27;t a bad thing (it&#x27;s the &quot;local&quot; point this post makes), but it&#x27;s important to emphasize this as the primary factor responsible for people being nicer, above any design decisions the author is complimenting. Keeping people civil is easy when there are ten thousand times fewer and they all voted socialist.<p>I checked the mastodon.social local timeline and fewer than 1% of posts were tagged, so I don&#x27;t see how that&#x27;s going to make a big difference to my experience.<p>&gt; Twitter is a public company, funded by investor money; they thus owe a legal duty to make as much money for their investors as they can.<p>False. This isn&#x27;t a legal obligation, it&#x27;s what the investors want because they&#x27;re toxic scum.

I was expecting a post trying to convince me to care about federated servers for my social media, but it made some decent points.<p>I really like the “Boost” approach to the retweet-with-snark problem. And I like to see Mastodon addressing Twitter’s outrage-as-a-business problem.

If Mastodon wants to be successful, it might be beneficial to try to get some luminaries on board, i.e. the 1% that the rest follow. Unfortunately, they are in the conflict business as well.<p>Another option would be to consider dropping out of the concept altogether.

What I find amusing about all these &quot;solutions&quot; to &quot;online outrage&quot; is that they are invariably made by comfortable centrists, with a smattering of libertarians. I can say this with some authority as both of these terms would have aptly described myself, before I lost my career, my home, and everything else in gender transition, and ended up working three minimum wage jobs instead of coding for 2 years.<p>Let me tell you where the outrage is coming from. It&#x27;s not coming from UX decisions. It&#x27;s coming from mind boggling suffering. It&#x27;s coming from exhausted and starving bodies who are disrespected and discarded, repeatedly. It&#x27;s coming from a lack of opportunity and a lack of services necessary for survival. It&#x27;s coming from a parlous minimum wage and no safety net. It&#x27;s coming from addiction and the homelessness and precariousness that so often drive it.<p>Those prone to conservatism interpret their pain as an attack on them from people who look different. Those prone, like myself, to systems level thinking about social structures view it (correctly) as an induced state, effectively selected for because the alternative was selected against.<p>The pain and outrage leaks onto social media, but it is not from there.<p>It is all around you, and it is nearly big enough to blot out the sun.<p>Get ready.

If you told me this in an elevator, I would think you&#x27;re one of those online people who cares a lot about your online presence and has big arguments about social networks.<p>Also, let me be honest, the language in the article is the sort used by people who have arguments about whether lolicon should be legal or not. This is not something I&#x27;m interested in talking about. Just like voat.co and friends this is a fringe-people network. No thanks. I don&#x27;t want 99% of my conversations to be about furries.<p>Consequently I would ignore you.