Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity
It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.
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Not really a comment on this specific case, but isn't it a bit strange to refer to Mastodon as a thing or community as a whole?
I get it when you have a platform like Twitter, you refer to the users of that platform. But Mastodon is many different platforms with different rules and social norms and communities that are more or less (in case of defederation) connected. Treating that as a single user base sounds a bit strange in my head.
Thoughts?
It is generalising for sure, but IMO touches on a real phenomenon. It’s more like saying if you encounter these behaviours they are likely to come from mastodon users.
The importance though is that mastodon is so dominant on the Fedi with a highly effective brand and relatively ambitious CEO, that fostering a toxic culture, however much of a minority, has implications for the whole fediverse. Whole swathes of people have left the fediverse because of the broken promises of the mastodon experience.
Who is this Mastodon CEO you think is controlling Mastodon's culture? Rochko? He doesn't have any influence on what posts anyone sees on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn't have a central server or moderation team, and their algorithms are too dumb to instill a culture or even present a single unified culture. I see posts from people I follow, and people they boost, that's it. It's like a step removed from RSS feeds.
@Zaktor There is some influence. Two things that come to mind:
default post length limit (500 characters)
how the server renders “Page” ActivityPub objects (e.g. Lemmy posts)
For example, many comments made in this thread could not be made from a Mastodon server. All Lemmy posts show as just a title and link with a blank body. These application behaviours have a direct influence on what types of conversations take place by people from Mastodon servers.
Culture is often nebulous and subtle. You’re straw-manning my statement as something about a monolithic culture governed by a single person. I was pretty clear about the subtleties of this. Otherwise, you’ve simplified the nature of mastodon the technology and brand and missed the ways in which a culture can attach to that nature especially around issues of privacy and consent.
A cohesive culture has definitely formed distinct from the rest of the fediverse. I think microblogging as a paradigm kind of lends itself to this but Lemmy certainly has a distinct culture as well.
