[PaulHoule]

I think the time period of 2016-2022 has been particularly bad. I mean, there was a time when somebody could have thought social media was a good thing but it was the events around the election of 2016 that got me to delete my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Since then we have also had the cryptocurrency grift.

The fallout of musk buying Twitter and the wave of crypto collapses despite the efforts to keep it going may be the beginnings of a better era.

[fsflover]

There is nothing wrong or bad with the social media. The problem is big tech trying to squeeze maximal profit via advertising by selling the attention of the users. Mastodon is the answer here, works amazingly well.

[PaulHoule]

I would (mostly) disagree.

(1) Freedom isn't free. A social site needs a sustainable business model. That might be advertising, it might be something else, but it ends in tears without it. To some extent I like the membership model but there are always going to be people who will complain about the cost of even something tiny like a $2 a month subscription, they'll say something like "Elon Musk can afford that but I can't..." Advertising has problems that come with it, but so do other ways of running a site. Advertising also has the socially positive potential of getting you better products and services by enabling new competitors to make themselves known.

(2) There is something particularly toxic about the Twitter model which is mostly open and encourages you to have a single presentation of self. If you are in some place where the music you like and what you do for work and what books you read, what hobbies you have, etc. are all there together with politicized aspects of identity such as race, gender, sexuality.

Like it or not if you want to shove your identity up everyone's noses and under their fingernails you're going to meet people on line who have an opposing identity and feel the same way and they will deprive you of being able to enjoy other activities. At best you can fight back and try to deprive them of a normal life online.

People who share an interest in say, photography, can go to a photography forum where there are community standards and a person who is a member of that community will find themselves protected from bullshit behavior from others in the community while themselves being expected to refrain from bullshit behavior. Communities like that can exclude people who do bullshit behaviors, whereas the point of Twitter seems to be bullshit behaviors and 95% of what people seem to think is "free speech that must be protected" is bullshit behaviors.

It really is a problem kicking people off platforms like Twitter and Facebook that you use to log into other web sites, but in a decentralized world it is much easier to take out the trash. And it is necessary.

That said I am indifferent to Mastodon. It's boring. I haven't seen extreme trolling there but also not anything I'd want to read. What can I say? It seems that the less people have to say the more they think their free speech is being violated.

[fsflover]

> (1) Freedom isn't free. A social site needs a sustainable business model.

Mastodon is not a single social network. What is the business model of the whole Internet? If you would say it's advertising, then I would reply that it worked better before it became widespread.

> (2) There is something particularly toxic about the Twitter model which is mostly open and encourages you to have a single presentation of self.

I agree. Mastodon does not force you to have a single identity.

> I am indifferent to Mastodon. It's boring.

Counterexample: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34232041.

[PaulHoule]

So my next concern is: how does Mastodon control spam?

[fsflover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)#Cont...