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by karaterobot 1253 days ago
People need to see this play out again in order to rule out the possibility that the problems Twitter had and caused were just due to that particular platform, in that particular scenario. If Mastodon (or any of the other alternatives) go down the same road, they'll begin to wonder if the cause may be something deeper. But, they won't arrive at that conclusion by abstraction, or else they would have already.

Another possibility is it'll work out great.

1 comments

I admire your positive attitude, but facebook nor snapchat nor tiktok have shown any other trend. "Social" media are social in name only.

> else they would have already.

Except it doesn't work that way. People are some mixture of dumb, greedy and vain.

> Another possibility is it'll work out great.

What would be the positive outcome? Preferably one that wasn't heralded 20 years ago and has not borne out.

I'm a pessimist too, however you may be discounting the effect of capitalism in your analysis. To me it seems reasonable that efforts of a group of cooperatives instead of a group of for-profit companies could lead to a different result.

Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.

It’s not capitalism, it’s society. The problem wasn’t twitter, the tech or the company, but the way it was used and consumed. The same actors with the same audience will have the same effect on Mastodon. Only this time there won’t be someone to moderate.