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by madeofpalk
1096 days ago
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Existing social networks do a poor job though of actually allowing users to choose their own community. For Twitter specifically algorthmic timeline, replies, likes, and retweets will often put content from people you don't follow right infront of you. You can maintain your timeline more by unfollowing and blocking, but this is a bunch of effort you must do on a more individual level. Mastodon's approach allows you to outsource a part of that by just joining an instance that doesn't even allow "alleged hate speech" into your timeline. That's the appeal of that. But the point of federated Mastodon is not to have a platform that is solely moderated less than Twitter. It's that: - it's not twitter (or rather, it's a "twitter clone" that's non-commercial, not reliant on a single entity, has a degree of data portability built in - decentralised) - it can allow for the spectrum of moderation styles to exist. The majority of bigger "mainstream" instances are probably going to opt to moderate similarly-ish to social networks, but this doesn't negate the other reasons for mastodon to exist. You can have instances that have an even stricter moderation standard, or even looser. But at the end you don't need to get why one person prefers a network in one way, because federation means different ways can happily exist, and you chose what you prefer. Just don't be surprised if other people aren't enthusiastic about the people you hang out with. |
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"Non-default" sounds too harsh here. It's literally a big tab saying "Following". It's only default for the very first time you log into Twitter, afterward it will remember your decision (it will be "default").
> , replies, likes, and retweets will often put content from people you don't follow into your timeline.
No only retweets will show in the Following tab. Which seems reasonable, as retweets were historically done via copy&paste. The other things aren't the case anymore for the "following" tab since Musk introduced it. (By the way, after pg himself asked him to add that possibility!)
I agree that Facebook is way worse in terms of moderation, but Mastodon doesn't seem an improvement over Twitter, quite the opposite. Those moderators are moderating for users, when this should be simply left to their decision of whom to follow. People or posts will be hidden from users who would not have hidden those themselves.
The decentralized approach sounds cool initially, but it leads only to even more segregation / filter bubbles / echo chambers. As if the choice of whom you follow didn't cause enough of that.
I think that's a real issue. Political polarization increases since the amount of media channels increases. When there were only a handful of newspapers or TV channels, they couldn't be too politically biased, otherwise they would scare away most other people. This changed when the number of media outlets increased. And with social media, every user now is able to create their own little reinforcement chamber.