EU politicians are still paying money to this guy, to use the social medium he controls, where his algorithm decides which voters they reach or do not reach.
@mastodonmigration Mastodon is not likely to pick up steam without big changes to moderation. Bluesky pretty much took the wind that should've been in Mastodon's sails.
And further, I really want a competitor to YouTube. YouTube is super fascist-friendly, and I am getting sick of it.
"If you don't like it, do your own!" is a very Mastodon statement, and is why people don't choose Mastodon or the Fediverse.🤷🏿♂️
If I go to buy a car, and I tell the salesman, "Hmm, I wish it had more trunk space." The salesman might say, "Sure! Hold on one minute!" and go to the back room, and come back with some sheet metal, some cans of paint, an airbrush, an arc welder, and a grinder. With a big grin he says, "If you don't like the trunk, you can build your own! Modify your car! It's allowed!"
No.
I'm not modifying my car. I don't want to be an automotive engineer. I just want to drive to work and back.
Rather than start welding, I will just go to another manufacturer, and buy a car that is similar but with more trunk space.
This post is about moderation and safety on Mastodon.
@mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration I think a lot of people do not understand that for people in certain marginalized groups, things can get very ugly very quickly, and it should not be up to the victims to fix the problem.
But I also remember people being very critical of requests for alt txt & CWs.
It seems that some users want all freedom & no responsibility.
Using the fediverse requires more thought & effort than elsewhere, about who we follow, how we find them & how we avoid stuff that we don’t want to see. But in return, we’re not deluged with ads & stupid suggestions & other rubbish.
OTOH, if people of some minority groups find that this doesn’t work for them without a disproportionate amount of effort on their part, then we need to do better.
Requests for CW are usually nonsense from white people. I ignore almost all of them.
Because Content Warning is the wrong word. And because the whole Fediverse system of making the poster responsible for all of the personal tastes of the reader is silly.
If I post "Sigh... Got pulled over on the way to work, again. Driving while Black, episode 3,989." then some Mastodon clown will say, "Can you CW posts about racism? That disturbs me! Also, put a 'US politics' label around it. Racism like that is a US problem, and we don't have racism here in my idyllic European mountain town!"🤡
No.
I'm not going to CW every post about my Black life.
Fact 1: Most white folk online don't care about what happens to Black people.
Fact 2: Many Black people experience microaggressions constantly.
This winds up with the Mastodon experience for Black people being constantly annoyed by strangers about why you should content warning everything.
"Using the Fediverse requires more effort." Is a choice, and not one that I agree with.
It only requires more effort because the UX for Mastodon has some huge gaps. It doesn't have to have those gaps. It can improve. It is improving. And it doesn't require VC money, dark patterns, or algorithmic feeds to do it. It requires UX expertise, and focus.
I will keep stanning Inkscape until someone stops me! That's what it looks like when an open source project puts as much thought and effort into developing UX expertise as it does into code expertise.
Twitter made things easy, but it was all about promoting outrage which increases “engagement”, except for those being targeted or triggered.
When I came here, I had to choose to do more to find my people & stay engaged with them, without sealing myself off in a bubble. But I didn’t cop much in the way of abuse, criticism etc. And I’m guessing there’s many others like me who simply don’t know what some other people have to deal with all of the time.
Again, outrage and shock doesn't drive the most engagement. If it did, Twitter would have more revenue than YouTube, 4Chan would have more revenue than TikTok.
Most social media engagement comes from viral content. The viral content that performs the best *by far* is comedy and fun stuff. Jokes and dances.
People still think Twitter was all about outrage, for many reasons, but here are two big ones:
1) Twitter's owners refused to block Trump, no matter what he said 2) Twitter was the only place that a rich racist white person could say an obvious lie, and get called out by a poor Black woman.
At peak, 1 in 5 monthly active Twitter users was Black. Twitter engagement would have gone *up* if they banned the nazis and added safety features for Black women.
@mekkaokereke @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration That is an excellent example of people wanting everyone to use CWs to make their online experience pleasant (& awfully bland) for them, while suppressing the needs of anyone to be able to rant about their experience of life. It reeks of privilege.
I think the CW issue has largely disappeared because people are using hashtags & filters instead. And I must admit that I’m less likely to bother opening something with a CW when they occasionally appear.
Whatever system is used, it prompts people to think about others.
I try to hashtag discussions of US politics, because as an Australian, I fully appreciate that not everyone who follows me, particularly Australians, wants their feed dominated by the often idiotic antics of politicians in that country.
And I hashtag stuff about neurodivergence, because while everyone could benefit from learning more about it, not everyone is as interested as me.
And stuff that might really trigger some people.
And alt txt? Why not make the whole thing nicer for people with visibility issues? My app will do it for me, although I always check for accuracy & to reduce the overly saccharine tone that has become the norm. And doing this, or writing my own, often makes me more appreciative of the image.
@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration Once I point this out, you won't be able to unsee it: People from all over the world use social media, but most of the people that complain about "put CWs around your US politics posts! No one wants to see that!" are from The UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand, or other "predominantly white, but not the US" places. This is the same trend as "We don't want to hear about you Yanks!" that was on Twitter.
@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration Missing alt-text is again, the fault of bad UX. There are so many features that can make it lower friction to add good alt text, and none of them have been implemented.
* If I post an image that I posted before, and I previously posted it with alt-text, the box should auto-populate with the previous alt-text so that I can make edits to it.
* If I post an image that someone else has posted before, same thing.
* If someone posts an image without alt-text, and I reply to that post with the same image posted again, but with alt-text, it should be possible for the original poster to just read it and be like "Yeah sure!" and click "OK" and have the alt-text provided by me apply to their image.
@mekkaokereke word! The alt text experience deserves improvement.
Currently I may post 30 posts in a day, and then someone who follows me for this content will complain why I do not add alt text 100 percent of the time.
It is like bringing free cake to the party and then someone complaining the cake has no frosting.
If someone posts an image of a red house in a forest, they should not waste time describing that — an AI system should.
@mekkaokereke @Susan60 @schmaker @mastodonmigration I try to be really rigorous about alt-text. The way I see it, I am doing it to be accommodating to people with certain disabilities.
However, I will confess that I do not bother doing this on platforms where it is not the norm, so I appreciate the occasional badgering about this topic.
I’m a political animal, but I am interested in other things as well.
As for the US thing, there are simply a lot of you! And your politics is feral atm, so it can get a bit overwhelming. (Obviously it’s much worse for those in the US…😩)
I do write a lot about neurodivergence. If people aren’t interested and they unfollow or block me as a result, so be it.
I do get upset if that happens because of a misunderstanding. Usually that is the result of incorrect assumptions & judgements. Most autistic people experience that, some more than others due to their tone/manner, which is misunderstood.
@Susan60 @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration Here's the thing you might want to keep in mind: if someone from my country says they don't want to talk about politics, it means they do want to talk about politics, but only with people expressing views from the far far far far right.
In case you wonder why Americans bristle when you complain about politics.
And I don't mind hearing about politics from other countries. I shouldn't be so myopic that I only follow local politics.
But if you live somewhere in which voting occurs, you really should try to pay attention. A lot of what is happening in the USA right now is happening because people were too busy to read a fucking newspaper.
@tofugolem @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration Oh I agree entirely. It’s one of the reasons I like the fact that voting is compulsory here. That and the democracy sausage make people take at least some notice.
@Tofu Golem Absolutely a valid point. To be clear, I'm not trying to dictate how anyone else should post. That's not my place. Also, curating my personal feed is my responsibility, no one else's.
@me I get that I should probably put a #politics tag in my posts, but given that my country has descended into all-out fascism, I have enough on my plate to bother with things like that.
Your request to not want to see US politics, or any topic, is fair. Especially given your view that it is your responsibility to filter, not others' responsibility to not talk about it.
Many people are so opposed to LLM based systems, that they've given up on regular statistical based regression filters. 🤷🏿♂️
You should be able to list topics that you don't want to hear about, and your client should score posts, and hide things that you don't want to see. You can do this without transformers.
Alternatively, BlueSky has composable moderation. Some human can read posts and tag as "US politics." Then you can subscribe to that filter, to not see it. Low effort for posters, good result for readers.
Telling people to add hash tags to everything is silly. It only makes sense from the position of someone in the default category, because they don't really think that they'll have to adorn everything they write with:
I’ve not bothered with filters, but someone I know has & has asked all they follow to use hashtags.
I do use follow requests & don’t follow back if their profile says too little about their interests or is only US pol.
It’s not about “liking” people or punishing them etc for me. It’s about curating a feed that is sufficiently varied & interesting, which is obviously highly subjective.
I’d like to see more racial & cultural diversity because diversity of all sorts interests me & always has.
@mekkaokereke @Susan60 @schmaker @mastodonmigration Content warnings are only valid if they might trigger someone who has suffered trauma, and I confess I need to get better about that.
I do not give a fuck about people who complain about CW for politics or meat consumption, but I should be more diligent about rape, child molestation, and the like. Those requests for CW are perfectly reasonable in my opinion.
@tofugolem @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @Susan60 @mastodonmigration But as @mekkaokereke@mastodon.cloud points out, trauma is lobbed constantly at Black people. As a WW with big trauma I can kind of see both sides. Here's another ex: a VERY large fraction of people w/ breasts have been traumatized by the medical industry, to the point that any mention/image of breasts can send us into flashbacks. You have NO idea how ubiquitous breasts are in our culture til they're a trauma trigger. But to flag every one? IDK.
The thing is, we’re not actually in a position to judge what other people find traumatic. OTOH, we can’t spend all of our time worrying about what might or might not trigger everyone out there. And those of us with the most privilege clearly have the least right to get too precious about it.
I tag the most obvious triggers, but also topics/interests. If someone is offended or upset by a mention or photo of something that most would find innocuous and blocks me as a result, that’s fine.
Let's wrap it other way - user is choosing from two ways of soc-neting at this moment: 1. Here you have commercial soc-net. We will sell your data, check your bedroom and wrap ad shit around your face with zero-to-none moderation. And you have nowhere else to go! Enjoy! 2. Here you have free soc-net without any ads being run and funded by volunteers. And if you do not like how we manage it, you can either choose other one or make your own. Welcome abroad.
I'd definitely go for 2 😀
And actually - buying a car lately somewhat matches the case 1: "You want a car that's not sniffing on you? GTFO our dealerships! Every single one!" 😀
Of course you would choose 2. Which is why you're here.
But I'm staying because there's a better option:
3) Make Fediverse better, so that everyone doesn't have to roll their own, when millions of people want exactly the same thing. That's silly and inefficient. Just make a model of car that people want.
@mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration I very much appreciate your presence, although I dearly miss certain African-American techy types. Some of them had a sophisticated understanding of moderating systems and policies, as well as the effects both had on marginalized people. I felt like I was learning from reading their posts.
@schmaker @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke They did exactly what you suggest. They left Mastodon for Bluesky. This is why Mastodon stopped growing and Bluesky started growing more rapidly.
Moderation matters.
If moderation falls below a certain threshold, the result is always Nazis and pedophiles. Just look at 4Chan or Twitter.
@mekkaokereke and even if DIY was helpful advice to people already on fedi who need better moderation, it'd still be patently ridiculous in the context of "most people are on corporate platforms where their attention and opinions are being played like a game." most of the people in my in-person circles refuse to try fedi because they think it's too techy and complicated. suggesting they learn web hosting, system admin, and social media moderation will surely not convince them otherwise 😂
And don't just reframe a negative as a positive, as in "I like Mastodon because it doesn't have Ads like other social media." That's still a comparative negative. Frame it just in terms of the positives of Mastodon.
@mekkaokereke @Minimac @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration I'm a salty bastard, and I'm gonna be negative. Those ads on other social media platforms make those platforms an inherent threat to democracy (e.g. the Cambridge Analytica thing).
Sorry for being a curmudgeon.
Sorry for interjecting, I'm just really surly about the things that have been done to manipulate the general population.
The things that have a much greater impact on voting patterns, are national newspapers and TV, and the framing of stories.
And the biggest counter to political interference in the US was... Black users online. We uncovered the disinfo networks before everyone else, for reasons I s covered before that are obvious once you see them.
[A Black adult shows Black kids a photo of Elmo and Cookie monster. Elmo is happily eating a cookie, as Cookie monster looks on helpless and in despair]
Black adult: On Sesame Street, Who be eating cookies?
Black kids: Cookie Monster!
Black adult:…
Tofu Golem
in reply to Randahl Fink • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •If only there were a solid decentralized non-US public social media platform.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Mastodon Migration • • •@mastodonmigration
Mastodon is not likely to pick up steam without big changes to moderation. Bluesky pretty much took the wind that should've been in Mastodon's sails.
And further, I really want a competitor to YouTube. YouTube is super fascist-friendly, and I am getting sick of it.
Schmaker
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •It's not #Mastodon, it's #Fediverse and we will never get further unless we finally figure this out.
Imagine you couldn't send e-mail from @gmail.com to @yahoo.com .. why do we tolerate this in social networks and walled messengers?
It does not mean we do have to win or something. All we need to be is viable alternative for people, who figured out someone is puppeting them...
Tofu Golem
in reply to Schmaker • • •@schmaker @mastodonmigration
Those moderation changes need to happen to promote wider adoption. It is holding the platform back.
I remember earlier days of this platform when there were more minorities around. I remember their complaints before they left.
Schmaker
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •Not sure how English part of Fedi acts like, but local (Czech) part is definitely moderated well
And here comes the biggest benefit - you do not like moderation of your instance? Do your own! 😀
mekka okereke
in reply to Schmaker • • •@schmaker @mastodonmigration @tofugolem
"If you don't like it, do your own!" is a very Mastodon statement, and is why people don't choose Mastodon or the Fediverse.🤷🏿♂️
If I go to buy a car, and I tell the salesman, "Hmm, I wish it had more trunk space." The salesman might say, "Sure! Hold on one minute!" and go to the back room, and come back with some sheet metal, some cans of paint, an airbrush, an arc welder, and a grinder. With a big grin he says, "If you don't like the trunk, you can build your own! Modify your car! It's allowed!"
No.
I'm not modifying my car. I don't want to be an automotive engineer. I just want to drive to work and back.
Rather than start welding, I will just go to another manufacturer, and buy a car that is similar but with more trunk space.
This post is about moderation and safety on Mastodon.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
Kevin Davy reshared this.
Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •I think a lot of people do not understand that for people in certain marginalized groups, things can get very ugly very quickly, and it should not be up to the victims to fix the problem.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •@tofugolem @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration
I have never had any issues with moderation… probably because I’m a white woman.
But I also remember people being very critical of requests for alt txt & CWs.
It seems that some users want all freedom & no responsibility.
Using the fediverse requires more thought & effort than elsewhere, about who we follow, how we find them & how we avoid stuff that we don’t want to see. But in return, we’re not deluged with ads & stupid suggestions & other rubbish.
OTOH, if people of some minority groups find that this doesn’t work for them without a disproportionate amount of effort on their part, then we need to do better.
mekka okereke
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •Requests for CW are usually nonsense from white people. I ignore almost all of them.
Because Content Warning is the wrong word. And because the whole Fediverse system of making the poster responsible for all of the personal tastes of the reader is silly.
If I post "Sigh... Got pulled over on the way to work, again. Driving while Black, episode 3,989." then some Mastodon clown will say, "Can you CW posts about racism? That disturbs me! Also, put a 'US politics' label around it. Racism like that is a US problem, and we don't have racism here in my idyllic European mountain town!"🤡
No.
I'm not going to CW every post about my Black life.
Fact 1: Most white folk online don't care about what happens to Black people.
Fact 2: Many Black people experience microaggressions constantly.
This winds up with the Mastodon experience for Black people being constantly annoyed by strangers about why you should content warning everything.
mekka okereke
in reply to mekka okereke • • •"Using the Fediverse requires more effort." Is a choice, and not one that I agree with.
It only requires more effort because the UX for Mastodon has some huge gaps. It doesn't have to have those gaps. It can improve. It is improving. And it doesn't require VC money, dark patterns, or algorithmic feeds to do it. It requires UX expertise, and focus.
I will keep stanning Inkscape until someone stops me! That's what it looks like when an open source project puts as much thought and effort into developing UX expertise as it does into code expertise.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
I’m afraid I don’t understand enough about the technical issues to engage with this.
Twitter made things easy, but it was all about promoting outrage which increases “engagement”, except for those being targeted or triggered.
When I came here, I had to choose to do more to find my people & stay engaged with them, without sealing myself off in a bubble. But I didn’t cop much in the way of abuse, criticism etc. And I’m guessing there’s many others like me who simply don’t know what some other people have to deal with all of the time.
mekka okereke
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
"Twitter was all about promoting outrage" is what someone that doesn't know enough Black people says. 🤷🏿♂️
Again, outrage and shock doesn't drive the most engagement. If it did, Twitter would have more revenue than YouTube, 4Chan would have more revenue than TikTok.
Most social media engagement comes from viral content. The viral content that performs the best *by far* is comedy and fun stuff. Jokes and dances.
People still think Twitter was all about outrage, for many reasons, but here are two big ones:
1) Twitter's owners refused to block Trump, no matter what he said
2) Twitter was the only place that a rich racist white person could say an obvious lie, and get called out by a poor Black woman.
At peak, 1 in 5 monthly active Twitter users was Black. Twitter engagement would have gone *up* if they banned the nazis and added safety features for Black women.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
That is an excellent example of people wanting everyone to use CWs to make their online experience pleasant (& awfully bland) for them, while suppressing the needs of anyone to be able to rant about their experience of life. It reeks of privilege.
I think the CW issue has largely disappeared because people are using hashtags & filters instead. And I must admit that I’m less likely to bother opening something with a CW when they occasionally appear.
Whatever system is used, it prompts people to think about others.
I try to hashtag discussions of US politics, because as an Australian, I fully appreciate that not everyone who follows me, particularly Australians, wants their feed dominated by the often idiotic antics of politicians in that country.
And I hashtag stuff about neurodivergence, because while everyone could benefit from learning more about it, not everyone is as interested as me.
And stuff that might really trigger some people.
And alt txt? Why not make the whole thing nicer for people with visibility issues? My app will do it for me, although I always check for accuracy & to reduce the overly saccharine tone that has become the norm. And doing this, or writing my own, often makes me more appreciative of the image.
mekka okereke
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Once I point this out, you won't be able to unsee it: People from all over the world use social media, but most of the people that complain about "put CWs around your US politics posts! No one wants to see that!" are from The UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand, or other "predominantly white, but not the US" places. This is the same trend as "We don't want to hear about you Yanks!" that was on Twitter.
Lots of interesting theories as to why this is.
mekka okereke
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Missing alt-text is again, the fault of bad UX. There are so many features that can make it lower friction to add good alt text, and none of them have been implemented.
* If I post an image that I posted before, and I previously posted it with alt-text, the box should auto-populate with the previous alt-text so that I can make edits to it.
* If I post an image that someone else has posted before, same thing.
* If someone posts an image without alt-text, and I reply to that post with the same image posted again, but with alt-text, it should be possible for the original poster to just read it and be like "Yeah sure!" and click "OK" and have the alt-text provided by me apply to their image.
Etc
Kevin Davy reshared this.
Randahl Fink
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke word! The alt text experience deserves improvement.
Currently I may post 30 posts in a day, and then someone who follows me for this content will complain why I do not add alt text 100 percent of the time.
It is like bringing free cake to the party and then someone complaining the cake has no frosting.
If someone posts an image of a red house in a forest, they should not waste time describing that — an AI system should.
@Susan60 @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Panic at the Trishco 🕊️
in reply to Randahl Fink • • •So use the Ice Cubes app. It has that capability.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Panic at the Trishco 🕊️ • • •@topofmyvoice @mekkaokereke @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
It does. Not as good as it used to be. Trying too hard to comment on ambience etc, but pretty good on basic content.
Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @Susan60 @schmaker @mastodonmigration
I try to be really rigorous about alt-text. The way I see it, I am doing it to be accommodating to people with certain disabilities.
However, I will confess that I do not bother doing this on platforms where it is not the norm, so I appreciate the occasional badgering about this topic.
Matthew Malthouse
in reply to mekka okereke • • •If an image has exif data field 'Image Description' populated use its content to autofill the alt text.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @tofugolem @schmaker @mastodonmigration
I don’t filter at all, but don’t follow back if all someone writes about is their national politics.
I’m a political animal, but I am interested in other things as well.
As for the US thing, there are simply a lot of you! And your politics is feral atm, so it can get a bit overwhelming. (Obviously it’s much worse for those in the US…😩)
I do write a lot about neurodivergence. If people aren’t interested and they unfollow or block me as a result, so be it.
I do get upset if that happens because of a misunderstanding. Usually that is the result of incorrect assumptions & judgements. Most autistic people experience that, some more than others due to their tone/manner, which is misunderstood.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •@Susan60 @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Here's the thing you might want to keep in mind: if someone from my country says they don't want to talk about politics, it means they do want to talk about politics, but only with people expressing views from the far far far far right.
In case you wonder why Americans bristle when you complain about politics.
And I don't mind hearing about politics from other countries. I shouldn't be so myopic that I only follow local politics.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •@tofugolem @Susan60 @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration
US politics is everywhere I look, but I don’t bump into many from the centre right, let alone far right.
I see a bit of Canadian & US pol on here, & some European, & NZ. I find it all interesting.
But some simply aren’t interested in politics (🤯)or just want to limit their intake because so much of it is scary & depressing. (That I understand.)
Tofu Golem
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •@Susan60 @mekkaokereke @schmaker @mastodonmigration
If you live in an authoritarian system, there is a reason to not pay attention.
But if you live somewhere in which voting occurs, you really should try to pay attention. A lot of what is happening in the USA right now is happening because people were too busy to read a fucking newspaper.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •Oh I agree entirely. It’s one of the reasons I like the fact that voting is compulsory here. That and the democracy sausage make people take at least some notice.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Looking for explanations… • •like this
Kevin Davy and Looking for explanations… like this.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •People who do not want to read about US politics are not a marginalized group being abused by a majority. Not comparable.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Tofu Golem • •Tofu Golem likes this.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •I get that I should probably put a #politics tag in my posts, but given that my country has descended into all-out fascism, I have enough on my plate to bother with things like that.
mekka okereke
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •@me @tofugolem
Your request to not want to see US politics, or any topic, is fair. Especially given your view that it is your responsibility to filter, not others' responsibility to not talk about it.
Many people are so opposed to LLM based systems, that they've given up on regular statistical based regression filters. 🤷🏿♂️
You should be able to list topics that you don't want to hear about, and your client should score posts, and hide things that you don't want to see. You can do this without transformers.
Alternatively, BlueSky has composable moderation. Some human can read posts and tag as "US politics." Then you can subscribe to that filter, to not see it. Low effort for posters, good result for readers.
Telling people to add hash tags to everything is silly. It only makes sense from the position of someone in the default category, because they don't really think that they'll have to adorn everything they write with:
#white #male #whiteman #man #cis #dude #bro #ablebodied #whitepeople #pinkskinned #majority #justaguy #guy #caucasian #presumeddefault #stuffjustworksforme #benefitofthedoubt #thoughtoffirst
They presume themselves to be the default, and hash tags are for everyone else that deviates from their view of the world with them at the center.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •@tofugolem @me @schmaker @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke
Of course not. I’m simply doing them a courtesy.
Looking for explanations…
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •@me @schmaker @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke @tofugolem
I’ve not bothered with filters, but someone I know has & has asked all they follow to use hashtags.
I do use follow requests & don’t follow back if their profile says too little about their interests or is only US pol.
It’s not about “liking” people or punishing them etc for me. It’s about curating a feed that is sufficiently varied & interesting, which is obviously highly subjective.
I’d like to see more racial & cultural diversity because diversity of all sorts interests me & always has.
Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @Susan60 @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Content warnings are only valid if they might trigger someone who has suffered trauma, and I confess I need to get better about that.
I do not give a fuck about people who complain about CW for politics or meat consumption, but I should be more diligent about rape, child molestation, and the like. Those requests for CW are perfectly reasonable in my opinion.
Callisto
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •Looking for explanations…
in reply to Callisto • • •@callisto @tofugolem @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke@mastodon.cloud
The thing is, we’re not actually in a position to judge what other people find traumatic. OTOH, we can’t spend all of our time worrying about what might or might not trigger everyone out there. And those of us with the most privilege clearly have the least right to get too precious about it.
I tag the most obvious triggers, but also topics/interests. If someone is offended or upset by a mention or photo of something that most would find innocuous and blocks me as a result, that’s fine.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Looking for explanations… • • •Maybe, but I can assume that rape and child molestation are traumatic for victims. I should do better about filtering those two things at least. I'm sure there are other super obvious things that I could do better on.
Schmaker
in reply to mekka okereke • • •Let's wrap it other way - user is choosing from two ways of soc-neting at this moment:
1. Here you have commercial soc-net. We will sell your data, check your bedroom and wrap ad shit around your face with zero-to-none moderation. And you have nowhere else to go! Enjoy!
2. Here you have free soc-net without any ads being run and funded by volunteers. And if you do not like how we manage it, you can either choose other one or make your own. Welcome abroad.
I'd definitely go for 2 😀
And actually - buying a car lately somewhat matches the case 1: "You want a car that's not sniffing on you? GTFO our dealerships! Every single one!" 😀
mekka okereke
in reply to Schmaker • • •Of course you would choose 2. Which is why you're here.
But I'm staying because there's a better option:
3) Make Fediverse better, so that everyone doesn't have to roll their own, when millions of people want exactly the same thing. That's silly and inefficient. Just make a model of car that people want.
That's what we're doing.
Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •I very much appreciate your presence, although I dearly miss certain African-American techy types. Some of them had a sophisticated understanding of moderating systems and policies, as well as the effects both had on marginalized people. I felt like I was learning from reading their posts.
mekka okereke reshared this.
Tofu Golem
in reply to Schmaker • • •@schmaker @mastodonmigration @mekkaokereke
They did exactly what you suggest. They left Mastodon for Bluesky. This is why Mastodon stopped growing and Bluesky started growing more rapidly.
Moderation matters.
If moderation falls below a certain threshold, the result is always Nazis and pedophiles. Just look at 4Chan or Twitter.
Lars Hansson
in reply to mekka okereke • • •Morgan ⚧️
in reply to mekka okereke • • •mekka okereke
Unknown parent • • •@Minimac @tofugolem @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Emilio, try this out: instead of framing things in terms of the negatives of BlueSky, name it in terms of the positives of Mastodon.
And don't just reframe a negative as a positive, as in "I like Mastodon because it doesn't have Ads like other social media." That's still a comparative negative. Frame it just in terms of the positives of Mastodon.
I find that much more constructive.
Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @Minimac @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration
I'm a salty bastard, and I'm gonna be negative. Those ads on other social media platforms make those platforms an inherent threat to democracy (e.g. the Cambridge Analytica thing).
Sorry for being a curmudgeon.
Sorry for interjecting, I'm just really surly about the things that have been done to manipulate the general population.
mekka okereke
in reply to Tofu Golem • • •@tofugolem @Minimac @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Cambridge Analytics is not nearly as effective as people pretend that it is.
The percent of white voters that choose the fashy option has not changed before, during, or after Cambridge Analytica era. 🤷🏿♂️
And Black US voters were targeted by Cambridge Analytica *the most* and it had *the least* impact on their voting patterns.
hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/114…
The things that have a much greater impact on voting patterns, are national newspapers and TV, and the framing of stories.
And the biggest counter to political interference in the US was... Black users online. We uncovered the disinfo networks before everyone else, for reasons I s covered before that are obvious once you see them.
mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
mekka okereke :verified: (Hachyderm.io)Tofu Golem
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@mekkaokereke @Minimac @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration
The point is that this form of influence is POSSIBLE, which I do not think we should tolerate.
And it is unfair to use African-American voters as an example. They are a lot less, erm, stupid about political influence than white people.
mekka okereke
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@tofugolem @Minimac @laguiri @schmaker @mastodonmigration
Why having more Black folk on your social media platform is so effective at protecting you against foreign disinformation campaigns.
hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/111…
mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
mekka okereke :verified: (Hachyderm.io)Mastodon Migration
in reply to mekka okereke • • •Fascinating