I have recently started using Mastodon. While I've never been a big user of
Twitter -- using that mostly to get in touch with politicians of my area to draw
their attention to whatever is bad in my area, but that never succeded.
I started with Mastodon because I think that at every level it's just too
much power in hands of Twitter, the corporation. It's not just the bad
things. The world has so many different cultures, and what is acceptable in one
part of the world is totally unacceptable in some other part of the world. How
does Twitter solves this? Or any other social media for that matter.
There are two problems that I see with so big social networks:
1. People are assholes when they are anonymous because there aren't really any
consequences. No one is stopping me from creating a fake email account, sign
in on any social network with that and wreck havoc.
2. The corporation is the admin. There isn't a single person who can manage the
tweets over the entire network. Nor is there a group of persons. The network
has just some lowest common denominator rules which they enforce so that
/primo/ the network doesn't get into trouble, and /secondo/ no one gets
offended.
Mastodon instances typically cover both of these issues. These are pretty small
and managable to start with -- close to a few hundred members and the admin has
the last say. If you don't play by the rules, you are kicked out. This keeps the
discussions mostly civil.
There are also a few things that I have observed even during my Twitter/FB
days. The fact that most of the people aren't really interested in me. Not that
they should be, but the entire thing has become a itch scratching
competition. Unless someone likes my comment, I would like his/her comment. And
I guess the social media forces us to harbour such feelings. Sooner or later it
becomes a game to be won, and given that the networks are using a lot of
psychiatry to actually bind users, the quality of interactions become pretty shallow.
So it's a combination of tricks that the corporation plays on the user, and the
large numbers of users themselves which is the problem.
I am not entirely sure how things will work out in Mastodon. But I am mostly
looking for other people who have some of the same interests.
PS: After writing this post down, I heard the newest episode of the Radiolab
podcast which is about the FB and the "rulebook" that they have to censor
content. A *very* interesting episode.
