As much as I would love for Mastodon to grow, I get why people are avoiding it like the plague.
People are flocking to Bluesky as X makes more unwanted changes
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/18/24273435/bluesky-user-spike-x-tos-ai-changes-blocking
As much as I would love for Mastodon to grow, I get why people are avoiding it like the plague.
People are flocking to Bluesky as X makes more unwanted changes
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/18/24273435/bluesky-user-spike-x-tos-ai-changes-blocking
@milkman76 @majorlinux Had a bunch of my friends try Mastodon. Many of them found it confusing, and just left. I tried my best to explain it and even wrote tutorials. Only a handful stayed.
Then others were run off because of anti-black racism. (A lot of Instances are just terrible. In my quest to find a home, I saw so many places using slurs. Hard R too.)
I've accepted that I'll be here and on Bluesky. That's okay, I don't believe in using a single social media platform.
@majorlinux its weird, but since coming here in 2018 all Ive seen masto do is grow, all the while, since basically the start, people say "its not working/people are leaving/nobody cares."
Huh. But they are flocking BACK to regular old corporate trash social media? Ok.
@milkman76 @majorlinux The problem is that you cannot see everything that's posted on other instances. Here on my instance, I don't see a lot of stuff. However, on the mastodon.social instance, I can see much more. It's in between that kind of fragmentation that racists hide. They also send others private @'s which no one else can see.
Find a black here who speaks out about anti-black racism on the regular, then check out their replies on their own server instead of your instance. It's there.
@milkman76 @silver_huskey Funny thing is, my experience with Threads and Mastodon are inverse to yours.
I have found way more leftists and LGBTQIA+ folks there than I have here and have interacted with their content.
Here, I've seen more liberals than I can shake a stick at and was literally hate bombed on July 4, 2023. That's two days before Threads was even a thing.
So, I don't know what to tell you.
@majorlinux @silver_huskey you got "hate bombed"????
Ive been trying to get hate bombed here for literally 8 years, as Ive been doing online for the better part of 25 years. I go uninvited into large mainstream threads and write hard left politics, speak on the Israeli genocide of palestine, LGBTQ rights,m etc etc, but I get back 1/1000th the hate here as on any other network Ive used.
Not you though?
@silver_huskey @majorlinux Im not entirely sure about this. Im antifascist as fuck and I look for a fight with racists and people from that ideology every day that Im online (which is every day), but I dont see anywhere near as much of that here as on any of the other corporate, non-decentralized networks.
Also mastodon dot social is connected to threads, which is facebook, and can re-expose people to the standard racism and bigotry that exist there.
@silver_huskey @majorlinux yeah, this. Im nb, a writer, tech worker, hard leftist, and I keep hearing (but not really seeing) this. Ive heard this identical thing for 8 years now, on and off, since the first large migration of users began, which threatened the large corporate networks who want ALL the data to train their "AI" with. That's right around the time when the "its too hard" and "its filled with racism" people showed up.
@milkman76 @majorlinux Yeah. People tend not to be believed unless they actually share those comments. Then other people get on them about not using CWs.
And most people threw up their hands and left. Others stayed, determined to carve out a space for themselves.
Just having to explain it over and over again gets exhausting, so I get it when people go elsewhere.
@silver_huskey @majorlinux understood. That may be true, but Im always looking for it -- I have numerous accounts and have no trouble accessing content on almost any instance.
So you are saying most of the hate speech and personal attacks are done privately, through DMs, and that's why nobody sees it?
Yeah I follow a few people who discuss leftist ideologies, which is what "anti black racism" is included within. Would love to see the threads with the actual racism in it so that I can engage.
@milkman76 @majorlinux Again, it just gets tiring having to explain it over again.
Personally, just keep in mind that Mastodon and the Fediverse can be worse than corpo social media in some ways, for some people. Maybe, just believe them a bit more.
@majorlinux @silver_huskey this is worse for you than any racist interaction? Wow... ok... I think I see what Im dealing with here.
BECAUSE I AM A BLACK MAN ON THE INTERNET!
Why do racists do anything?
However, this interaction is by far worse than anything a racist would ever do to me.
@majorlinux @silver_huskey weird. Why would they attack you, randomly like that? I mean I am very promiscuous, I run a blog, and Ive been a pretty aggressive antifascist and leftist voice online forever. Where are my attackers? lol why arent I getting hate DMs? This is my original account.
@milkman76 @silver_huskey I was sitting on a train minding my own business.
Nothing provoked it.
It just happened.
While I do have the reports I filed on my own server to stem the bleeding, the original posts have been purged to reign in storage.
@milkman76 @majorlinux Yes. And people are tired because this is the response almost every time.
Here's the service I used to find smaller instances. Log out of Mastodon or open a private window and browse the dreck to your heart's content. https://instances.social/
@silver_huskey @majorlinux speaking of believing people -- you are saying I must believe you even though there isnt any evidence of anything (its all private, hidden, deleted), and so therefore I should agree that mastodon is shit and racist without actually verifying that myself even though this SPECIFICALLY helps facebook and fascist twitter companies claw back users? Huh.
@milkman76 @majorlinux This will be my last bit of input before I bounce from my PC to unwind.
A good way to help people would be to believe them when they say the racists/fascists are here, and that it's worse than corpo social media. Follow more black people too. Listen a bit more.
@silver_huskey @majorlinux 30+ year tech worker, an I know mastodon very well. Its tiring explaining this to people, but this is my life lol.
I know how to access almost any masto instance, yes, which is whI was interested in th8e instances seeing waves of bullshit. I literally want to try to engage and fight fascists, as Ive been doing offline and online for decades of my life. I want to protect masto.
@daihard @majorlinux Jack wanted little to no moderation and no ability for users to block, only mute. Sorta like what Twitter is now rolling out. The staff and CEO of Bluesky disagreed, so he left.
I've been on BS for a year under my blog account before making a personal account last week. People there are determined for the place not to be toxic like Twitter. Bad actors are mass blocked, and disparaging quote posts are discouraged. People are at least trying something different.
@majorlinux @silver_huskey @milkman76 Dorsey says he left Bluesky because it was "becoming another Twitter" or something like that. I wonder if there's any truth to it. If so, maybe Bluesky isn't all that great after all?
@silver_huskey @milkman76 I agree.
I find that Bluesky has been a great alternative, especially since Jack left.
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