It's a pretty common thing for people to scoff at the idea that the affordances of a platform have something to do with how people behave on it, and that if you make the wrong decisions about how your platform operates you'll get outcomes that you won't like.
It's a pretty common thing for people to take the attitude, "Oh, geeze, what difference does it make whether this feature exists? People will do whatever they want to do anyway."
One of the things Mastodon has going for it is a userbase that mostly doesn't cop out like that. Mastodon is full of plenty of people who believe deeply that how the software works and what its affordances are actually a matter immensely to how social life on Mastodon unfolds.
The problem isn't convincing Mastodonians that these things matter – it's convincing them to not take their first impressions from traumatic experiences on Twitter as gospel truths.
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