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Comment by nafey | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

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I have a feeling it already is one. In my timeline there are a lot of LGBQT activists (which I think is the case for much of Mastodon at the moment?), and since I generally agree with how they'd like to see the world and am otherwise not really involved with that movement, I don't really interact with those posts. However, I see a lot of "I simply blocked this hateful person lalalalalala" which makes me, as an outsider, feel uncomfortable, and I feel hesitant even to try to respond with even a slightly different view.

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves.

The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be into in Japan).

The third wave was sex workers in response to SESTA/FOSTA eliminating platforms they used in the past.

All these waves set up their own instances, and they don't communicate much with the other waves.

If you look at what these waves all have in common (aside from using the software), there's just one thing. They were all posting stuff that didn't fit in on a mainstream platform. In the first case it was due to harassment, in the second it was embarrassment, in the third it was legality.

The users are already bifurcating the network, admins routinely share blocklists of sites that they don't want included in their version of the fediverse. Being able to block instances and people you don't like is one of Mastodon's killer features.

I don't think it will become the next outrage machine, people will just block and bifurcate. I do think users will keep setting up Mastodon instances in waves similar to the first three. I'd be surprised if Mastodon ever powered a better version of the commons we currently have on FB, Twitter etc. [1] The feature Mastodon added to federation (and that made it more popular than similar software) is the ability to not federate with people who are different from you.

[1] The "fediverse" at large has some potential to do this if it receives mass adoption. Think of a scenario like WordPress integrating federation features into the Core. This would bring federation to the mainstream.

Yeah that first wave are huge with using content warnings for the silliest of things.

[cw: food] I ate a burrito

I've since disabled content warnings, because I think it gets in the way.. But then it fails the second and third waves, because they post childporn and sex ads..

So I've ended up blocking pawoo.net and switter.at

Which is kinda the problem on mastodon, there's nothing in between silly content warnings written by people that are offended by the slightest thing, and content warnings for childporn drawings

I think the Content Warning thing is a different "problem". People in my timeline say they're using it in order to not clutter your timeline, i.e. you can quickly scan the headline ("I ate a burrito") to determine whether you want to read the rest. Ironically, that might be because Mastodon allows longer posts :P

Perhaps they'd need to implement a summary tag or something, so that people can configure their clients to only show the summaries for those who want to, and allows you to always expand them and still hide everything behind a CW.

Then it sounds like an option that should exist when reading your feed rather than something that requires the action of each individual person per tweet.

Yes there needs to be a global "disable all CW/Spoilers/ETC"

I don't see how the story about the waves and about users not fitting in would lead to less outrage. Sure, by being able to block (groups of) people, they might not come in contact with the people they are outraged about as much. However, the main thing that seems to turn Twitter/Facebook and now Mastodon into an outrage machine is exactly only seeing their own circles. That's what I'm currently observing at Mastodon: there's a lot of outrage in its LGBQT communities over things that I perceive as small, and the outrage is such that I wouldn't even dare to get involved in the things they are discussing, even though that is the only way to get closer together.

Don't forget the French wave.

It will be easier for governments to shut down small instances and smear the owners. I don't think decentralisation has much security value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole

This always ignores the fact that several things like networks and server hosts are still fairly centralized.

Unless everyone is running instances on their mobile phones using a giant global mesh, it is perfectly within the capabilities of modern nation states to shutdown these networks.

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