Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is.
What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
No one has to care about which pair of celebs are arguing
No bloody advertising
People are building interesting stuff with it
Third party apps work
It's not run by a guy seemingly at war with his own users
edit: more
Your parents aren't there
The people who left twitter years ago because of all the harassment and you've been missing are probably already there
If you've got a feature request or something, you can just toot Gargron and you will get a reply
But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user for the entire instance).
Moving instances is not a big deal and yes, know your admin.
Instead most "blocks" are just muting from the federated timeline, precisely so that you're not cut off from contacts.
If I start acting like a jerk, them my users will start leaving. Pretty soon I don't have anyone left except people who like being treated like that. In my experience that will probably mean they're jerks too.
And thus pretty soon my instance is "that instance run by that jerk who lets her users be jerks". At that point, admins on other instances stop federating with my instance. Eventually the only other instances who are willing to talk to mine are also run by and full of jerks, and I am amidst a hell of my own creation.
So that is, as I see it, the external forces acting on me to try and be a chill admin who's nice to her users. It's a lot easier for them to leave my server and stay in contact with people elsewhere than it is to leave Twitter.
Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding.
Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they should care, but they don't. They just look at the track record and decide if they trust that person right now.
And right now, Mastadon instances are better at moderation than Twitter. You're worried about an instance admin theoretically not protecting you in the future; Twitter already, today, doesn't protect you.
A lot of people are OK with a middle ground where moderators remain, but are closely associated with their communities to reduce communication problems and increase their stake in doing a good job. Is it really crazy to believe that someone might want to trust other people, but also want to have more selection over who they trust?
You're here, so I would hazard a guess that you're OK with that middle ground too. HN admins could theoretically turn this site into 4Chan or Reddit if they wanted to. But we both trust them not to, and the fact that they theoretically have the power is not enough to make either of us throw up our hands and say, "well there's no difference, and nobody will care, and there's no reason for anybody post on HN instead of Reddit."
There are a lot of people here posting on a dedicated tech-community Reddit clone about why fringe Twitter is a bad idea.
Source: I'm a moderator on anticapitalist.party. AMA.
I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.
That's the advantage they have over twitter, they're able to set community rules that fit to the respective communities. It's twitter that suffers from the anarchy.
When twitter users are setting up filters and mass blocks to remove all the nazis and trolls and conspiracy theorists from their feed, they're essentially just trying to painfully recreate what you get in a mastodon sized community by design.
The main thrust of my user agreement is "hi I am queer lady who is out of patience with people being jerks and wants a nice place to talk, if you piss me off you can go find a new instance or start your own". It's not much more formal than that, either.
You want a more lawyer-like policy with tons of explicit rules for people to try and work around, then run it yourself.
You trust your admin to not screw you over the same way you trust, say, the people who run that chill coffeehouse you’re a regular at.