It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape."
Now that's the new tagline.
Now that's the new tagline.
Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?
So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.
Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.
So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.
And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.
Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.
Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.
Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.
Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.
Wouldn't A also forward those replies to B?
It is, IMO a good indicator that neither actually care about free speech, since they are basically "censoring" the rest of the fediverse.
Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.
Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?
> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.
And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.
I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.