When I started to see toots from people marking their first full year on mastodon, I thought my fedi-versary must be coming up soon, as I joined in the middle of the big eXit surge last year. When I checked – to my surprise – it was November 4th, so I’ve missed it.
A while ago I saw a toot by Les Orchard which drew the distinction between “posting content” and “exchanging messages” and later in the day I saw yet more low key rants by Thomas Fuchs and several others on the common theme of why mastodon should be striving to be more like twitter.
The latter discussion mainly centre around “missing” technical features designed, in the view of the posters, to make it easier to use the tool – quote posting, text searching, surfacing subject-of-the moment type posts. All things designed to reduce any friction (ie the need for thinking) and raise the dopamine hit.
Also there is the ongoing debate about the ease, or not, of moving between servers. This is mainly concentrated on the NEED to keep all our history. I see the need to preserve lists of followers and following because it is time consuming to rebuild from scratch, but I am less sure about posting-history.
All of this prompted me to reflect on why I use social media and why I moved from twitter to mastodon in November last year.
I don’t usually categorise myself in either of the main demographic groups defined by Les:
– the people who are here to sell either a product or themselves (posting content)
– the people here to exchange messages
Both these groups seem to me to require the medium to preserve their interactions to some extent. The content posters have commercial interest in being found and being seen, after all what use it is to create content if no one can find it, and how can you become or remain important and influential if new people can’t see your huge body of “work”. Many of the posters seem to also need some sort of validation of their interactions with others, a need to feel seen and understood.
The other main categories of poster I see on social media are the ones for whom history is not really an issue. These are people who use the medium as it was originally intended, back in the prehistory of twitter when it was predominantly 140 characters about what you ate for breakfast, as somewhere to make fleeting inconsequential comments:
– the trolls – there are always the trolls
– the shitposters/jokers
– the lurkers
The trolls are easily dealt with scroll past, or block depending on their stupidity level. For the dangerous ones there is the action of last resort – Reporting to the admins.
Likewise the shitposters and jokers, if their humour doesn’t add to your day, its easy to scroll past them and they can always be blocked if they become to frequent or annoying. I like that mastodon even has temporary blocking for those times you just don’t have the mental energy to ignore other peoples silliness and walk on by. This is also useful for the times that someone you follow for their intelligent posts on a subject of mutual interest, indulges in some silliness or gets caught up in a boring subject that doesn’t appeal to you, as people sometimes do.
Finally the category where I would place myself – the lurkers, those of who use social media the way we used to use old fashioned media such as TV or newspapers. Now that those sources have become so devalued by their toadying to the politically and financially powerful, or their futile attempts at remaining “relevant”, good social media sources have become the default for keeping ourselves informed.
For me twitter was just a way of keeping up to date with the world. It involved a certain amount of gate-keeping on my behalf to block out the dross and advertising and avoid the anxiety amplification that was its main tool to maintain engagement and promote its commercial purpose. Only when it was taken over by the big moron and ceased to be a reliable source of anything, did I decide to opt out and find another tool.
I was pleasantly surprised after joining mastodon to find myself not just being a passive consumer of the world but responding to the atmosphere of the place, and reacting to things I like or even boosting or joining in conversations or offering advice where I could. There is the natural tendency for some people to assert themselves, try to dominate a conversation, or appear to be an expert, people will be people after all, but overall the trend of conversations is for disagreements to be easily deescalated in the interest of polite social interaction rather than the quick exaggeration of differences that seemed to be a natural part of the twitter environment.
I still find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about the environment that makes it so much more calm. Obviously the lack of manipulation must contribute, which is somewhat worrying in itself. Are we still so easily manipulated, in spite of what we all know these days about the dangers of marketing and the techniques used to try and turn us from normal individuals into an angry but controllable mob? In which case we are right to be cautious about adding shiny new features that could turn mastodon into the “new twitter”. We should be aiming for something better.
Categories: opinion
Leave a Reply