This is exhibiting a lot of software guy detached from reality. The reality is the teen girls kill themselves for being "too fat" because bullying engagement makes money for big commercial social media sites. Somebody else on this thread claimed to be somewhere addicted to Mastodon sites.

In principle they're comparable. In the real world, no high school kids are going to harm themselves over an argument about Mint versus Ubuntu on a 100,000 subscriber ATmosphere site. It's like comparing the Dominican cigar shop selling hand rolled cigars with Philip Morris. Unedifying.

> ... because bullying engagement makes money for big commercial social media sites

Teenagers have been bullying each other for literal millennia. Kids got bullied on IRC and chatrooms; they get bullied today on Roblox, on SMS group chats. None of these have engagement algorithms.

Again, the corporations sure aren't helping, but we need to confront the fact that a large chunk of this is human nature. I'd like a better Internet landscape but switching from Facebook to Mastodon or whatever, while a good step, isn't going to cure all ills. A lot of people in these threads act like every Internet toxicity symptom ever arose because of evil corporations.

Small social sites are just as dangerous in another way, as vessels for a toxic monoculture. Pro-anorexia forums, political radicalization, there was even a famous one that fetishized infecting people with HIV.