It's not the fault of the users when there's no viable alternative

Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies, Mastodon is the same, even less popular and even more tyrannical

So the choice for most users, including myself, is tightly moderated spaces run by awful people, or a website run by a literal Nazi, but that at least doesn't ban me on sight

The Musk twitter acquisition (and the sieg heil at the inauguration) were pivotal moments where a good alternative could've surfaced but instead we got twitter 2.0 (and moving from Twitter to Twitter 2 seems entirely pointless even if it wasn't badly moderated on top of that)

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numpad0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IMO the reason why BS just ended up being Twitter 2.0, or 1.2 even, or why Twitter went down its path in the first place, is that the US and EU are no longer producing enough content to justify ownership or continuous iterations of such a system.

Otherwise it wouldn't have been forced upon who begrudgingly got funding secured. Any of then-GAFA could have bought it and none wanted to touch it.

The bad moderation on those platforms, I think, is a desperate attempt to align platform cultures to the moderating entities' standards that are no longer comprehensible to users, if known at all, like a kid on a push car moving away from the park trying to steer it back.

It seemed fine until 2015 or so, streaming hundreds of novel tweets per second per user, many with novel images. Then things went downhill. Musk can't be the sole villain in it.

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Philpax 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Bluesky is founded by the same founders of Twitter and is not open and has ridiculous policies

Huh? It is remarkably open and the policies are not really an issue.

	▲	numpad0 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bluesky has the same moderation issues as Twitter. There are people complaining their recommendation feeds are full of macho men nudity and/or furry images, or flooded by far left infights(not like relative to self-proclaimed centrism but FAR left), or straight up getting banned after they've specifically chosen the most appropriate contents, things like that. Weird thing is that my feed is largely fine other than those gotten banned went back to Twitter. Only politics topics I get are neutral, concerns in global economy, some US and more often Ukraine. No dick pics or furries or antisemetism, just cats, more cats, food pics, infosec stuffs, all as I were back on Twitter in 2009 or so. But there are enough reports of negative experience, so moderatuon is likely still a bit problematic. Or that compounding with lack of passionate users.
	▲	Vaushite 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I've gotten banned from Blue Sky for absolutely no discernible reason, and the main feeds are basically centrist slop

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wolvoleo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mastodon doesn't have policies. Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

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TFNA an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.

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numpad0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gargron, Apple, Google, all has/had policies for Mastodon, which were incompatible with more than 2/3 of its users(at peak).

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Vaushite 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know how to understand this. Google owns Mastodon?

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numpad0 an hour ago | parent [-]

App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.

Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.

They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).

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Vaushite an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.

You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.

What's the ""main Mastodon network""?

	▲	numpad0 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted. Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority. I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.

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mschuster91 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

And it's biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.

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jrm4 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."