The Nexus Of Privacy looks at the connections between technology, policy, strategy, and justice.

  • 21 Posts
  • 105 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 2nd, 2024

help-circle







  • Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There’s a lot of negativity around Mastodon – the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a “failure”. It certainly wasn’t a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.

    Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023’s Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well … how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software’s making more progress, but it’s still frustrating.







  • https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What’s frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!

    Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that’s good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography … but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh – certainly not the worst, but it’s not all that well-moderated, and it’s big enough that the local feed isn’t useful for finding interesting people or stuff – and that’s now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they’re a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim … still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.


  • Bluesky certainly provides another option … when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon’s numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky’s addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn’t, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn’t have stuck around.



  • Agreed that there’s a difference between funding and other kinds of engagement – and a difference between initial funding to get them off the ground. Right now it’s not exactly clear what funding Meta’s contributed and what the longer-term plans are. One of the other polls in the thread was about transparency, and (at least so far) 90% of the respondents are saying that SWF should be transparent about the funding it’s getting from Meta. And, another poll zeroes in on funding and has different options for initial and up-front, and whether or not there are any strings attached.








  • Yes, I answered your question, you just didn’t like my answer.

    If you can’t find them, then (like many people) that’s a sign you’re used to an environment where anti-Blackness is normalized. So, imagine a Black person reading this thread who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse. What comments would they think are dismissive of Black people?

    It doesn’t make any assumptions about your ethnicity. If you are in fact a Black person who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse but isn’t seeing it in that thread, it’s still a useful suggestion to step outside yourself and try to reading it as somebody else would,