Current distractions

[jducoeur]

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm now ensconced on Mastodon. I've recently moved my account over to jducoeur@social.coop, which seems to suit me pretty well -- social.coop is a rather process-wonky Mastodon instance focused on collective action: thoughtful progressivism is the general tone.

I'm posting a lot more over there than here at the moment. Partly that's simply because it's new and cool, and has that fresh new-social-network smell. (Mastodon is by no means new, but the Muskocalypse is causing massive sudden growth, so the energy level there is sky-high at the moment.) And partly it's because my brain is currently rather over-focused on Mastodon itself and the Twitter meltdown, and that topic just seems more appropriate over there: I'm going to try to avoid too much of that particular navel-gazing here.

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Digression: it's slightly disturbing how I can't take my eyes off of the Twitter situation. We have a channel at work titled #social-twitter-slow-motion-train-wreck, and at this point at least once a day someone comes in and says, "Slow motion? Uh, no."

On the one hand, I'm angry and sad for the employees who have been subjected to this bullshit, as Kaiju Billionaire stomps all over Mega-Tokytwitter and then wonders why everyone doesn't love and follow him. There were a lot of good people there, many of whom were seriously trying to build a site that both worked well and was at least sometimes a net social good.

(Yes, I know, it's easy to mock Twitter. But one upshot of the past few weeks for me has been coming to understand that the #BlackTwitter community is deeply angry, because it was a central organizational tool for them, and they are far from alone. It's easy to forget how important it has been for both marginalized communities and revolutionary movements -- a place to organize and amplify their voices. That's a very serious loss, and much though I like Mastodon, there are some good reasons why it's not simply a good replacement for that.)

OTOH, wow -- it's hard to resist noshing the popcorn and watching. If there is any positive side to this horror, it is the vivid illustration of a self-proclaimed master of the universe discovering that this social stuff is not rocket science -- it's much, much harder. And it's a fine public lesson that shitting on your employees, making rash decisions without understanding the lay of the land, and generally acting like a corporate Trump is not a winning proposition.

There have been bigger corporate failures before, but never in history has there been one that was so fast, and so blatantly the fault of one idiot with the world's biggest case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. One can't help but think that, if this is what Musk is like, Tesla and SpaceX have succeeded despite him, not because of him.

But I digress...

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Anyway, I'm not leaving DW -- one of my first Mastodon posts (and certainly my most-boosted) was reminding people that this is still the best blogging site.

But I like Mastodon a lot more than I did Twitter, so I'll probably continue to post more frequently there than here. The micro-blogging approach works well when I only have a couple of paragraphs of something to say, or am largely just link-sharing, and the 500-character limit there is much more comfortable than Twitter's 280. I'll be doing most of my macro-blogging here, both diarizing and longer, more thoughtful posts. (You can do long posts in thread form over there, same as Twitter, but like Twitter that's kind of an annoying hack on a system that's mostly not designed for it.)

I do commend Mastodon to you: it's not a replacement for DW, but it's an interesting supplement if you'd like a feed that is chattier, more random, more publicly social, and often a bit more "newsy". The technical differences aside, the look and feel is a lot like a less-toxic version of Twitter, and it's rather fun.

I will note in advance that getting started on Mastodon is rather more hassle than it should be -- indeed, I have a long thread going on how we might improve things for new folks. For now, I'll just say that it gets a lot easier and more fun after you get past those initial hurdles. I'm happy to chat about that, and help as best I can, if you are interested in talking about it -- ping me directly, or just comment here.

Comments

[sunlit_stone]

I've been following it with gigantic eyes too; it's been really...wild doesn't quite seem sufficient. As you say, not slow-mo. I'm on twitter and then a friend's been messaging me articles and they come at a rate of like two a day.

I'm going to miss my twitter corner but for now I'm here and on tumblr and sooort of on Discord—for DMs, anyway; I have yet to really get a server to work for me.

[lauradi7dw]

Aside from downloading my archive and subscribing to a bunch of people's email newsletters, I'm treating twitter like it's going to survive and keep some of its positive features. I'm not paying too much attention to the impending doom posts, although I worry about the health of the H1B visa people. I roll my eyes a bit at the people who stomped out of twitter with great indignation and keep popping back in to wheedle people to join them on Mastodon (which a surprising number of people can't spell properly). I don't think you are in that category, so it's interesting to see your view, but as a chalky white person who has followed a lot of Black twitter for years, it's hard to imagine it being replicated on Mastodon. I can see how the medieval manuscripts silo might manage, though.

[jducoeur]

I'm treating twitter like it's going to survive and keep some of its positive features.

Quite possible, although I'm now at the point of considering that to be a coin-flip, and the chances get worse with each passing day of the fuckups. Running a site at that scale is just plain hard, and they've fired a dangerously large fraction of the people holding the clue tokens. There's nothing that guarantees failure, but there are a remarkable number of ways in which it could just come crashing down. (Both technical and, perhaps more importantly, legal -- they've pissed off multiple powerful regulators who could make things much worse for the company.)

I roll my eyes a bit at the people who stomped out of twitter with great indignation and keep popping back in to wheedle people to join them on Mastodon (which a surprising number of people can't spell properly). I don't think you are in that category

I mean, I totally am in that category. (Aside perhaps from the "great indignation".) I've largely washed my hands of posting anything substantive in Twitter -- I never particularly enjoyed the platform, and now there is a replacement I do enjoy -- but I want to encourage folks to come over to The Better Place.

I can see how the medieval manuscripts silo might manage, though.

Making progress, anyway. The first couple of weeks seem to have been pretty rocky, but it looks to me like it's starting to coalesce.

[alexxkay]

Your saying nice things about the (mostly former) Twitter employees reminded me of what seems to be an increasingly common phenomenon lately, where things that we mock are replaced by ones that are So Much Worse, that we look back wistfully on what we thought was awful at the time. I've recently gotten into a UK-based podcast that started several years ago, and am listening to the back catalog. They had an episode specifically talking about satire, and from the perspective of now, it feels so *weird* to think of a time when PM John Major was considered a major satirical target.

[jducoeur]

Honestly, me being gentler about Twitter is largely a result of the past two weeks. It's less that I look back fondly, and more that I've learned the other side of the story: how hard some of those folks were working behind the scenes on real free-speech issues (rather than Techbro bullshit), and the number of communities that really relied on Twitter.

There's a graph that came around my Mastodon feed a few days ago that was really striking, showing (IIRC) positive / negative sentiment towards Twitter. For white liberals like us, it was fairly negative -- but for the black community, it was pretty positive. There's a lot of "eye of the beholder" there.

They had an episode specifically talking about satire, and from the perspective of now, it feels so weird to think of a time when PM John Major was considered a major satirical target.

I mean, politicians are always satirical targets. But yeah -- it's really remarkable is how easy it is to look back on John Major fondly by comparison with today, given what a punching-bag he was at the time.

(Of course, I can largely say the same about Reagan and Thatcher vs. the modern Republicans and Tories in general, which is even more astonishing...)

[mindstalk]

I've learned a lot about covid from following Twitter people, and the urbanism side has been neat too.

Twitter does have its neat points: kind of following multiple "blogs" at once"; also first-class comments (a reply is also a Tweet, easily shareable, providing a virality that can be good or bad.

[jducoeur]

Twitter does have its neat points: kind of following multiple "blogs" at once"; also first-class comments (a reply is also a Tweet, easily shareable, providing a virality that can be good or bad.

I mean, all of that is entirely true of Mastodon as well. The biggest difference is mostly that Mastodon tends to lightly dampen virality rather than AI-amplify it, very deliberately. That means that you don't have the rage-machine effect of the big sites, but also means that it is weaker for things like calls to collective action.

[danabren]

Mostly for the sake of reserving my user name, I have a mastodon account as of a few days ago. I added you, I think.

[kiya]

Black twitter, disability twitter, autism twitter, trans twitter. Everyone's emergency Gofundmes that need virality so people don't die, get thrown out on the street, or whatever else. Small press science fiction, particularly that serves niche communities. The absolute delight of watching Jwitter do Daf Yomi.

Ferguson news and Black Lives Matter. The Arab Spring and other attempts to organize movements internationally. News from Iran. Ukrainian war news. Actual fucking COVID information since nobody seems to want to deal with that on an official level anymore.

I learned as part of the meltdown that there are earthquake notification services that run substantially on tracking Twitter and recording when "Did you feel that earthquake?" trends.

And, at the same time, it served to organize and mainstream fascists and serve the destabilizing goals of the Former Guy, facilitated massive abuse movements such as those run out of K*wiF*rms, and they wouldn't run the "just block all the Nazis like is required by German law" universally because it took out too many Republican politicians, and reporting abuse (particularly transphobic abuse) was a fucking joke.

There's a lot to process.

And on a personal level, I encountered one of my favorite authors of all time there, learned about the story that made me sob because it was the first time I had been seen; I got my story into Recognize Fascism because of Twitter; I got an ancient Egyptian sourdough culture off Twitter (from the guy who invented the XBox)....