This is me copying over a series of Mastodon posts I did. More after the “Read More”!
Preamble and Introduction
Before I start I’ll note that I have no beef with Emily, I actually read her blog when I see it in my feed reader. I am critiquing the point she made in this blog post, not her as a person.
So the blog post in question is this one.
And the relevant bit I want to talk about is this:
I tried Mastodon for a year, but I found it unbearingly sweltering. Mastodon is not a fun social network. You cannot have fun there without an endless army of pedants dissecting your every post endlessly in your mentions. Its operating model is inscrutable, its moderation metadrama impenetrable, and its product strategy nonexistant. I eventually rage-blocked the entire mastodon.social domain and then set my posts to autodelete after 7 days. I use it only as an automated relay for my blog content now. The one gem in the ActivityPub (Mastodon’s underlying protocol) space is bookwyrm.social, a federated replacement for Goodreads. The site isn’t bad. They need some design love and to fix some performance issues, but it’s become my go-to for book management, and I’m happy with it.
My go-to social media now is Bluesky. The site is not without its dramas, but it has the most promising product and technical approach I’ve seen yet. The API is very open, which has allowed me to write some easy scripts to megablock bad actors. The “Feeds” function is fantastic, and the moderation tools aren’t perfect but they’re way ahead of anyone else’s. I’ve also made the site auto-curate: all my posts auto-delete after two days, unless I self-like a post. This way, I can still post my whims, but I can choose in real time what I want to endure. I’ve been running this way for a couple of months, and I have to say it feels incredibly fresh. Bluesky’s community is also much more averse to Twitter brain bullshit. Quote posts are possible but dunking is looked down on. The block function is brilliant—block and move on is the motto of the site. It means that the network there is much more pure and original. The one thing it lacks compared to Mastodon is that Mastodon was always much more receptive and supportive of DIY creation. I wish Bluesky to adopt that culture.
The Critiques
Critique 1:
on “fun”. Emily says that “Mastodon is not a fun network”. Now, “fun” is a very subjective thing and what’s fun for one person is not for another. But I dislike the way this is said a definitive statement. I know this is Emily’s blog and its her opinion but it feels like she’s making a statement of fact.
Personally, I find Mastodon very fun in many different ways.
Note 1:
“You cannot have fun there without an endless army of pedants dissecting your every post endlessly in your mentions”
This at least I understand more. This is a problem here especially if you are visibly a woman and talk about topics like tech. Extremely valid to not want to be here for that.
Critique 2:
“Its operating model is inscrutable, its moderation metadrama impenetrable, and its product strategy nonexistant.”
Operating model – Mastodon is not something that really needs an operating model in the way Emily is talking about. Its an open source project used by thousands of people to build communities. There is no one operating model.
Moderation metadrama – its not any more impenetrable than any other social space that has been around for years. obviously it is impenetrable because you just got here and then left without trying to really understand why it is that way.
Product strategy – Mastodon is not a product, it is a open source tool that people used to build communities and social spaces. This is and I’m sorry to say it this bluntly – capitalism brain poisoning.
Critique 3:
Bluesky – “the most promising product and technical approach I’ve seen yet” – lol lmao. Its just another silo. More capitalism brain on display here.
“The API is very open, which has allowed me to write some easy scripts to megablock bad actors.”
Okay so you didn’t even really explore Mastodon as a tool at all because this is very doable with Mastodon’s API which is also very very open.
Conclusion
Emily approached Mastodon as though its a “product” in the capitalistic sense and not a piece of open source software, a tool used by many people to build communities, not for monetary gain. I supposed a rebuttal to this that open source projects are also “products”. Sure. But they are very very very different in the way they approach that concept and Mastodon is a strong example of that.
This I think broke her brain because her thinking has been poisoned by capitalism. Unfortunate, truly.