mastodon and the eternal september

[solarbird]

Dr. Jessica F. Hebert · twitter.com/Dame_DNA · 5:35 PM · Nov 10, 2022

Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 · pati_gallardo · Nov 9
Ok fine. I have tried to hold my tongue, but there is a line, and when Mastodon folks threaten BIPOC people with getting blocked for not Content Warning when they talk about racism... I need to get real with y’all.

Cool, so Mastodon is also garbage.

First: I am not just not discounting what Patricia has saying - because it's _true_ - but have boosted her and written in support _over there_. I know people _I have met_ who've seen this.

But Mastodon has been very white and very Usenet, and is now having its Eternal September.

Mastodon was substantially built by women and queers who fled Twitter over harassment - but mostly white people. It's been a very... trauma-aware community, but it's _not_ socially aware of _other_ axes of discrimination, even if it most certainly should be.

The social conventions that seem to have built up involve using "CW" not for "this is NSFW," but also for "this is srs bsns content where many users have trauma."

They've been using CW "birdsite" to talk about _twitter_, for example.

This is interfacing _badly_ with new users.

It's _excellent_ at siloing away fascists, terfs, white supremacists. It uses the n*zi bar phenomenon against them _very_ effectively.

There's a big n*zi mastodon. It's siloed away. There's a blocklist people share. It works, and works well. It's _very_ hard - _very, very hard_ - to launch hate raids on Mastodon. It's even harder to do it twice.

But it's socially bad at _this_.

And this is a _cultural_ interface. It's literally white people being white people and uncomfortable about talking about racism, combined with a big chunk of marginalised people traumatised by their own abuse but not yet able to map that to _other_ marginalised people.

Which gets back to this: there's no "mastodon" that's one massive entity. It's not Twitter or Facebook, not a monolith.

What there are are federations of individual sites, collections which have their own cultures within their own federations.

P*rler is a mastodon fork, part of n*zi mastodon. So is K*w*f*rms. I could relay them.

Obviously, I fucking well don't. But!

Any instance administrator can relay _any_ site that's willing to be relayed, and _anyone_ can be an instance administrator, assuming you have a computer.

There is no central administration outside the individual instance. In that way, it is more Usenet than Usenet was.

And the _largest_ defacto federation - or "fedi" - is very anti-nazi and anti-terf and anti-white-supremacist when it's obvious and anti- a lot of bad things, but again... very white.

And it's having one hell of an argument right now. I know. I'm involved.

I call it "Usenet Twitter," but even that's not very accurate because the social expectations are _so_ different, and it's not just "no algorithm."

Eternal September has arrived, and a lot of them were _not_ ready.

It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Comments

[vatine]

As someone who, at the time, ran a news server (for the university I was employed by) at the time, the influx of people with a different culture was actually not the big problem. The big problem was that AOL's Usenet integration gateway had an interesting quirk. Roughly every N[1] days, it would suddenly decide that anything it had previously sent out had a new Article-ID[2].

Which, as it were, amplified the culture mismatch something fierce. Not only did you have the classic "a new batch of frosh get on the Usenets and make a stink of themselves until they settle down", there's also the "and it looks like they insist on repeating themselves, again and again, and again".

And, initially, it was actually damned hard to spot that it was due to software duplication rather than intentional. But, once that penny dropped, a lot of the annoyance (for me, but certainly not for everyone) shifted from people to shoddy software QA.

And at least (so far) I have not seen anyone botching the integration between the fediverse and a new non-mastodon platform to the point that every toot is re-tooted as a new toot every so often.

[1] I actually no longer remember exactly what N was (it's been, what, 3 decades), I am thinking it was "a week", but it may well have been "3 days". Essentially, there would be waves of posts that were "every single posting made from AOL since the integration started", and it was sufficiently spaced that it initially was not obvious. But once it was, people started calling AOL's tech team out in the more admin-y groups.

[jreynoldsward]

The whiteness of Mastodon is why I'm not being very active--that, and the difficulty and PITA nature of negotiating the instances. A lot of BIPOC people I follow--including Indigenous people trying to save the Indian Child Welfare Act--are still on Twitter and plan to ride it down. I'm with them. Discovering the pragmatism and grassroots organizing focus of Black political Twitter has been a huge relief for me and a nice antidote to too much of white quasi-socialist sorts claiming that the class revolution will solve everything. Or that bleating away on social media will make a huge difference.

In any case, if the future is gonna be Usenet, then I want Agent/Free Agent to make it work right again, please.

[solarbird]

I'm still getting some likes/reblogs there on some of my commentary. So the discussion is, at least, still happening at mastodon's slow pace.

I want there to be a non-corporate social media that functions, and I think the last week or so has really shown why that's a good idea.

[vostoklake]

I assume you've seen this article saying that "Mastodon's Eternal September" is a bad thing? https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

[solarbird]

I read that as a little more balanced than being purely "a bad thing." I think it's reasonable to say goodbye wistfully to something. I mean, as they point out, Twits are losing something too, and it is a real loss for us - and an even bigger one for so many oppressed peoples who have used Twitter to organise.

[sistawendy]

People – all people – need to get good at swapping "group I'm a member of" for "group I'm not a member of".

[talkswithwind]

I talked about this too elsewhere, and yeah; they're going through a sea-change right now. A lot of the critiques fall out of READ THE FAQ BEFORE POSTING culture that also crystalized on Usenet, but also seems to happen any time an established community gets a large influx of newcomers. Discontent over people not adhering to the unwritten social contract means people write the dang contract down (generally badly) and throw it at newbies.

Like all those other communities, once the influx recedes for a while and the folk who are likely to stick around do stick around, new social norms emerge. We're a ways away from that. Hopefully by the time Twitter's datacenters start triggering major outages, and trigger new migration waves, the social contract on mastodon will have improved some.

[solarbird]

Given that they appear to have fired all their contractors today, I think that crash might come sooner rather than later.

[dewline]

That jerk needs a proper Villain's Mustache to twirl as he learns to say things like "These people are refusing to let me wreck their online lives, they are in my way, and I will steamroll over all their needs and rights like a good little apartheid nostalgia enforcer! For I am...the Musk-Man!"

Can no sane human(s) strip that company out of his hands???

[dewline]

Thanks for the warnings about culture shock. Leaving it at that for now.

[lyonesse]

ohh yeah it's always september somewhere.