Hey there! Figured I’d share here since my main instance, Lemmy.ml, seems to be really broken right now. I published an article today focusing on some of the myths and misconceptions Mastodon users have spread over the last few years, with some critical analysis and debunking.
Let me know if you like it!
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Yep. When I tried Mastodon, I gave up again super fast, and I think I see why now. Thankyou, very interesting.
A staggering amount of honesty that will likely make a bunch of idealistic blowhards really mad. Good job.
A few of these are interesting and accurate (email comparisons), a few are pretty obvious and widely distributed already (privacy challenges), a few are a bit of a straw man argument (not sure “algorithms are bad” is a thing) and a few I’d caveat a little bit (quote tweets).
Going through all that would mean a whole response piece, though, so I’m more than happy to vaguely nod and move on.
It’s gotten diluted over time with each wave, but algorithms are bad was a strong stance on mastodon servers since its inception. It was one of the first “big” things touted about mastodon. Each wave brought more people from twitter that didn’t care about that or actively disagreed with it so you don’t see the argument as much
I think for most people talking about algorithms, the problem isn’t an algorithm, it’s “The Algorithm”.
The distinction is that everything on a computer screen is displayed using an algorithm, but The Algorithm is instead this sinister thing that arbitrarily displays things for the benefit of the company rather than the benefit of the user.
An Algorithm might show posts by upvotes or by comments or by some combination of the two, or by time, or by some combination of the three. The Algorithm will show stormfront posts to black people because it drives engagement. On Youtube for example, a thumbs down is just as acceptable for the purposes of The Algorithm as a thumbs up.
Pretty decent list. It covered a lot of the myths I think about.
One myth you mention that I see a lot is the idea that people you don’t like won’t be on the fediverse. On the face of it it’s an absurd idea – So anyone can start an instance and run it however they want but somehow it’s going to be more locked down than big tech sites that spend millions of dollars on moderation?
The myth that “it’s all called mastodon” that you mention I feel is less like the gnu/linux distinction, and more like your mom calling every video game system a “nintendo”. I’m running 6 different services that use some form of federation, and none of them are Mastodon (nothing against the program, it’s just that I’ve always been running with system performance at a premium so something heavy and scalable like that wasn’t on my radar)
