Problems on Mastodon?

Someone on Twitter mentioned racial and other problems there.

And, they weren't wrong on the racial issues, at least by one example. Mastodon's hived off servers also mean security problems. And, it doesn't help issues that Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko didn't want to talk about the racial issues. Let's continue on that.

On Twitter, this Black/Jewish person thinks the private nature of Mastodon invites MORE casual / off the cuff racial insensitivity than Twitter. She also seconds Johnathan Flowers, the racial issues focus of the Guardian piece at the first link, that way too much stuff on Mastodon gets a "content warning" tag.

Mashable's prediction six years ago that Mastodon wouldn't survive were wrong, obviously. But, if we change don't survive to don't thrive, not wrong.

Now, Mastodon's most enraptured users will spout Rochko that it will never be like Twitter. And, that's fine, but you know what his sounds like?

Mac 8.6, pre i-Anything, Apple Computers, and a version where Jobs never originally gets booted out, or when he comes back, never listens to an underling tell him to create a PC-operating system version of iTunes. But, though Rochko may be more low-key than Jobs, the parallel otherwise does Apple a disservice. Picture Apple in Jobs' first heyday with a less-than-Linux sized slice of the OS world, and NOW the parallels are somewhat better.

I joined at about the time of the Mashable article and was quickly hugely underimpressed.

There's also this issue from 2019 — the Daily Dot noted that, while Mastadon presents itself as community-creator friendly on the surface, at least then, it was NOT so friendly in the deeper waters. And, a former assistant of Rochko calls him basically the Benevolent Dictator for Life. When Gab migrated to Mastodon, interestingly, though, when asked to totally black-box it, Rochko claimed "I don't have the control." Bullshit, I say, from my limited computer networking knowledge. You could, I would presume, "defederate" other servers that wouldn't play ball.

That said, I also have no desire to follow Jack Dorsey's ice-bath-shriveled balls to Onlysky, which will have the same problems (which we all didn't recognize so much at the time) as Dorsey's version of Twitter, to be sure.

Speaking of, with allowances for big fish in small pond angles, I think Rochko in his own way is like a Dorsey or Zuckerberg — big and proprietary egos about their social media babies. I also think his own particular flavor of tech neoliberalism is influenced by being German and two-plus generations removed from the post-World War II reaction to Nazism.

Update, July 24: Mastodon also reportedly has a child abuse material problem.

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Alternatives? Per this OnlySky piece, I'll pass on CounterSocial. Blocking entire countries based just on government hacks is wrong. Second, the US and Israel also do cyberhacks. And, beyond that? Per this roundup, good old Tumblr may be the best Twitter alternative. (Since this, I've heard that BlueSky has a racism problem, too.)