Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity
It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.
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I still haven't run into problems on mastodon. Maybe I'm not using it right lol.
But I've not run into any jerks frequently enough to notice. The feed is easy to curate, so I don't have to deal with political shit since I just don't scroll through the "all" equivalent feed unless I'm really bored. Even then, I've seen less toxicity the entire time I've been on mastodon (a couple of years, irc?) than I would in a week of Twitter or a single day on reddit.
I'm sure it's there, don't get me wrong. I'm just thinking it's an exaggerated perception based on how people use it rather than being indicative of the user base as a whole. Shit, on my author account, the whole writing and book community is wholesome as fuck. Supportive, friendly, helpful. It's fucking awesome.
Twitter deliberately trends toxic stuff
👆 this is the most important thing to remember related to all of this, mastodon sucks, but remember what the alternatives are before you decry it as the wrong direction instead of the right direction but still deep in problematic territory
Mastodon as a platform is alright. Any toxicity is purely down to humanity. Eugen made Mastodon. Eugen saw that it was good. Then humans came along.
Same situation, for the most part. I was, however, originally on an arts & crafts server that had to shut down because the admin was being bullied by the folks over at .art, so I have seen a bit of the nonsense.
Seems like most people on there are just normal nice people, but unfortunately as in the real world being awful gets you attention and power and disproportionally affects the reputation of your server, platform, state, country, etc.
There's also a ton of crossover, again as in the real world but also as on Lemmy and everywhere else, between people who obsess over politics and this kind of toxic behaviour. So I think in having most of that filtered out we kill two birds with one stone.
As an end-user, you won't be the subject of this kind of controversy. Run a service that attempts to make a profit using federated content or that provides very different discoverability features from Mastodon and it becomes very likely.
Ahhh, that makes sense
