Pawlicker's Pleroma Experiment Blog on Nostr: Not long ago, a previous blog post I made talked about how the difference between the ...
Not long ago, a previous blog post I made talked about how the difference between the Mastodon side of the fediverse and the rest of the fediverse boiled down to one thing. One side wants to use the fediverse to escape social media platforms, and one side wants to use it because Twitter isn’t censoring hard enough. There was one glaring flaw in this however, and that is I forgot a group that lands somewhere in between the two; users with Musk Derangement Syndrome.
See Elon Musk has had an interesting career. A decade ago his company was a favorite of the left; in particular because while traditional automakers were caught in emission scandals, only selling hybrids in 3-4 states to boost CAFE (fuel economy) numbers, or being painted as the force of evil thanks to the infamous GM EV1 fiasco (tl;dr, GM made an electric car, pushed it hard, and then because it was a lease made all the owners give them back to be crushed), Elon Musk didn’t care. He tripled down on what he saw the future was: battery electric powered cars. While the other companies seemed to not care about alternatives such as Hydrogen (which has zero infrastructure, not merely limited) and VW/other European companies completely fumbled the ball with the diesel emission scandals, Tesla was making electric cars and actually selling them.
I say selling instead of marketing them because until 2023, Tesla didn’t even need to market because the word of mouth was just that huge. They didn’t need to run ads as they were the darling of every single green car blog, politicians were driving them as status symbols, with owners who just love gloating about not paying high prices at the pump. In fact, Tesla might as well have taken the Apple model of “reality distortion field” and applied it to the car industry, mixing the brand worship of Apple with the smug comment warfare of internet liberals and creating a sales success.
And then Elon Musk became known for mean tweets and not exactly being left wing, and that’s when the hit pieces began. I wish I had a timeline on this because I’m disconnected from whatever the TV is saying these days, but I’ll say this. With Donald Trump out (after creating a cottage industry of balding men trying to be the first to reply to a Donald Trump tweet), the same reply guys who obsessed over him changed their focus to Elon Musk. Sure, the mainstream media theatrics are still focused on some show trial and “TRUMP SAID A THING”, but online there are a lot of people angry at Elon Musk. Now Twitter was very notorious for doing a lot of suspicious things under it’s previous CEOs, which were then confirmed with the Twitter Files posts, but most importantly a switch went off and suddenly the cattle on Twitter began to realize they had been getting screwed over. Of course, as they’re unable to rationalize it any other way the hate was directed at Elon Musk. This was made worse by the fact that Twitter’s useless staff who had been fired were really, really, good at theatrics for the Twitter crowd.
While this was going down, many Twitter midwits angry at Tesla Man needed a new place to go to. So these users went to the fediverse, because they heard it was just like Twitter but without the Tesla man in charge. Unsurprisingly they’ve been kind of pissed off at the community. As you’d expect, they’ve been clashing with the Mastodon side over not talking like a Tumblr user (using CWs for everything, alt-text, the whole 9 yards) but there’s something else I find interesting. These people have never ever been in a social media network without algorithms and coddling.The Fedi Difference ™
The fediverse is not like a normal social network. The fediverse timeline seems to act more akin to an RSS feed or the old-school Twitter timeline as opposed to the modern Twitter timeline which can hide posts without you knowing, shove posts in your face, and whatnot at will. If you think finding yourself either next to Tumblr users screaming that you didn’t CW a picture of your burger and fries or racism enjoyers into anime girls was a culture shock, it’s another one to realize that there’s no magical algorithm on the site. This is by design, one side will think it’s how hate speech and literal genocide spreads, and the other side will say it censors people with “shadowbans” or “throttles” (and as it came out as well, had some connections with the FBI). Others will say it kills their engagement online.
On the fediverse, there is none of this, especially if you run an instance yourself. Your timeline is what you are fed from who you follow, period, with a “whole known network” timeline being for content from instances yours knows about (that haven’t had federation broken thanks to Signed/Authorized fetches or are in your instances blacklist). There are no centralized moderators deleting posts or hiding content that might seem “spammy” to you, like frequent posters. But most importantly, you can’t click a button to make it go away.
This is an extreme culture shock to anyone expecting an algorithm (but not that one). There are none, period. The closest thing to one is Mastodon with it’s explore function that can be seen on many instances such as Mastodon.social giving you posts that are liked by people the instance knows about. In fact, if you go to many instances with Mastodon 4.x, you will see this tab. Let’s see what’s on Mastodon.soc…oh wait this is way too on the nose. Darn it.
Let’s scroll some, yeah that’s more like it. Safe /r/all level posts and “Trump bad”.
Okay that’s odd. Let’s see what it’s like on a retrotech instance:
I don’t need to go further, you get the point already. The trending tabs on Mastodon are the same kinds of garbage you can find on Twitter and as I’ve mentioned in the previous post, the instances are also run by the same kinds of people who ran Twitter into the ground. But otherwise, there’s not an algorithm on the main timeline to my knowledge, or for your replies, and whatnot. I know Pleroma lacks one, that’s for sure. This matters, because it’s leading into the point I’m making here today.Some people do need a walled garden
Now that I’ve mentioned just how much of a culture shock it is using the fedi as opposed to Twitter, let’s talk about a recent meltdown. A lot of tech enthusiasts have been moving to Mastodon because they know the computer thing, and this means that ecelebs in that circle are naturally following them. Case in point; Technology Connections. He’s a YouTuber who has managed to win the algorithm game with videos like “here’s something nifty that you never bothered to look into”, with very autistic video topics.
Unfortunately, his autism that allows him to get massive numbers of views talking about “cool things you never noticed” extends to his social life and this is where the fun begins. Technology Connections has been posting a lot of greatest hits on the fediverse for the past few weeks, including but not limited to “I wish I could control what people say about me online”:
To feeling he’s being gangstalked:
To wishing the moderator in the sky would take care of posts:
While then in the same thread telling people he’ll take on anyone in a fedi fight:
Despite all these complaints about the network, he cannot just leave it. In fact, he drops his handle in a video description for a video he uploaded four days ago:
Older videos of his on the flipside have Twitter links, which is now private because Musk Bad.
Now while these posts are funny, they’re not why I’m sharing them. The point of me sharing them is simple. It’s to illustrate a third type of user on the fediverse. He really wants old Twitter to come back, as in 2019-2020 Twitter. Not of course the Twitter which as one viral tweet said, would let you tell random people how to cook crack in the microwave. Nah, he wants the Twitter of shadowbans where the “quality filter caught most insufferable people”. On Twitter he was an e-celeb and could feel like a king. On the fediverse he’s a nobody to many people, an example of never meet your heroes to others, and an episode of the Jerry Springer show to yet another group. It’s just they’re now shouting “WORLD STARRRRR” or posting it to rdrama.net instead of shouting “JERRY JERRY JERRY”. This of course is either an ego dent, or a situation he’s never had to handle in his life.
Now imagine a lot of people online, used to the reporting tools and blocking tools of Twitter.com, thrust into an online sphere where they have no power. Where someone could be shit talking you online and you wouldn’t even know, it wouldn’t even pop up in the Google Alert under your own usernames and real name. Where the person you blocked can still see your posts if they federate to him, enough to call you names online that you’ll never see. This absolutely breaks this third demographic on the fediverse; since unlike Kiwi Farms or 4chan or rdrama or whatever scrapegoat exists this month, it’s at your doorstep and you can’t even clean it up or call for someone to. After all, Mastodon reports go to the owner of the instance who reported it. And just like Kiwi Farms handling people sending takedown emails, many times they will even be posted publicly.
Arguably you could say his posts were intended for a different purpose, to make Mastodon developers add in algorithms and similar to reduce harassment, but the userbase of Mastodon does not want this. In fact, you could argue it would silence trans and BIPOC voices just like how HP webcams were racist. He’s also not the first person who would call for such a thing, if anything he’d be the 300th idea guy to this week. He will either have to get used to it, or log off of social media for his own mental health because Twitter right before Elon Musk took over is never going to come back unless the US government steps in and sells it to Google or the ADL or something.
In other words, the fediverse is not Twitter. If it’s getting to you, just log off instead of aggravating the situation and trying to fight everyone.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/04/you-dont-understand-i-need-my-internet-daddy/
See Elon Musk has had an interesting career. A decade ago his company was a favorite of the left; in particular because while traditional automakers were caught in emission scandals, only selling hybrids in 3-4 states to boost CAFE (fuel economy) numbers, or being painted as the force of evil thanks to the infamous GM EV1 fiasco (tl;dr, GM made an electric car, pushed it hard, and then because it was a lease made all the owners give them back to be crushed), Elon Musk didn’t care. He tripled down on what he saw the future was: battery electric powered cars. While the other companies seemed to not care about alternatives such as Hydrogen (which has zero infrastructure, not merely limited) and VW/other European companies completely fumbled the ball with the diesel emission scandals, Tesla was making electric cars and actually selling them.
I say selling instead of marketing them because until 2023, Tesla didn’t even need to market because the word of mouth was just that huge. They didn’t need to run ads as they were the darling of every single green car blog, politicians were driving them as status symbols, with owners who just love gloating about not paying high prices at the pump. In fact, Tesla might as well have taken the Apple model of “reality distortion field” and applied it to the car industry, mixing the brand worship of Apple with the smug comment warfare of internet liberals and creating a sales success.
And then Elon Musk became known for mean tweets and not exactly being left wing, and that’s when the hit pieces began. I wish I had a timeline on this because I’m disconnected from whatever the TV is saying these days, but I’ll say this. With Donald Trump out (after creating a cottage industry of balding men trying to be the first to reply to a Donald Trump tweet), the same reply guys who obsessed over him changed their focus to Elon Musk. Sure, the mainstream media theatrics are still focused on some show trial and “TRUMP SAID A THING”, but online there are a lot of people angry at Elon Musk. Now Twitter was very notorious for doing a lot of suspicious things under it’s previous CEOs, which were then confirmed with the Twitter Files posts, but most importantly a switch went off and suddenly the cattle on Twitter began to realize they had been getting screwed over. Of course, as they’re unable to rationalize it any other way the hate was directed at Elon Musk. This was made worse by the fact that Twitter’s useless staff who had been fired were really, really, good at theatrics for the Twitter crowd.
While this was going down, many Twitter midwits angry at Tesla Man needed a new place to go to. So these users went to the fediverse, because they heard it was just like Twitter but without the Tesla man in charge. Unsurprisingly they’ve been kind of pissed off at the community. As you’d expect, they’ve been clashing with the Mastodon side over not talking like a Tumblr user (using CWs for everything, alt-text, the whole 9 yards) but there’s something else I find interesting. These people have never ever been in a social media network without algorithms and coddling.The Fedi Difference ™
The fediverse is not like a normal social network. The fediverse timeline seems to act more akin to an RSS feed or the old-school Twitter timeline as opposed to the modern Twitter timeline which can hide posts without you knowing, shove posts in your face, and whatnot at will. If you think finding yourself either next to Tumblr users screaming that you didn’t CW a picture of your burger and fries or racism enjoyers into anime girls was a culture shock, it’s another one to realize that there’s no magical algorithm on the site. This is by design, one side will think it’s how hate speech and literal genocide spreads, and the other side will say it censors people with “shadowbans” or “throttles” (and as it came out as well, had some connections with the FBI). Others will say it kills their engagement online.
On the fediverse, there is none of this, especially if you run an instance yourself. Your timeline is what you are fed from who you follow, period, with a “whole known network” timeline being for content from instances yours knows about (that haven’t had federation broken thanks to Signed/Authorized fetches or are in your instances blacklist). There are no centralized moderators deleting posts or hiding content that might seem “spammy” to you, like frequent posters. But most importantly, you can’t click a button to make it go away.
This is an extreme culture shock to anyone expecting an algorithm (but not that one). There are none, period. The closest thing to one is Mastodon with it’s explore function that can be seen on many instances such as Mastodon.social giving you posts that are liked by people the instance knows about. In fact, if you go to many instances with Mastodon 4.x, you will see this tab. Let’s see what’s on Mastodon.soc…oh wait this is way too on the nose. Darn it.
Let’s scroll some, yeah that’s more like it. Safe /r/all level posts and “Trump bad”.
Okay that’s odd. Let’s see what it’s like on a retrotech instance:
I don’t need to go further, you get the point already. The trending tabs on Mastodon are the same kinds of garbage you can find on Twitter and as I’ve mentioned in the previous post, the instances are also run by the same kinds of people who ran Twitter into the ground. But otherwise, there’s not an algorithm on the main timeline to my knowledge, or for your replies, and whatnot. I know Pleroma lacks one, that’s for sure. This matters, because it’s leading into the point I’m making here today.Some people do need a walled garden
Now that I’ve mentioned just how much of a culture shock it is using the fedi as opposed to Twitter, let’s talk about a recent meltdown. A lot of tech enthusiasts have been moving to Mastodon because they know the computer thing, and this means that ecelebs in that circle are naturally following them. Case in point; Technology Connections. He’s a YouTuber who has managed to win the algorithm game with videos like “here’s something nifty that you never bothered to look into”, with very autistic video topics.
Unfortunately, his autism that allows him to get massive numbers of views talking about “cool things you never noticed” extends to his social life and this is where the fun begins. Technology Connections has been posting a lot of greatest hits on the fediverse for the past few weeks, including but not limited to “I wish I could control what people say about me online”:
To feeling he’s being gangstalked:
To wishing the moderator in the sky would take care of posts:
While then in the same thread telling people he’ll take on anyone in a fedi fight:
Despite all these complaints about the network, he cannot just leave it. In fact, he drops his handle in a video description for a video he uploaded four days ago:
Older videos of his on the flipside have Twitter links, which is now private because Musk Bad.
Now while these posts are funny, they’re not why I’m sharing them. The point of me sharing them is simple. It’s to illustrate a third type of user on the fediverse. He really wants old Twitter to come back, as in 2019-2020 Twitter. Not of course the Twitter which as one viral tweet said, would let you tell random people how to cook crack in the microwave. Nah, he wants the Twitter of shadowbans where the “quality filter caught most insufferable people”. On Twitter he was an e-celeb and could feel like a king. On the fediverse he’s a nobody to many people, an example of never meet your heroes to others, and an episode of the Jerry Springer show to yet another group. It’s just they’re now shouting “WORLD STARRRRR” or posting it to rdrama.net instead of shouting “JERRY JERRY JERRY”. This of course is either an ego dent, or a situation he’s never had to handle in his life.
Now imagine a lot of people online, used to the reporting tools and blocking tools of Twitter.com, thrust into an online sphere where they have no power. Where someone could be shit talking you online and you wouldn’t even know, it wouldn’t even pop up in the Google Alert under your own usernames and real name. Where the person you blocked can still see your posts if they federate to him, enough to call you names online that you’ll never see. This absolutely breaks this third demographic on the fediverse; since unlike Kiwi Farms or 4chan or rdrama or whatever scrapegoat exists this month, it’s at your doorstep and you can’t even clean it up or call for someone to. After all, Mastodon reports go to the owner of the instance who reported it. And just like Kiwi Farms handling people sending takedown emails, many times they will even be posted publicly.
Arguably you could say his posts were intended for a different purpose, to make Mastodon developers add in algorithms and similar to reduce harassment, but the userbase of Mastodon does not want this. In fact, you could argue it would silence trans and BIPOC voices just like how HP webcams were racist. He’s also not the first person who would call for such a thing, if anything he’d be the 300th idea guy to this week. He will either have to get used to it, or log off of social media for his own mental health because Twitter right before Elon Musk took over is never going to come back unless the US government steps in and sells it to Google or the ADL or something.
In other words, the fediverse is not Twitter. If it’s getting to you, just log off instead of aggravating the situation and trying to fight everyone.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/12/04/you-dont-understand-i-need-my-internet-daddy/