Erin Kissane:

During the big waves of Twitter-to-Mastodon migrations, tons of people joined little local servers with no defederation policy and were instantly overwhelmed with gore and identity-based hate. A lot of those people, understandably, did not stick around, and plenty of them went back to their other social spaces and warned others that Mastodon wasn't safe. For people who lucked out and landed on a well-moderated instance, finding fun people to follow was hard and actually following each of them often involved three separate steps, depending on which link you happened to click. [...]

I -- a nerd -- actually really like Mastodon most of the time, but I would like it so much more and feel like it was doing a lot more good in the world if it were more welcoming and easier to use. When I raise these points on Mastodon, I get a steady stream of replies telling me that everything I'm whining about is actually great, that valuing a "pleasant UI" over the abstraction of federation is shallow and disqualifying, and that that people who find Mastodon difficult don't belong anyway, so I should "go join Spoutible" or whatever. [...]

I haven't mentioned the simplest and IMO best critique of Bluesky and most other big platforms, which is that they emerged out of venture-capital galaxy brain, which has the moral sense of an AI chatbot. After the past decade or so on Twitter, "I won't touch anything Jack Dorsey has touched" is a reasonable reaction. "I will only put my social labor into platforms that can never benefit billionaires" is fair.

But the missing step, to me, is when people with principled objections to other platforms are unwilling or unable to make the alternatives of their choosing more welcoming to more people. And there are absolutely people trying to do the work, but they're dependent on the choke-point of what Mastodon-the-company decides is valuable. (Almost like something...centralized?)

I have a lot of complaints about Mastodon, but I'm sticking with it because I am 100% in the "I won't touch anything Jack Dorsey has touched" camp. That is absolutely and forever disqualifying.

This guy. This fuckin' guy: "Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness."

(If you're going to "well actually" me on your opinions on his level of involvement with Blewsky, just stop now.)

Also -- despite its faults, which, again, are many -- I personally find Mastodon about a thousand times more pleasant and interesting than I ever found Twitter.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.