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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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More and less in different ways.

There's no way to actually stop someone from speaking (including "dangerous" speech), but they can choose to be on instances that are not federated with instances that tolerate this speech (more power within their fiefdom).

Apparently it's currently going a different direction - as Mastodon had an existing critical mass of too-left-for-Twitter refugees, the influx of centrists, normies and media bluechecks is being met with widespread condemnation & bans/defederation.

Source:

https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705

I imagine this is a temporary phenomenon, the masses are just following their the bluechecks & the latter has IRL status & isn't going to stand for being bullied by a bunch of left-radicals who just happened to get there first. If the structure of Mastodon makes the natives too difficult to dislodge, the bluechecks will find somewhere else, (probably Twitter) wrestling in the mud out in the political fringes is the last place these folks want to be.

Definitely a no-lose scenario for me, as another user quipped.

Seems like exactly how twitter was before the Elon takeover, except you can't get kicked out of the entire network, you might just have to make an account on a different instance.

Though I doubt you could get a small number of instances. That would require a lot of computing power, and mastodon is hard to monetize.

That last bit is the real reason I don't see mastodon taking over. No ads means you'd have to charge up front, or a subscription, or something. Normies seem willing to endure leftist signaling, but we've never seen them chomping at the bit to pay for it.

I suppose someone could fork the client and change the protocol, but it's not really a mastodon instance at the at point.

I am imagining reddit-style jannies

Then you lack imagination. There will presumably be some with much stricter mods.

But they'll end up splintering in a series of inevitable purity spirals as these things are wont to do.

Normies would probably end up on whichever one the most celebrities end up on (or their particular favorite if they have one).

This is actually an area where the purity spiral moves in your favor.

Splintering off into their own instance means that the normies can't really be exposed to the memes generated on that instance (they'd have to federate with an improperly pure instance to do that, if they were willing to do that, they probably wouldn't be in the purity spiral to begin with).

As opposed to a new faction splintering off on twitter, where they can get exposure to the entire normie audience.

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