It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.
leereeves|3 years ago
Would that be different on Mastodon? I've never used it, but as a decentralized service, I assume it won't have a central authority banning users?
cmrdporcupine|3 years ago
So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.
Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.
So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.
And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.