The big story occupying space in my mind (and on this blog) is the #TwitterMigration. As Twitter grows troubled and troubling, “Fediverse” technologies in general and Mastodon in particular are successfully attracting many users and providing a pleasant experience. Everyone is wondering out loud whether Mastodon can take the strain and whether it can provide cool new features. What we haven’t been discussing are two ethical questions: First, is it OK to bail out of Twitter? And if bailing out, is Mastodon a acceptable place to land? Bye, Twitter (OK?) · I confess that this discussion caught me by surprise but I’m glad it did, it’s eye-opening. The voices are those of Black and disabled people (mostly the former) arguing that Twitter has fueled an important flowering of their culture (the hashtag is #BlackTwitter) and become important as a refuge, a meeting place, and a source of power. I’m as white as can be, so probably not your best source on the subject, but I felt educated by Shamira Ibrahim’s Can Black Twitter Ever Really Die? ¶
I also like to see Twitter go down and dissappear. The criticism about Mastodon by Black people has indeed been seen before, and I do not understand it. They find the quote reply very important, but some journalists also wrote that they think they cannot do without it. In reply to that I saw this web link on Mastodon : https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20673 (a long read) which shows that Mastodon no longer does not want to have the same feature as on Twitter but is looking at a more safe alternative.
I don’t get how there can be an ethical question here either.
The only ethical question should be to the detriment of twitter or about specific instances with questionable rules but not about the whole mastodon platform, let alone the fediverse.
It goes to show that many people don’t understand what Mastodon, and by extension, the Fediverse is. They don’t understand about Instances. I remember reading an article some time ago that said people in certain parts of the world thought Facebook was the internet. I think this is similar.