Due to the ongoing twitterpocalypse I was wondering if anyone knew of any Mastadon servers inhabited by community management types, or just any with solid moderation policies they’d recommend?
I’ve been following in horror the collapse of any kind of safety/moderation policy on Twitter and the whole “vote to allow people who’ve been banned for abuse” thing M*sk is running at the moment to generate controversy has finally made me push through the learning curve for Mastadon.
I haven’t seen any community Mastadon’s, but I also haven’t looked.
I find myself not being able to find the energy to move elsewhere. I just don’t feel very energised with the idea and that it wouldn’t be a great use of my time.
Is there something we could create here at Rosieland instead? In my head I’m have this idea that niche communities can help fill the gap.
I suppose we could create a Mastadon server, but what about this forum? And the use of this Discourse chat? or encouraging more blogging? Or encouraging more Rosieland events?
I find myself not being able to find the energy to move elsewhere. I just don’t feel very energised with the idea and that it wouldn’t be a great use of my time.
I agree with this view, and this is the social dilemma in which we all find ourselves. Ever since audiences moved towards social media (and new generations of users preferred single, large, mega-sites to decentralized and distributed sites), the largest platforms tend to monopolize our time because people prefer large clearinghouses where they can communicate and collaborate with the largest possible audiences for general use cases.
Niche use cases, or specialized brands, including communities, stand in exception to this view, where people are not necessarily interested in socializing primarily, but instead in finding timely, relevant, and valuable information to a specific need or want.
In both of these scenarios, a Twitter-replacement would be a waste of time, unless if Twitter is suddenly and immediately replaced in its entirety. It hasn’t happened often - Facebook’s dethroning of MySpace, or MySpace’s replacement of Friendster being two historical precedents for the wall-based desktop-driven content-scale - but when it does happen, it’s a complete apples-to-apples substitution. Twitter is fairly unique in that it drives micro-blogging, and so only another superior micro-blogging alternative that is both (a) centralized and (b) more meaningful and/or impactful than Twitter.
I think what’s more likely is that an entire format – micro-blogging – ceases to be compelling and is replaced by another format. This is the biggest threat to the wall-style news-feed format that Facebook has been confronted with, thanks in large part to the video-first mobile-scroll format of TikTok. It has driven Facebook and its owned properties, like Instagram, to essentially emulate in the face of plummeting audiences.
