🤔 People keep saying that Mastodon doesn't have this problem "because no algorithms," but Mastodon absolutely does have this problem.
For example, whether or not a fediverse user sees this post that I'm writing right now, depends on whether or not their admin thinks that they should see posts from hachyderm, or from me in particular. 🤷🏿♂️
Someone is still deciding which replies you see and which ones you don't see, presumably for your safety and enjoyment.
Because in Mastodon, a boost is closer to a "like" on other platforms.
If I start boosting a lot of crypto spam, mods on other servers will be like, "Crypto spam?! Seriously?! What happened to him?! This dude sucks now! Hachyderm, handle that, or else!" Then if Hachyderm doesn't, other admins may defed Hachyderm, or block me individually.
Instances that don't like people that like crypto spam, don't let their users see my posts.
On all platforms, a like and a boost communicate two things:
1) I enjoyed this! (Enjoy) 2) Other people should see this! (Visibility)
On a platform like TikTok, the "like" button gives a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and N<1.0 to "Visibility." TikTok gives the "repost" button a score of N>0.0 to "Enjoy" and N<1.0 to "Visibility."
Mastodon gives the "like" button a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and 0.0 to "Visibility." It gives boost a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and a score of 1.0 to "Visibility."
Other social: "Everyone sees every reply! But we fiddle with the order!"
Mastodon: "Not everyone sees every reply! But the order of posts that are seen, is guaranteed to be strictly reverse chronological!"
Different trade-offs inherent in the architecture of each.
I've posted on here before about how Mastodon's trade-off makes it much easier to racially abuse Black people in the replies, and puts more of the burden of reporting that abuse on victims rather than the community.
@mekkaokereke@stux Honestly speaking as a social media abuse survivor – as a survivor of abuse by these very social media platforms, by their interfaces, by their affordances, by their (deliberate) limitations – all things that can be called “dispositives of power”, following Michel Foucault's theory –, I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that Mastodon makes people more violent and that other social media platforms like Diaspora* are, at worst, sponging negativity coming from other social media platforms, including Mastodon, as well as other forms of AFK oppression.
I do not meant that there would be no racism problem over here, or that it would boil down to an attempt at open sourcing tobacco. There's a lot of important stuff to be said about it, about the whiteness of the communities involved on Mastodon, including the open tech community and unfortunately too many activist, antifascist circles. But I also notice that the perpetrators – who could be prosecuted according to the French law – are themselves stuck in echo chambers, in a form of double exploitation as makers and consumers of assets, in a mostly closed circuit, isolating them from a differentiated society that would therefore fit into Erving Goffman's theory of “total institutions”. This is the result of deliberate design decisions from Twitter, but also from Facebook and Instagram, of which Mastodon, as a Twitter clone nostalgic of the “good old times”, isn't sanitized (and isn't meant to be).
As a result, many Mastodon users are disenchanted toward open tech because they expected this pile of glittery poop to save their lives, whereas it's doing too little for them, and often begrudgingly. This is why we should all, including white people, put more attention and funding into Aer0h's work on Fipamo.
