Portions of this post originally appeared on Brontoforumus, 2024-08-06.
The other day I showed my wife the Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter scene. She'd never seen it.
She commented, "It's funny how she says they don't judge you by what you look like."
And I said, "Yeah, this was back in the 'on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog' days. They didn't judge you by your appearance because nobody had a digital camera. But it was very white and very male. On the other hand, it was diverse in some ways — it was also disproportionately queer and furry."
Mastodon reminds me of the old Internet in some ways — it's similarly made up primarily of tech-savvy people, with a heavy queer and furry presence, but also very white.
I like the idea of Mastodon a lot. I don't like silos; I don't like focusing power into the hands of a single point of failure that, say, a rich fascist can buy and ruin at his leisure.
But I've gotten pretty disillusioned with Mastodon over time, too, and it's that very-white, very-European, very-engineer kind of vibe that's responsible. I've read so many Black posters reporting their experiences with racism on Mastodon, and so many white reply-guys responding that they don't see any racism and you must just be Mastodoning wrong, that I'm becoming disillusioned at its approach. It just doesn't seem like the developers, or the admins of the major instances, think this is a priority, because it's not happening to them.
I'm not on Bluesky, and that's because, as of right now, it's another silo, another single point of failure. But in theory, at least, that's supposed to change; it's supposed to be an open, interoperable protocol stack, and someday soon there should be other, independently-owned sites that can federate with it. And I look forward to that, because of the various up-and-coming social networking sites, Bluesky seems like the one with the most forward-thinking approach to empowering users to curate their own experience and keep abusive posters out of their feed and their DMs.
I'm a big fan of not-for-profit FOSS projects like Mastodon on general principle, but there's an old criticism that they're "scratch-your-own-itch" projects where developers create the software they want to use and don't bother with features they wouldn't use themselves. Unfortunately, there's some truth to that, and unfortunately I get the impression that Mastodon devs are stymied by Black users' complaints of racist harassment because they don't have experience dealing with anything similar themselves. One thing that commercial projects like Bluesky have going for them is an incentive to address things that their users are asking them to address, regardless of whether the devs personally find them interesting.
Bluesky's got some smart people there who've thought a lot about the moderation problem, including Mike Masnick, whose "Protocols, not Platforms" paper is largely responsible for Bluesky existing in the first place. I think Bluesky's the social network to watch.
In the meantime, Mastodon feels a little bit like the Old Internet. For good and for ill.