Yet another insightful question about my engagement with mastodon here.
If I'm going to be honest, my perspective hasn't much changed about Mastodon except insofar as I've learned more disturbing things about the history of users of color and other marginalized groups on the platform. I've also learned some pretty not great implications for the existing affordances of the fediverse, many of which I've outlined in other places.
The primary thing that I've learned about mastodon is that more than twitter, much of our cultural inheritances structure how we use the site and how the norms of using the site are enforced and maintain. This, predictably, has a great deal to do with who is using the site and in what way.
As I have said before, Mastodon is a very white platform. It is also, in many respects, a very male platform and a platform that abides by the epistemic norms of the tech industry.
Let me be clear what I mean: tech privileges a particular way of knowing, of engaging with problems that is in tension with other modes of inquiry. As I am primarily a philosopher, I am interested in implications, directions, potentialities, while a great many of the replies have demanded "solutions" "resolutions" and so on. This is similar to the demands made of me when working in spaces like AI and algorithmic bias.
These are both spaces that share the demography of Mastodon and the social norms, broadly construed, of mastodon itself. In essence, some of what I have learned during my time here is about the social dynamics of mastodon and how those dynamics can impede the kind of community formation that many (not all) marginalized groups desire and are looking for.
To put it simply, I have learned more about the social aspects of mastodon since being here than any of the technical aspects.
Now, what I have learned of the technical aspects gives me both hope and broad concern for the platform. I see that the technical aspects of the fediverse, while enabling freedom from some kinds of abuse, also open up vectors to other kinds of abuse. These vectors are overlooked in the recommendations made by mastodonians to marginalized communities. I have enumerated them in my responses to "build your own instances."
@shengokai I have not read all of those responses, so I might be misconstruing what you’re saying.
I do think that this might illuminate what I was trying to say in my comment above. Maybe, “build your own instances” is part of the answer in some cases, but it wuld help to enlist the assistance of others to bootstrap doing that.
I considered creating my own instance, but it seemed like a silly waste of time to do that for just myself and a handful of family or friends. Helping other people connect in a way that has been denied them seems like a much better way to spend my time and energy.
