Rex Kerr @ichoran@qoto.org

@marathon0 @freemo - If you’re trying to curate a safe space, you exactly don’t want the user to decide because in deciding they have to hit something (maybe many things) that makes them feel unsafe.

The wisdom of increasing comfort rather than developing resilience is another matter, but it’s self-consistent.

Also, the people I’ve talked to who are into this sort of thing mostly don’t, when pressed, have much of a problem with authoritarianism-used-for-good or oversight-used-for-good. Benevolent dictators can be awesome, if you can guarantee benevolence. There can be some nasty differences between theory and practice regarding resolving that conditional, however.

@albertcardona Very useful to have enough people like you to keep introverts like me from disappearing completely! Thanks for advocating for Mastodon and linking Kristin's explanation of its features and merits!

@kristinmbranson - "Finding" me on Mastodon isn't a coincidence! I am here because of your recommendation, which I found because Albert tweeted about it.

So it's more like you lured me here!

Whether Mastodon has any staying power remains to be seen. Its biggest selling points seem to be "no algorithm", which isn't even true--it just is a very very simple, completely open algorithm; and open/free. But this doesn't necessarily make it align with the philosophical justification for public discourse, especially the "marketplace of ideas" ones. Twitter etc have pretty conclusively demonstrated that with some formulations of the idea-economy, in fact, bad ideas win, or at least do way way better than they have any right to. My instinct, sans any clear idea let alone a proof of properties or empirical evidence to support it, is that a solution will actually require a *lot* of algorithm to compensate for the depersonalizing effects of interacting in text remotely instead of in person. And if someone does manage to do that, it'd leave Mastodon without very much of a mission. But that's okay. Google+ didn't last long, and it wasn't a big deal that it didn't.

@kristinmbranson - As someone who asked way way way too many questions in person in conferences, as often as not because nobody else was asking much of anything, I've been particularly delighted by the virtual conferences I've attended where far more people have been willing to ask questions--lots of really interesting, knowledgeable questions.
Strangely enough, at the first in-person conference I went to post-Covid, the trend continued--people were considerably more willing to ask questions than they had been pre-pandemic, and I think this really enhanced the meeting. I don't expect it to last, however, as there is no reason to believe that the previous norm wasn't a stable equilibrium given people's distribution of personalities.
However, a lot of hybrid conferences don't handle questions well at all--one or the other (or both!) of the channels ends up being shortchanged when it comes to questions.
So I don't know how to solve that aspect of the problem.
(I do wonder who likes scientific speed-dating at conferences. We're a pretty introverted bunch on average. I am roughly as drained after such things as after 8 hours of talks. Oh well.)