"There’s no one telling me I’m a piece of sh-t on there!" marveled one Mastodon user.
By
Michael Martin, Metro
Twitter is embroiled in a seemingly never-ending controversy about
hate speech on the platform, with many charging that the company has
been overly permissive and too slow to remove offenders including white
supremacists and neo-Nazis. Their message to Twitter founder Jack
Dorsey: This is your house, and you don't have to let everyone inside no
matter how badly they behave. That's the attitude of the newish Twitter
competitor
Mastodon, which has vowed to boot alt-right groups off their platform.
“Nazis are bad and I don’t want to give them a platform for
recruiting,” founder Eugen Rochko told a Mastodon user on Twitter. When
the user tried to bait Rochko by asking him to define a Nazi, Rochko
replied: “That bullshit doesn't work on me, man.”
Wait, what is Mastodon?
"Mastodon is like a utopian version of Twitter," wrote Joon Ian Wong
in Quartz in March 2017. "It’s focused on limiting abusive speech and
promoting privacy, it doesn’t have to chase growth mandated by venture
capital, and it’s decentralized."
Many Twitter users were already disturbed about the length of time
that hate groups were given a global platform on Twitter, the profusion
of sexist and racist trolls, and the fact that Russia used the social
network to foment discord and push pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda
during the 2016 election. Frustration boiled over this summer about
Twitter's continued acceptance of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist
who has claimed that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School were
faked, even after he was banned from nearly every other social platform.
Founded two years ago, Mastodon eliminates those issues. It's
open-source, not owned by a profit-seeking company, so there are no ads
and drawing the biggest audience possible is not a priority. Rochko has
said he doesn't care if he makes money on it, and he doesn't expect to.
How does Mastodon work?
Mastodon is designed somewhat like the chatrooms of the early
internet, with different spaces, called "instances," for different
subject areas. Users essentially just talk to each other. Saying it's
"built for real conversation," Mastodon has a 500-character limit. The
smaller chat spaces mean that moderators can ban bad actors quickly.
Because the platform is open source, anyone can create a new instance.
Some say that small-community focus will be no match for Twitter's
global town square. Said Alex Goldman of the podcast Reply All: “I think
it's a net negative for the internet, but it appears that we as users
want consolidation. It's easy to find all of our relatives on Facebook.
It's easy to find all our favorite celebs on Twitter. All our
information on Google. But Mastodon seems to be broken up into niches,
and that doesn't hold the appeal. Even though I honestly miss those
cultural internet niches.”
But
Luke O'Neil of Esquire
says he's hooked: "The platform has become a must-check in my daily
social media routine," he wrote last week. "While it looks almost
exactly like Twitter—even replicating Tweetdeck's columned layout—the
feel is distinctly different, like putting a favorite pair of pants on
inside out. For one thing, there’s no one telling me I’m a piece of shit
on there. At least, not yet."
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