This is a very, very long post and it touches on a lot of the schisms, but there are two rough constellations of Fediverse servers with their own islands of cultural attitudes and practices. The post refers to them as “tech Mastodon” and “queer Mastodon”, and talks about the conflicts between the two.
My experience (on furry.engineer) has kind of sat on the boundary between both circles. Though furry instances are almost always in “queer mastodon” territory, I write a lot about technology topics, thus I’m exposed to both.
Over the years, I’ve had some very silly interactions (being told I need to post a content warning for fursuit photos by someone I’ve never interacted with before). I’ve had some incredibly exhausting debates. I block a lot of people that annoy me.
Despite very loudly disagreeing with many of the left-leaning people on Mastodon, they don’t just call me a Nazi. I’ve even had a few call me homophobic slurs before (though Hacker News comments are generally more hostile).
But generally if they don’t like you, they just call you an “asshole” and move on with their day. And that’s fine.
Sure, I have been using mastodon for years but all of the sudden I am doing it wrong.
I think its about who you follow. If you follow niche things or small communities (or very closed) its probably fine (I should probably return to that), but once you start following big entities, especially ones that has something to do with (but not limited to) politics you find yourself in lots of sh*t.
Just go read a few comments under the Proton posts and you will see the “other” version of mastodon…
The difference I always have to point out is that PG has a forum (and a PeerTube) too.
Proton does have a blog, and half the time they don’t bother posting to it the same things they will announce on Reddit. It’s this part that annoys me.
Well, it depends I generally find niche communities lacking in divesity of topics too and some can be shitty on its own (I kinda don’t like the Fediverse’s community in general, so I just kinda gave up at this point)
This wasn’t a slight at all to PG, it’s definitely good to be on the mainstream platforms to reach a wider audience. It’s a clear benefit to get more people into privacy, and PG as an entity has different privacy goals than the audience it’s capturing.
PS- This is not a personal attack, I admire your work a lot.
You have never been called a nazi because you display all the shibboleth and purity test rituals the in-group demands. You are a furry who is on a pro LGBT server interacting with other folks with similar interests. You are also not a public figure the scale of Proton CEO. Andy Yen has failed the purity test of declaring American voters choice as Nazi and a Russian puppet, so he is now a Nazi and other words folks on Mastodon use for anyone not agreeing with their view of US partisan politics.
Mastodon is a reflection of the same population that has doomed the world by marginalizing the majority, trying to guilt trip for minor mistakes, making intent secondary to past mistakes done by people in their youth and allowing no room for improvement of a person, etc. The surge of right wing is directly propped up by the morons who try to guilt trip everyone for participating in the flawed society and then victimize themselves when asked why they participate in the same society.
If Andy Yen is a Nazi because of endorsement of a bureaucrat who he thought would be better for his company than their predecessors based on his lived experience, then everyone on Mastodon is also a Nazi for not renouncing their citizenship and taxes for every single abhorrent act done by their governments from Abu Ghraib to Canadian Education camps, to Australian refugee camps in Papua New Guinea, etc.
Ultimately, mastodon is terrible experience for anyone who logs into mastodon.social thinking it is twitter, when it is just 4chan for NIMBY pseudo-Left wingers while drawing 300K USD a month from Palantir and the like.
I wouldn’t call Andy a Nazi purely based on his comment, but you’re being extremely disingenuous here. He didn’t just praise one bureaucrat, but the entire Republican party. The current administration has been doing an awful lot of Nazi salutes lately and very plainly aligns itself with neo Nazis.
Calling Yen’s actions equivalent to continuing to do the things you need to do to survive is absolutely ridiculous. Andy Yen doesn’t even live here and his company isn’t based here. There was no need for those comments and it was pretty obvious how polarizing it would be. Plus he’s just flat out wrong as people have discussed in other threads on this forum.
Again, I wouldn’t call Yen a Nazi, but what he said and how he’s responding to backlash is seriously calling into question his priorities and his judgement.
Did I say “Anvil is calling Yen a Nazi so Mastodon bad”? The criticism is explicitly about a large section calling him and Proton Nazis, very clear in the comment section I linked above.
You are discussing US partisan politics again, which discussion is clearly not about. You are free to have your fantasy worldview, I am allowed to have my fantasy worldview. This is about the platform being terrible due to terrible design philosophy and takeover of a platform by a loud minority of virtue wielding terrorists (who aim to terrorize, not hold accountable, Proton).
If Yen is a Nazi for calling Trump pick good and presenting his understanding, then like I said, everyone is a nazi who praised any political party anytime for all the sins committed by politicians from them. If your logic is “Praising XYZ fron party I don’t like makes you a Nazi”, then every single person who praised Kamala Harris is racist, everyone who praised Obama is a terrorist for middle east folks, and everyone who praised any party anytime anywhere for some niche activitiy is complicit for all their actions. Ridiculous mental gymnastics.
Just for the record, I don’t support Proton and think encrypted email is snake oil, and people should all self host everything before anyone accuses me of being a Nazi or a Proton shill.
Maybe for you. For others it does not matter. But if the platform as a whole keeps trying to make it seem like what a few outspoken idiots want is the majority opinion, its a terrible platform.
I certainly don’t display all of the shibboleth or purity tests demanded by any group. Even a single counterexample debunks this statement.
That doesn’t actually matter as much as you think it does.
Like many hackers, I’m in favor of self-defense, even with firearms. This puts me at odds with virtually the entire Democrat party because it goes against the popular narrative. But I also take this stance because the US government historically classified cryptography (which is little more than mathematics) as a munition so they could control its export.
There are damn-near infinite possible political topics, for which there are each an uncountable number of positions one can take. That’s way too much information for anyone to process about complete strangers, so humans tend to compress this into as little information as possible to make things easier. This is a great survival tactic, because information overload sucks, but in extreme cases it culminates in black-or-white thinking.
And if the position being taken is approximately, “well you must be one of them, because you don’t sound exactly like one of us”, the error rate is so high that conversation is useless.
But, like, of course I’m pro-LGBT. That’s not even a matter of “politics” (even the democrat party wasn’t in favor of gay marriage until halfway through the Obama administration, and I was very painfully aware of that growing up). Rather, it’s a matter of simply caring about the rights and freedoms that everyone should have. Some rich jerks made this a political topic because of their own prejudices. At the end of the day, who really cares if someone’s LGBT? It’s not hurting you.
I’d like to request a thread lock or mod intervention. The topic is about Proton opting out of a more privacy respecting platforms to post updates on their service. Everyone’s qualms with Mastadon is their own bias irrelevant to the conversation.
How is Mastodon more private? Xitter with account authentication before posts is arguably more private from third parties compared to bluesky and mastodon. Fediverse users had a famously stupidpanicattack when a Bluesky plugin bridged what were public posts.
A lot of fediverse instances have terribly written privacy policies with no data sovereignty for the user. They are also empirically toxic according to some, though this is more subjective than the shitty privacy policies.
Since nobody is really talking about the original topic Proton anymore, I think it is fine to close this.
There are too many bad-faith arguments about Mastodon here. I had to remove a post about Mastodon supposedly sanctioning pedophilia for crying out loud. How this would even work, it’s hard to say.
Mastodon is not a monolithic service like Twitter or Bluesky, it is inherently decentralized in the same manner as email or the internet at large. You need to look no further than Gab and Truth Social to see that the Fediverse has no singular viewpoints and can be used by anyone.
I hope that we can once again return to the point that people understand how decentralized services work, I fear social media silos like Facebook and Twitter wiped these memories away.
