I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

I have a feeling it already is one. In my timeline there are a lot of LGBQT activists (which I think is the case for much of Mastodon at the moment?), and since I generally agree with how they'd like to see the world and am otherwise not really involved with that movement, I don't really interact with those posts. However, I see a lot of "I simply blocked this hateful person lalalalalala" which makes me, as an outsider, feel uncomfortable, and I feel hesitant even to try to respond with even a slightly different view.

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves.

The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter.

The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be into in Japan).

The third wave was sex workers in response to SESTA/FOSTA eliminating platforms they used in the past.

All these waves set up their own instances, and they don't communicate much with the other waves.

If you look at what these waves all have in common (aside from using the software), there's just one thing. They were all posting stuff that didn't fit in on a mainstream platform. In the first case it was due to harassment, in the second it was embarrassment, in the third it was legality.

The users are already bifurcating the network, admins routinely share blocklists of sites that they don't want included in their version of the fediverse. Being able to block instances and people you don't like is one of Mastodon's killer features.

I don't think it will become the next outrage machine, people will just block and bifurcate. I do think users will keep setting up Mastodon instances in waves similar to the first three. I'd be surprised if Mastodon ever powered a better version of the commons we currently have on FB, Twitter etc. [1] The feature Mastodon added to federation (and that made it more popular than similar software) is the ability to not federate with people who are different from you.

[1] The "fediverse" at large has some potential to do this if it receives mass adoption. Think of a scenario like WordPress integrating federation features into the Core. This would bring federation to the mainstream.

Yeah that first wave are huge with using content warnings for the silliest of things.

[cw: food] I ate a burrito

I've since disabled content warnings, because I think it gets in the way.. But then it fails the second and third waves, because they post childporn and sex ads..

So I've ended up blocking pawoo.net and switter.at

Which is kinda the problem on mastodon, there's nothing in between silly content warnings written by people that are offended by the slightest thing, and content warnings for childporn drawings

I think the Content Warning thing is a different "problem". People in my timeline say they're using it in order to not clutter your timeline, i.e. you can quickly scan the headline ("I ate a burrito") to determine whether you want to read the rest. Ironically, that might be because Mastodon allows longer posts :P

Perhaps they'd need to implement a summary tag or something, so that people can configure their clients to only show the summaries for those who want to, and allows you to always expand them and still hide everything behind a CW.

Then it sounds like an option that should exist when reading your feed rather than something that requires the action of each individual person per tweet.

Yes there needs to be a global "disable all CW/Spoilers/ETC"

I don't see how the story about the waves and about users not fitting in would lead to less outrage. Sure, by being able to block (groups of) people, they might not come in contact with the people they are outraged about as much. However, the main thing that seems to turn Twitter/Facebook and now Mastodon into an outrage machine is exactly only seeing their own circles. That's what I'm currently observing at Mastodon: there's a lot of outrage in its LGBQT communities over things that I perceive as small, and the outrage is such that I wouldn't even dare to get involved in the things they are discussing, even though that is the only way to get closer together.

Don't forget the French wave.

It's the people that bring the outrage, not the platform itself. Anything that reaches a certain scale will start to become it, it's part of human nature and something we haven't had sufficient time to learn and evolve past.

Wouldn’t a decentralized social network be more prone to delvelop more extremist groups? I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missing?

> I mean if anyone can create an instance, then extremists from all the political spectrum will be able to moderate their own instances, in other words they will censor those who think differently and encourage their own views creating a loop that could potentially create more myopic-extremist views, or is there something I’m missing?

Does this even matter? I mean, if you really wanted to stop people with weird views from grouping and then getting extremist through evaporative cooling[0], you'd have to roll the world back to preindustrial times (and even then you wouldn't stop it completely). Mastodon is but one platform; fringe groups will happily keep relocating when their old meeting places want them no longer, or they'll even set up their own platforms. Now that physical proximity is no longer a limiting factor, people of like beliefs will always find each other (if they bother to look).

(I think a good analogy is this: a Mastodon community is in the same relation to the Internet as Facebook Groups are to Facebook, or subreddits are to Reddit - a federated system inside a larger whole. The way fringe groups use subreddits/Facebook groups is analogous to how they will use Mastodon.)

If you're worried about extremists getting endangering public safety, I feel it's the job of the police to infiltrate such groups and stop individuals as they cross from talking to doing. If you're worried about large chunk of population catching some insane beliefs; I offer no remedy for that.

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[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

I'm not really sure what your point is. With or without Mastodon people have already created forums/social media groups/online communities for like-minded people and will censor or not censor it to their liking. That's the freedom of the internet.

And honestly I'd rather have that than the current state of social media where everyone is on the same platform and yelling at each other and using retweets to shame one another. My experience is anecdotal of course but whenever I see people trying to engage in discourse with the other side, everyone just doubles down on their opinion and the conversation goes nowhere.

Compared to the current mode of a few centralized services, a federated social networking landscape will be harder for companies or institutions to control and contain, yes.

Depending on the world view that can be perceived as a bug or a feature.

And won’t the proponents say this is a feature as it keeps them off other instances?

Then perhaps people/corporations will learn that farming social networks to predict IRL intentions may not be the best use of their time and energy.

As far as I'm aware, "being an accurate source of voting intention" is not a prime requirement for social networks, nor is "making life easier for lazy journalists/pollsters". At least, not for any where the users are the customers. For those, where the users are the product, requirements might be different. Personally, I view this is a positive for Mastodon.

"outrage machine". What a perfectly succinct description. That said, Mastodon would likely turn into an outrage machine if it ever reached critical mass.

I suppose you could stay in your own mastodon instance to avoid it.

The potential for division in the fediverse as a whole is worse. On twitter, there were McCarthyesque, opaquely curated user blacklists to worry about. A conglomerated instance could enforce this kind of arbitrary censorship across entire communities by imposing rules on who their federation partners can federate with, and control network disruption by refusing to federate with new, <100 user instances under the excuse of "preventing spam". Centralized social networks have already isolated people into information bubbles bad enough as it is.

The blocklists are equally as McCarthyesque..

I remember being on mastodon when the second wave of users hit (pawoo.net). Suddenly overnight we had to worry about what was on our servers cache.. suddenly there was lolicon porn, which might be legal in japan, but outside it could be illegal.

So naturally blocklist's appeared, blocking all the new wave of Japanese servers.

I remember there was a disagreement between those in favor of block list's and the creator of Mastodon. Who didn't want any form of blocking, back at that time the tools to do any form of blocking was either non-existent or very raw. I had an instance at this stage, and the thought about having some kind of childporn drawings in my servers cache scared the living shit out of me. Enough to shut it down.

But the blocklists weren't vetted back then, and I don't think there was a central list that I can remember.

I think this is what led to instance muting. Now admins can mute an instance, but people can still opt in to following someone there, probably without caching.