Birdsite

posted on 24 Nov 2022 | Politics

On the birdsite: Musk's policy changes were about "Free Speech"... but it's become extremely clear that the particular speech he was focused on liberating was transphobia. Most of the accounts he unbanned were banned for anti-trans hate-speech, and he's since gotten very chummy with notorious anti-trans extremists on Twitter. He's also tweeted anti-trans stuff himself.

It's hard to avoid that detail -- when he says he bought twitter for "free speech", its important to ask "about what?".

As a person with trans family, this is a deal-breaker for me, and I'd hope for many others. Many artists I follow have exited for the same reason, often in spectacularly pyrotechnic fashions, such as the QuestionableContent comic artist Jeph Jacques.

So, I'm really hoping this Mastodon thing takes off.

I know some people are going to other social networks like Tumblr, Hive, and Post.... but fundamentally, what's to stop their owners from ruining those sites too? Tumblr in particular already had an exodus because of bad moderation once before.

People have complained that Mastodon's governance model is like an HOA. Each server is a private nation with complicated political relationships to other servers. That's bad... but is a new hopefully-benevolent dictator better?

Mastodon is flawed. It's confusing, it's overloaded, and it's questionable how fiscally sound its servers are. But Twitter's Muskpocalypse has proven how governance is important. And Mastodon gives people the tools to care about governance. We can emigrate to new servers. We can build our own servers that can be run as we see fit. We can modify the code of our server. Nobody owns the Fediverse network Mastodon's servers run on.

If Twitter's moderation matters, then ownership matters.

I'm at @Pxtl@Mastodon.Social