@zersiax I think part of what's going on is that on the fediverse specifically, the founding population, and the people outside the blind community who still tend to come here, had specific reasons for rejecting mainstream social media, and those reasons are often political. So we were never going to get something that was just like good old Twitter, but accessible. That doesn't excuse those kinds of posts, though, just possibly explains them.

@matt @zersiax I think there are three groups: tech people who love the self-hosting aspect and were here before Elon, politically-minded people who are here because of Elon, and the blind community, which just wants a platform that gives them a nice API and hence better, more accessible apps. These three groups are often at odds with eachother. I guess there's also the fourth group, Japanese people who believe child pornography is acceptable as long as it's anime and not real children, which western countries are wehemently opposed to, but they're on instances which most of the west blocks for legal reasons, so we don't actually see them much.

@miki @matt @zersiax It's called "You nailed it!"

@miki @matt @zersiax Yeah, i'm just a blind guy that likes tech lol

@miki @matt @zersiax Mm, I was on fedi since aroudn 2018, pre-Elon, but mostly for political reasons, though I eventually self-hosted later, and I'm blind, so I guess that's a weird mixture of the 3. But I guess any generalisation will have outliers.

I do think the fedi pre-Elon had a pretty active and definite political direction, arguably more so than now, there are more liberals now I think.

@matt @zersiax OH interesting, thanks for explaining it.

@zersiax

sorry you had a bad time
here's a balloon 🎈
what you call toxicity
is just the mood in the room

if you don't feel it, great
count yourself as lucky
but reading these posts for the emotions and not the ideas
seems to me a bit fucky

@tyzbit yeah no. Calling people nazis for using a tool or service they may or may not be forced to use and offering to show them pictures of war atrocities is where I don't care what anybody's reason it, you need to go touch a heck of a lot of grass because you're no longer aware how to deal with humans in a normal fashion. And if those same people then turn around and wonder why nobody wants to move from corporate-solution-here to FLOSS-solution-here when this is what they have to look forward to I don't even see the point in trying to make it make sense, you're beyond any kind of reasonable discourse at that point

@zersiax @tyzbit You just said exactly what i was thinking

@J3317 @zersiax chatbot, write me a sonnet using as many forms of the word "set" as possible

@tyzbit @zersiax Ok now your just trolling, i am not a bot i am a real person

@zersiax hey quick question what do you think about palestine

@tyzbit can't say I've ever been there

@zersiax you can learn a lot about a person by their inability to simply recognize and condemn a genocide given a chance. that's why people are calling other people a nazi and that's why i'm calling you one now. i can call you a nazi because they're easy to spot: they act like a nazi and refuse to hold humanity sacred. your beliefs are odious and therefore so is your presence.

@tyzbit @zersiax Never been there.

@zersiax I'll confess - my feed is a solid mix of scientists, LGBT, Black and Indigenous creators, and disability justice. As near as I can tell, that's because I follow these people, people like them, and I interact with these kinds of posts. Of Course there are assholes. This is the internet. I belong to an instance that bothers to moderate, and that helps, but a lot of what goes into your feed here is what you put into it. There is no magic algorithm forcing things at you. Maybe curate more?

@VaylLarkinPoet Oh yeah I'm sure part of it is the company I keep, as it were. I'm a tech person, so a lot of folks I follow do tech things. Tech things appear to be rather... polarizing, as of late. Might be time to lean more into other spaces

@zersiax I do definitely hear you. I had the advantage as a tech writer of primarily working with engineers, who are the weirdo-crafty people of the tech world, in my experience. There are other corners! May you find many :).

@zersiax That's why I just view my followers timeline and ignore the local one. It's infuriating. X sucks, Facebook sucks, mastodon is full of assholes, like where do we go?

@ysotomayor lol this IS my followers' timeline, that is the depressing bit. To be fair a lot of it is boosts, but that tells its own story

@zersiax That's just bad.

@ysotomayor @zersiax I don't see the server local timeline as well.

@zersiax I agree, its what I like to call the left wing fediverse evangelists, or something along those lines, its ridiculous, and its a load of bullshit, and an example of why I'm neither on the left nor the right, fuck politics!

@zersiax I’d recommend mute keywords. A chunk of the people I follow are interested in US politics but I’m not, so muting the Dear Leader’s name has made my timeline much more appealing.

@robinwhittleton @zersiax I came here after Musk killed the Twitter API for 3rd party apps and while i do love it, the extreme opinions here can be jarring, to say the least.

@NicksWorld @robinwhittleton @zersiax Yeah i agree with you, i'm not really on either side and the anti AI and let's call people we don't agree with fascists crowd has put me even more off from politics, not that i really cared mutch to begin with, it's all pointless fighting.

@J3317 For real, its ridiculous, and all the more reason I turn to X for anything serious and not blabbering bullshit. @NicksWorld @robinwhittleton @zersiax

@dhamlinmusic @zersiax Oh geez, i haven't seen that very mutch recently but i've seen it before and it's the most annoying thing, can't we all just let others use what they want and what works for them?

I only had THAT problem at the beginning. I blocked those guys right away. There’s no point in arguing with them. People like that just get rude or even hurtful. I don’t put up with people like that in real life either. So why should I do it online?

@annette very good point :)

Following the *right people and boosting the *right content brings you an interesting, cool feed and timeline.

I love to walk around in Fediverse, especially on Mastodon.social and BizzFed.

• "right" means: not ashole-like.

@zersiax

One of those is actually accurate and I don't care about the others.

As long as they don't come *here* it's all good …

@VE2UWY lol if you mean X, I actually meant x as in x y z as in tool/service/platform x, of which X is a possibility. Hate that stupid name with a passion NGL

@zersiax The thing is, I'd welcome a civil discussion around several of those topics. They need to be had, but in my experience, Mastodon mostly is the farthest part where you can do that. This could exist on the mutual understanding that different opinions, views, experiences, circumstances and people exist, and the conversation starts by respecting that. Instead, the Mastodon mob starts by putting you in a box, calling you names, and being rather illogical in their arguments at that. I often wonder if people genuinely feel they've made the world a bbetter place by tagging others and blocking them.

@jakobrosin I'd say that's the weakness of all social media platforms, not just Mastodon, i.e., they are not designed for long-form and nuanced conversations, and most interactions are overblown reactions to bite-sized contexts. Mastodon is no different, except that it is a microcosm of ideological viewpoints to the mundane. Me? I just don't have the bandwidth or energy to be righteously angry for very long, certainly not to the point of harassing others for a differing, and not even opposing, viewpoint. @zersiax

@twynn @jakobrosin @zersiax Yeah agree, it's just silly, i know i did go absolutely off on him erlier but he was being really annoying.

@twynn I agree. But, at least my logic dictates, that if you want to bring out change in people or the world, labelling and blocking others is not gonna get your far. @zersiax

@jakobrosin @zersiax If only we gave everyone the benefit of best intentions as a default, but appealing to the emotions in both positive and negative ways is a far easier shortcut even if ultimately not productive.

@twynn @jakobrosin @zersiax I disagree loudly from behind my keyboard with everything you say, just because you said it, and so I call you a purple chees wheel, have the last word, and block you because you don't agree with me. Bye...
Yeah sure.

@FreakyFwoof @jakobrosin @zersiax Except most of the time, it's less about what you say but the position you may or may not hold to, simply by what you do or don't say, do or don't boost, do or don't favorite, etc. Case in point, the posts by a certain poster as seen by pulling the parent thread, which is all sorts of sad.

@twynn @jakobrosin @zersiax Pulling the parent thread? so what, it got too hot to handle so someone deleted a thing?

@FreakyFwoof No no, there are a lot of conversations in this thread, but from a certain tyzbit@toot.now aptly demonstrates @zersiax point perfectly. @jakobrosin

@jakobrosin For some, I truly do think they feel they have. Block who you disagree with, keep who you agree with. In general I don't even think that viewpoint is all that problematic. It's when who you "keep" take your views and make them more and more extreme when a dangerous echo chamber effect starts occurring where any old outrageous thing you say just becomes normal afternoon tea conversing