The fediverse is def no pre-musk twitter because it's damn near impossible to find on the ground accounts regarding what's going on in Israel/Palestine.
@BlackAzizAnansi X, it seems, is still massively more diverse regionally. Mastodon is great for following some tech and hobby niches, but its weakness when it comes to first-hand accounts of events has been noted…
@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi
It's getting better. Follow #Newstodon to find real journalists and news organizations to follow. You can find local, regional, national, and global news, and the more you follow, the better your news feed is.
@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi Well, it's not like you could blame Mastodon for that. It's still the individual users who choose which networks they want to use and where they will share their information, and most will use those networks that are best known, no matter how shitty they are in some aspects (like, if they spy on you or if they pamper nazis). And best known are those networks that can or could afford good advertisement. Independent networks don't win in capitalism.
Sure, Mastodon is very much not perfect either (and some of that also has to do with a lack of money behind it), but criticizing a network for not having enough users is just beside the point.
@KAOS@BlackAzizAnansi I think you can blame the culture that was created here to some extent - a head-in-the-sand mentality that persists - and the structure of Mastodon, with its many blocklists and subnetworks and lack of discoverability is inherently limiting. Journalists were blocked en masse when they set up an instance. Why not work on being the internet’s “town square” instead of ceding it to a capricious billionaire?
@KerryMitchell@KAOS@BlackAzizAnansi There are hashtags, but they're inconsistent - for example, Israelis don't hashtag #israel when talking about the massacres. There's a bunch of hashtagged content in German, except that Germans are about as informed about the Middle East as Americans (how uninformed: the public broadcaster called the Hamas fighters "fighters"; some natsec bores complained that that's bad and they must be called "terrorists" - of note, Israelis use both words).
@KerryMitchell@KAOS@BlackAzizAnansi Right now mastodon/fedi is a deception. It gives the illusion of choice or freedom but instead of corporate ownership you're beholden to the restrictions the creators impose anyway. Like the illusion of welcoming friendliness here. Imagine thinking that stating 'everyone is welcome here' is the same as actually addressing racism and sexism here.
@SarraceniaWilds@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi Yes, all of that is true.
But it's still so much less bad than X is now, and many people still prefer X. And I've seen a very similar thing play out before, with Diaspora and Facebook (and now you might wonder what the fuck Diaspora was, because it was not able to advertise). So I have reasons to assume it's a general problem that independent, decentralized networks have compared to corporate ones, and I'm also pretty sure I can boil it down to blaming capitalism. 😉
@KAOS@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi
I dont think an oversimplification to redirect away from the racism and sexism is necessary. As if those do not exist independent of an economic system.
@SarraceniaWilds@KAOS@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi
Some of you can be reductive all you want doesn’t change the truth. The culture can be a problem. Be it with the views on capitalism, journalism and big companies. It’s also telling how quickly people react to any criticism of Mastodon
Yeah, I have myself a problem with more than one thing about Mastodon, and yes, of course the culture is one of them. I recently even thought about leaving, and then ended up with just totally downscaling it for me (cut the majority of my following and follower connections).
Anyway, it's just a thing I've seen over and over again, though, that a place (not always Mastodon, even) is criticized for the people who are not there. 😉 Which is a bit... Idk, funny?
That's just a pattern I've witnessed so many times since 2011 when I started using alternative social networks for the first time.
Many people never learn these alternatives even exist, so they don't actively decide for or against them; they just stay where they are. And others do learn about them, usually right when some bigger issue shakes the "mainstream" networks, then they come to the alternative networks, and then > 90 % of them disappear the next day, in most cases "because this whole group of people who are important to me isn't there". Which is super understandable, but also... uhm... has a bad impact on the bigger picture, because they don't even give it a try and that means that the alternative network doesn't even have a chance to gain that much momentum.
I'm sure that whole thing could be described not just sociologically, but probably even with theoretical physics or so. 😅 Things that happen when bigger groups of humans do stuff. And in the end, they usually (or always?) keep ending up where the money is, because that's the places that are known by everyone and that can also afford an "it's actually super simple"-tutorial if needed.
@KAOS@SarraceniaWilds@KerryMitchell@BlackAzizAnansi
In this case it’s justified. People attempted to give Mastodon a chance & many people were chased off by the culture, particularly Black people.the culture wants to finger wag at those that remain on Big Social, yet this place has many of the same issues & can be worse b/c you have ppl telling others how to use their own damn accounts.
@BlackAzizAnansi It’s hard everywhere, btw. Your best chances are Al Jazeera feeds (they’re there), Haaretz,..news org on the ground.
(Sorry for stating the obvious, o just went though all the social platforms and it’s chaos for on the ground)
@BlackAzizAnansi al jezeera is one of the best for reporting and indepth documentaries. They are one of the better ones that try to highlight both sides
@BlackAzizAnansi TBF, even pre-Musk, those on-the-ground accounts tended to be wildly mutually contradictory about the most basic questions of [what should in principle have been] objective fact, even after applying a "source is trusted by someone I definitely trust" filter.
@crashglasshouses Sorry reply guy, but maybe I'm just used to being able to read tweets from folks who are actually experiencing events live rather than just going to a blog?
@BlackAzizAnansi
I have yet to be less informed than I was on Twitter. I have so much news in my feed that I do not have time to read it all. Not once in a year have I had to go to another platform. Every news outlet gets funneled into this place in one way or another. I then go to the particular site to suck up the information. BTW on the ground accounts in a war are not relayed at the speed you think. We are in the age of misinformation and it is rampant with this 2 day old war.
I'm just trying to be the change I'd like to see in the world.
ActivityPub is a W3C standard that decentralizes a wide range of services. When more people just run their own, and their collectives grow, and reach... but it doesn't happen overnight.
And, it has to happen in the shadow of really big capitalist centralized trees, where people are just leaves who feed the billionaire trunks.
@BlackAzizAnansi For solid information, I would not l trust any platform at this point. #Harretz, #bbc, #cnn are publishing amazing pieces like this one from #CNN geolocating videos: Festivalgoers, children, soldiers: What we know about the Israeli hostages taken by #Hamas #israel
@BlackAzizAnansi yeah. I think Masto has a potential beyond anything Twitter had but it's definitely not achieving what that site did at its peak.
The relative difficulty of finding breaking news and the individuals who know what they're on about when it happens is a big part of that.
Personally I'd argue Twitter went off the boil a long time before Musk though, that was "just" out of the frying pan and into the fire. Part of why I'm not mad on BlueSky.
@BlackAzizAnansi Go on tooot.im and leftodon.social? It's partly in English, partly in Hebrew (and Hebrew machine-translates poorly). As a Hebrew speaker, I've seen fresher things here - mostly family-and-friends-of accounts - than when I check Twitter, which is perpetually behind Haaretz and other media feeds.
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