Thread by @Kavaeric

I don't want to talk about Mastodon because I felt like I said my piece, but everything under the sun for the past week or so has seemingly tried to compel me to talk about it

What is immensely frustrating is that the stuff I tried to be more sympathetic and excuse as just personal preference in my original piece ended up happening anyway in more or less the worst possible way, and now I feel annoyed at myself for not being more assertive originally

I think I've mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again:

If you have even a remote interest in online platform development, ESPECIALLY when developing to take on an entrenched competitor, @FoldableHuman's essay on Vidme is a must-watch

The video touches on all sorts of things like the specifics of why YouTube is a bin fire and why online platforms aren't your friends, but I want to focus in specifically on his autopsy of why Vidme was not compelling from the start

In the essay, Olson cites Vidme's lack of feature identity as the core reason why it never caught on. Vidme does have unique features, like more monetisation tools and a meta category, but the platform is by and large a YouTube clone.

If what you present is just a clone, it won't readily attract people off of the entrenched competition, but more importantly, the systems in place ended up duplicating the same social outcomes and dynamics that you were competing with in the first place.

Put another way, Vidme being a by-and-large duplicate of YouTube meant that YouTube's problems and social dynamic ended up being duplicated as well.

It's the same problems, just somewhere else.

I bring this up because a large number of people have approached me and defended Mastodon, claiming that the issues we've been seeing over the past while are the result of a few isolated individuals and bad apples, and not a systemic problem.

This core failure to view Masto's problems as being systemic appears to stem largely from the belief that Mastodon is, in fact, a completely different platform that bears no resemblance to Twitter.

Which, I've come to realise, is just a comical statement.

Sure, you get cws and your character limit is a bit higher and you got that whole instance/fedi thing going on.

But, by and large, Mastodon shares 95% of its DNA with Twitter, and that should not come as a surprise.

There are posts with strict length limits, there's a timeline where you choose who you follow, there's likes and retweets, and there are locked accounts, and the media posting structure is identical.

There is of course the instance system, but numerous Masto people have repeatedly reminded me of how federation works and so everyone from any instance can talk to anyone anyway so like it's basically the same social sphere as on Twitter.

If you are a leftist or even have any understanding of sociology, you must understand that the behaviour of people is largely a product not of their individual character, but of the system you place them in, and consequently what they are incentivised to because of that system.

If your platform, by and large, is mostly just Twitter but with different branding and with different white techbros at the helm,

then why are you surprised that the social paradigm of Twitter ended up getting duplicated there?

I am somehow meant to believe that the same problems of people being jumped on based on points and not a comprehensive understanding of a situation or conflict, and the empty gestures made to POC made by those at the top is the result of a few bad apples who "don't get it"

I am expected to accept that the issues in these white techbros' platforms does not stem from systemic problems, which they sometimes have the gall to lecture me about, and rather just so happen to be the fault of Twitter refugee outsiders who aren't playing the game right

I am assumed to give credence to the testimony these white techbros give, that it's "not actually that bad and it's just some isolated circles" despite every POC who fled telling me that they were not being listened to and that their struggles to acclimate were being dismissed

Ultimately I realise that Masto is largely what it appeared as: a Twitter clone that holistically does not do a lot to differentiate itself, helmed by white techbros to create a space that ended up favouring those who were white techbros themselves

"A user who made an honest mistake and apologised was victimised, driven off, harassed, and banned, having their indigenous Mexican identity erased to justify the witch hunting" sounds like a Twitter problem, but today I learned it was a Masto problem as well.

Sure, fine, maybe it's another set of bad apples. A whole bunch. A crate. Somehow an entire number of instances' staff were just miraculously filled with bad apples. Not your problem. Just more drama. They were simply Twitter people who didn't get it and they don't belong here.

You don't have to listen to me. You can just accept the jank. I certainly am stuck here on hellsite for what can be described as masochistic reasoning.

But don't fool yourself into thinking what you have is something that's really that different or it's going to revolutionise online everything, and I'm getting very tired of you pretending that it is.

Different branding, different name, but the same shit, same problems, same dogpiling, same toxic white techbro crap.

To paraphrase Olson, you haven't built a Twitter competitor, you just built a Twitter clone, and you're ultimately dooming yourself to the same mistakes.