Oh definitely Mastodon. I’m having a blast over there, tons of fun people. Plus, the fact you can follow hashtags makes it super, super easy to populate your timeline with interesting content and then if it’s too much, you can pick a few people you like who are interested in that topic and just start following them instead, which gradually translates into a very organic feeling timeline without a long period of crickets while you look for friends and make new friends.
From what I’m hearing doomscrolling is quite difficult to achieve on mastodon. People are mostly horribly nice and supportive and stuff. And there’s no cool vampire algorithm exploiting heightened emotions. But where there’s a will, there’s a way! You can do it. Choose your doom-y hashtags carefully, my friend! We believe in you.
How is mastodon condescending? is this something just to fill that “make something up about a trending topic” quota.
I agree with you. But I think those are the words used by the haters. The artist may have done their homework. The onboarding procedure, the concept of instances, etc., is different or cumbersome, or difficult, whatever. So, if you have trouble figuring it out and you go looking for help you sometimes find these threads or posts/videos saying:
“It is SOOO easy. Just choose an instance. It’s like [insert analogy here], get it? Good! Now have fun and be kind and polite 😸”[1]
And some would use the strongest word possible to describe the situation: condescending.
Personally, I didn’t find that part condescending. And being told to add alt-text isn’t a problem. And using CW for lots of different things isn’t a problem either. I have had one confusing interaction on Mastodon where someone blocked me after accusing me of some offense — a “lost in translation” situation where a non-native speaker misinterpreted what I was saying and before I could explain to them what I was saying, I was blocked… but that can happen on any social network.
not an actual quote ↩︎
Ye best start believin’ in fediverses, Miss Turner. Yer in one.
The condescension in that makes it clear that the smug social network is whichever one the author happens to use.
You can do anything there, anything at all. The only limit is yourself.