Mastodon drama tends to have another level of hysteria to it caused by the amount “context collapse” the platform creates. There’s no search or quoting posts or anything that can really “go viral” … so news only spreads through rumours and “chinese whispers”. Which means once some drama goes viral, any one conversation about it is mostly held in the dark, with people mostly speculating based off of some rumour they heard that has gone through who knows how many cycles of whispers, but because of the uncertainty, and the additional gatekeeping culture of outing “the bad people”, a rather elevated energy quickly ensues where people desperately want to know what’s going on, sometimes because their instance is implicated which makes it pretty personal, and want something (ie drama) to happen all to the point of convincing themselves that they do know what happened and what needs to be done.

Behind all of that is the stark reality of the context collapse which means that anyone who actually wants to know what’s happening will find it strikingly or prohibitively difficult to actually find out, which often gets to the point that people will think they saw the evidence and truly know but will disagree or not actually have the evidence they think they do.

The more I see of it, and hear of the issues BIPOC people have had for similar-ish reasons, the more I think mastodon’s design of “safety” and “anti-virality” through limited feature sets is actually an awkward middle ground rather than a good solution.