• LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈@c.im
    0·
    2 years ago

    @mathias @bgtlover @AskPippa @raccoon Assuming there is a single reason why Twitter failed is naive at best and self-serving at worst. And saying “this was worse than that” is an effort in futility.

    Each community will have different experiences in what part of Twitter made it worse. Having been on Twitter since 2007 I will say categorically that QTs are and were used to harass and attack other people. Those who deny it, generally deny it because they want QT. In fact, most deny it because they want their Twitter and they will insist that they get it and screw the people who are already here. People who actually came here because this place was different.

    And I find it particularly maddening given the fact that people who use Frendica and other services that have QT continue to insist that the world needs QT. If the world really needed it, Frendica would be experiencing massive growth and it is not.

    Consent. We are built on consent. If I want to see a man’s dangly bits, I can. I can consent by opening a CW. If, for some bizarre reason I want to see your Wordle, I can. If I want a safe place for queers, I can find it here.

    To date, nobody has offered a QT that will give me the right to consent to you breaking my thread so you can make a point; consent to include my posts in your thread when you QT; consent to you using my work; consent; consent. How many people have to object? How many of us who are queer or disabled or trans or a furry have to worry again about whether our true selves need protecting?

    • Jupiter Rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu
      0·
      2 years ago

      @LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈

      And I find it particularly maddening given the fact that people who use Frendica and other services that have QT continue to insist that the world needs QT.

      As you can see here, at least if you open this post of mine at its source, quotes can serve a useful purpose. Like on forums, they make it possible to directly reply to certain parts of a post.

      Anyways, those who have found Mastodon to be a safe haven from Twitter-style harassment and strongly oppose quotes have yet to give a concise declaration on their demands as to what should be done about quotes being an available feature on other projects, and about the possibility of using the quote feature on a non-Mastodon, but ActivityPub-supporting instance to quote Mastodon toots and have said quote appear on Mastodon timelines.

      I mean, I’ve done just that. I’m on Hubzilla. Hubzilla even only supports ActivityPub through an optional per-channel app. And yet, I was able to quote your Mastodon toot. And you can see my post with quotes of your toot on your Mastodon timeline. Nothing could stop me from doing this.

      But especially the LGBTQIA+ community which fled from the harassment on Twitter to Mastodon has yet to answer this question: What, if anything, should be done about this? Should everything that isn’t Mastodon, including Friendica which has quotes six years before Mastodon was launched, be forced to remove the quote feature even for internal use once and for all? Should they be forced to defederate from Mastodon? Should Mastodon in turn deliberately be forced to become incompatible with everything else (which will not work against multi-protocol platforms like Friendica and Hubzilla)?

      Where are the LGBTQIA+ activists? Why don’t they take a stand? Where is their public “quotes are harassment” campaign against Pleroma, Akkoma, MissKey, CalcKey, FoundKey, Socialhome, GoToSocial, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) etc. etc., openly declaring all these projects homophobic and transphobic for holding on to their quote features?

      Instead, most of them still do as if the Fediverse was only Mastodon. They seem to try to convince themselves that all those projects which both support quotes and federate with Mastodon don’t exist, if they know that these projects exist, that is. I don’t know what they do if someone comes and tries to tell them about the world outside Mastodon. Do they immediately block these people? Do they proverbially cover their ears and chant?

      If the world really needed it, Frendica would be experiencing massive growth and it is not.

      That isn’t because the world needs something as frugal as Mastodon more than something as elaborate as Friendica.

      That is purely because the world doesn’t know that Friendica exists, and it never knew. People don’t migrate by the millions to an online project of which they don’t know that it exists. Otherwise, Friendica could have exploded as early as July 2010, and Diaspora*, which at the same time was developed as the free, decentralised, distributed Facebook killer and backed by several $100,000 in crowdfunding, would have been stillborn or never released in the first place.

      From late October to early December 2022, some seven or eight million Twitter users were channeled not into the Fediverse, but directly to Mastodon, often even to one specific Mastodon instance to spare them from having to choose one. None of them was told that there’s more to the Fediverse than Mastodon.

      They could easily spend November, December, January, February and March “knowing” that the Fediverse is only Mastodon and not knowing about any of the alternatives. I’m pretty certain that being initially given the choice between Mastodon and Akkoma, every other one of them would have picked Akkoma just like Linus Torvalds did.

      Why didn’t they pick Akkoma? Or Friendica? Because they didn’t know that Akkoma or Friendica exists, because nobody told them, because all they were ever told about was one Mastodon instance. They could easily spend three months not even noticing that Mastodon itself is decentral and has instances.

      And when they finally learned about there being other stuff on the Fediverse than Mastodon after four months, it was already too late. Moving from Mastodon to another project is too much of a hassle and often not worth it, also because you can neither take your toots nor those who follow you nor your uploaded media with you.

      Oh, and by the way: Just a few weeks ago, MissKey experienced an enormous wave of new users in Japan who went from Twitter straight to MissKey without any stopover on Mastodon. And MissKey has quotes, too.

      • LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈@c.im
        0·
        2 years ago

        @jupiter_rowland I keep hearing that it’s hard to move. But I did it. It took me 3 hours and it only took that long because I wanted to separate my following to three different services. One was Pixelfed and the other was Frendica. Perhaps it did not take me so long because I’m not as invested in my own posts as others appear to be. So this, “it’s hard” excuse feels a little weak to me.

        I do not understand why it is so hard for people who communicate in the world of defederation to understand that not all tools using the fediverse need be the same. You really need to get over it. Tumblr is not going to have the same tools as Masto or Frendica and you aren’t going to require that they do. Every company that uses ActivityPub will bring different features and that’s how it should be. So why must everything be the same here?

        Getting every member of the queer and trans communities to agree on any one thing is like asking all Democrats to agree on any one thing. And I think you, Jupiter, are smart enough to know that. So let me ask you, which one do you want? Peter Thiel or me? George Santos or Rachel Maddow? The fact that people were harassed is a truth. The fact that you do not know that truth speaks to your lack of knowledge, not to the veracity or the historical fact. So let me ask you a question: how many? How many people have to come forward with their moment on Twitter when they were harassed and brought to tears. How many people need to be deliberately dead named or doxxed. How many is enough for you?

          • LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈@c.im
            0·
            2 years ago

            @jo @jupiter_rowland I’m happy for you. I certainly celebrate those who have had that luxury. I guess that the rest of us should stop “panicking” that the assholes who did these things will come to the fediverse and do the same thing? We have consistency of application of rules across instances, right? Or perhaps we should be less hysterical in our concerns that we might get stuck on a queer instance where you aren’t allowed to discuss certain games. I mean, I hear it’s so damn hard to move from one place to another. I cannot believe you actually used panic to denigrate people who give a shit. What an entitled comment.

            • Kevin Davidson@mas.to
              0·
              2 years ago

              @LucyWildboots @jo @jupiter_rowland There are strong feelings on both sides of this, which is going to result in emotive language.
              I’ve definitely seen celebrities dunking on small accounts and driving them off Twitter. But also, I use QT myself - mostly to add context or to refer back to my own previous posts.

              • Kevin Davidson@mas.to
                0·
                2 years ago

                @LucyWildboots @jo @jupiter_rowland My confirmation bias means I believe all the studies saying it’s not the tool that causes harassment, as people intent on harassing will use any method available, including simple replies, to cause harm. The fix is cultural, not technical, although speed bumps and guide rails probably help to nudge behaviour away from unwanted and towards more positive community behaviour. Maybe.

                • LucyWildboots 🏳️‍🌈@c.im
                  0·
                  2 years ago

                  @MetalSamurai @jo @jupiter_rowland

                  ‘It’s not the gun that kills people. It’s people using the guns who kill people?’

                  Am I the only one old enough to remember that canard from the NRA in America? And America, because it loves its guns, buys into it. So we create laws that nudge gun rights this way and that without ever really getting anywhere. And when something bad happens we wring our hands and offer thoughts and prayers. And Europe, with it’s own bloody past, looks on condescendingly and tsks.

                  ‘QTs don’t hurt people. People using QTs hurt people.’

                  So how many QTs have to hurt someone before we admit they can be used as weapons of verbal war and treat them accordingly and where are the ‘tskers’?

                  Note: This is an analogy for those who don’t recognize them as such. This is not a position one way or another on guns or gun control.