still thinking about the degree to which old habits of online protest carried over from the corporate sites cease to function as they did when transplanted here, in an environment designed to limit visibility and impose friction.
@hugo i do feel this too: there isn’t really a sense of mobilising here. I mean, i have lost all naive optimism about social media as tools for counter-hegemonic movement buikding i i used to have anyway, but it still feels that Mastodon in particular really is designed not to work for that. Or maybe i just joined the wrong Instance… I don’t know.
@pvonhellermannn no, I don't think you did. mastodon was intentionally designed to be anti-viral. a lot of design choices to create friction on sharing, citation, searching, visibility and so on.
@hugo yes. Which is all very good and so on but it does make jt feel, well, disempowering and, well, a bit boring here. Even when you know that the feelings of empowerment and excitement you had before were an illusion. Or, put differently: when i first switched it felt like leaving a noisy, drunk party with lots of “it”people for a sober seminar discussion. Which was nice! But a year in I kind of wouldn’t mind the occasional party 😊
@pvonhellermannn I enjoy this space partly as a kind of methadone, a sort of halfway house to ease me out of the unceasing noise and fury of the twitter vortex. but yeah, I am so much less informed about... everything now than I was a year ago. there is an undeniable relief in this, but also quite a lot of ambivalence :/
@pvonhellermannn PS. obviously I'd rather you hang out here, but if you miss the faster vvibe and visibility of a centralized site I do have a few bluesky codes? if you want to dip your toes there.
@hugo oh thank you! I think for now it’s better to stick to the methadone (great analogy), otherwise i am in danger of complete relapse, but might come back to you on that offer one day 😊
But yes, very much agree about missing news. I used to find the Guardian mostly reported things i knew already, a day or two later, now i really read it again and other papers as i know nothing otherwise. Which may be a good thing
@inquiline@hugo not barging in! Very interesting to hear all this from you - that you have reached a similar point. Agree very much about missing constituencies. I really loved the global connections Twitter enabled you to forge, especially, for me, with Nigeria - it helped me discover a whole new, really exciting side that I didn’t know at all from my time there (always in rural places). #EndSars#Obidient etc. All that is just not flourishing here
The forms of movement building and viral protest amplification in the Fediverse quite likely are and will be different to those of surveillance-capitalism social media. For protest/event organisation, the Fediverse has #Mobilizon [1]. Current monthly usage is about 100 instances, 30k users, 300k posts [2].
#Lemmy and #Kbin forums could also play another complementary role.
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