DecaturNature @DecaturNature@social.cleverlibre.org

@ToddWalker Still, exactly what behaviors are you talking about?

@ToddWalker And what are you seeing? Does it involve prominent leftist organizations, or just random people claiming to be leftists? My guess is that some leftists are quietly building networks and seeing how things develop (and hosting instances). If you see people aggressively proselytizing or otherwise telling people off, they are probably just jerks.

@PhenomX6 Change my opinion just to spite people? That's for losers.

@micahflee Musk's pretense of supporting political moderation and 'free speech' must be clearly seen as a lie. Just a day or two after declaring 'amnesty' for edgy political accounts, Twitter has gone on a censorship binge against 'antifa' accounts. None of the accusations against Crimethinc rise to the level of what Trump did (spread lies to rally an angry mob with a history of violence on the steps of the Capitol and goaded them into disrupting Congress).
On the electoral side, Musk encourages people to vote for Republicans but claims that this is solely to avoid one-party dominance -- as if nothing changed when the Republican leadership (McCarthy etc) supported Trump's attempted coup by providing procedural cover and propaganda.

@Arne_radelt As far as I can tell, the anti-search arguments sum up to the fact that trolls/harassers use search engines to identify conversations and people who they don't like, and then disrupt those conversations or harass those people. That is a legitimate concern of course, and it may be an accurate description of how people have behaved on Mastodon in the past, but we need to consider what will likely happen if/when Mastodon becomes more popular.

For references, here's a thread describing why the search engine was taken offline:
https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/109311187050279476

Here's some comments from the lead developer:
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/4947733

If you remember a week or two back, someone set up a server to provide full text searches for Mastodon, but soon took it down after getting feedback that it was rude to provide this service (https://fedsearch.io/). However, I think he was doing us a great service by showing us what is technically possible. That specific server may have come down, but his sense of propriety will not stop others from setting up their own, private versions of the servers. With the current growth of Mastodon, we can be sure that similar search servers will be created by many parties for their own use -- law enforcement, copyright enforcement, background checks, journalism, advertising, etc. For the time being, it may be beyond the capabilities of the random Internet troll or fascist club (as long as they don't have support from more powerful terrorists), but before long the capability to set up a search engine will probably be in the hands of your average script kiddie. While these capabilities develop, your average Mastodon user will blithely use the service as though general search capabilities do not exist, exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. What's more, if any newsworthy content appears on the Mastodon network, all of the above people will have access to that information before the rest of us do. This doesn't sound like a good arrangement to me.

Back in the old days, the only ways we could misinformation was either through mass media or by chain emails. But by golly, we still managed to invade Iraq.

As a general rule, when you criticize the terminology used by someone, it is your responsibility to provide better terminology. Examples:
"[system] is not a platform, it is a ___".
"[word] is not a slur, it is a ___"
It's fine to argue that a word is being used too broadly, but you can't simply insist that people abandon having any word for the concept they are talking about.