Eubie Drew (QOTO 🦣) @EubieDrew@social.cleverlibre.org

So I've been using Mastodon as a Twitter replacement for almost a week now, and I'm... not optimistic. I want to be, but I'm not. So I'm going to <s>Toot</s> Post my thoughts here so that if I'm wrong (and I hope I am) folks can Boost me to dunk about this bad prediction for years to come.

Alsjeblieft. Nigieriaanse dwerggeitjes.

This means NOT invalidating other people’s experiences, especially Black folk, by comparing it to your experiences even as a marginalised person.

It is so exhausting to constantly have your lived experience being questioned all the damn time.

Don’t assume that people don’t know how Fedi works or that they not trying hard enough to find safe spaces aka better instances.

We shouldn’t need to find “safe spaces” just to exist and be ourselves and not experience abuse.

Think about for a second and how fucked up it is.

I boosted a toot earlier with said we can acknowledge that this is better than the birdsite and yet it’s not enough.

I think that’s exactly where I’m at right now.

Yes, I like this space soooo much more. I feel freer, like I don’t have to constantly stifle my voice for fear of being harassed or trolled for just being who I am.

Yet so many people *are* being abused & harassed for exactly those things on other instances.

I’ve been feeling very conflicted about this bc I don’t want to make it out to be a panacea. It’s not.

We still have so much work to do to make it a better experience for everyone.

We can do that by appreciating the good *while* constantly working to make the bad better.

I do like it here on Mastodon, but the huge influx of people from Twitter means there are far fewer image descriptions than from even a couple of weeks ago. I’d love to tell every one of them about this, but quite frankly there are so many I don’t have the patience. I’d dearly love it if apps could block posts unless an image description was added to every photo, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for. I’m feeling really excluded from so many conversations. It’s getting as bad as Twitter.

@freemo regarding the character limit on #qoto I think it must be WAY MUCH lower. May I ask about his decision of yours? I believe if someone is willing to publish a useful and/or interesting post which is more than 2-3 paragraphs, it must be in a blog and not here. You can host a separate Writefreely instance for that purpose. For myself, if something is useful and long enough, I would write a blog post where it's very easy to find for myself and the others. Also Writefreely does the SEO very good so people could find my useful content easily using search engines.

#mastodon_character_limit

One thing I’m learning is that community leadership (aka good moderation) is so rare, when I talk about it, some people literally have no idea what I’m talking about because they’ve never experienced it. And that’s pretty sad.

Amazing how one dedicated schmuck can ruin your experience of an entire social network.

Which is why “you can just block people” is not sufficient. It’s like trying to be a gardener with only pesticides.

I really need to take the time to write more about this. The rise and fall of blogging as a lot to teach the fediverse, and I was deeply involved with that (I worked for Blogger and Technorati). I sincerely want to see the fediverse succeed, because we’ve tried the alternative and we all know it sucks.