Post #3229483

@Deglassco@mastodon.social @notafurry@hulvr.com And I think that it’s that first paragraph for me. I’m not at a point where *I* can make a judgment call for myself or in general. And the fact that the influx of people broke the workarounds also adds to how new people are experiencing the issues that those who’ve been around a while tried to fix is probably just making the situation worse across the board. I’ve seen people fall into a few general categories. “I love it! Everyone is so much better here”: nothing is perfect and this is a bit reductive since the same trolls are also migrating. “I hate it! It’s not Twitter!”: Again reductive. It is, as you pointed out, specifically designed NOT to be Twitter. “It has problems but…”: and this is where I fall in, I guess (?) - observations about the platform and hopes to make it more inclusive/safer. “It’s not really different from anywhere else because people are trash anyhow but now we don’t have a consistent way to create protections”: This is the one that’s concerning. I’ve been seeing a lot of the abusive behavior by individuals against friends, and it becomes the burden of the individual on some level - primarily because exponential growth and adoption. For *me*, I feel I want to sit with things, pay attention to the conversations from different groups of users, and take my time to make an informed decision. I’d say I fall into the third category. Any group of people is going to have problems and harassment - some people are definitely trash. On the other hand, I’d like to see/hope that there could become an overarching acceptable behavior/CoC - the idea of a social contract if you will - that shakes out in the end. My main concern is that with the rapid adoption, what’s going to happen is that the internalized biases we have will be overlooked by too many people across the diversified space. With no centralized location, I worry that society is going to lose that focused spotlight that we’ve gained. For example, I don’t think that the decentralized nature of Mastodon would have created the same urgency and attention around Black Lives Matter that Twitter was able to generate. That’s totally intended based on the model’s goals of not giving so much power to one entity or set of beliefs, and I understand/accept it. However, the massive influx of new people who relied on that structure to affect change are losing something very powerful that’s enabled them to have their voices heard. Now that’s gone. I think there’s a sense of loss that comes with that. I think people are processing that. I think it feels like a step backward because they have to rebuild that community. Even if you look at the hashtags, people within historically excluded communities don’t have a consensus yet around *how* to connect here, and that’s a huge loss - emotionally, socially, and politically.