Post #3229502

@Deglassco@mastodon.social @rozz2022@mastodon.lol Try thinking about it this way. I get the difference now. On Twitter, you can get people to use a hashtag so that you can publicly broadcast a message by playing the algorithm. That’s the purpose of that platform. You say something and it goes out everywhere. This brings in viewers of that message. You see “trending” on there, and the algorithm gives power to it. This is good and bad. You may get new people who agree with you. You also get trolls. It’s totally public. The thing is- Mastodon is a fundamentally different model. So let’s think about it this way. On Twitter, you might have BlackTwitter, ComicsTwitter, and DisabilityTwitter. But what you don’t have is BlackComicsDisabilityTwtitter. These large aggregated groups on the public, centralized platform often lack intersectionality. Now, on Mastodon you can have super detailed smaller groups that take these into account. You could have a JamaicanMarvelBlind instance and a HarlemSupermanFibromyalgia instance. The Local feed would be the smaller group. The Federated feed would be the aggregate of all these different groups/identities/interests talking to each other. Using hashtags, you can find other people for your personal feed and share conversations. Now- instead of federating with these huge instances that can’t easily regulate their people, you defederate from them. Why? Because it’s not about broadcasting to a huge audience. It’s the opposite. It’s about protecting your community and growing it as a grassroots community to build trust. It’s this last paragraph that I think us new people need to consider more. Since “reach” and “broadcasting” aren’t the purpose of Mastodon, staying on these larger instances where racists, homophobes, ableists, anti-Semites, etc can hide easily is the problem. We should be focusing on finding the server for our Local feed that gives us the community we feel represents us. And that includes looking for one that protects us from the larger servers *as well as* the known “bad” servers. And THIS is the fundamental difference between how Mastodon works - and is *intended* to work - when compared to what we’re *used* to using in centralized platforms. It’s less about “large servers excluding marginalized groups” and more about historically excluded groups banding together to exclude these large servers.