On Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 8:46 AM Andrew Diller via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I'm personally fascinated by all the new revelations and misgivings about twitter _all of a sudden_. All of a sudden twitter is some horrible thing that will silence people - it's been doing that for years. If anything there will be less silence.
Here’s why *I’m* worried about the Twitter acquisition, at least: Simply existing as a trans person on the internet invites unprompted harassment. Changes to Twitter’s content moderation policies in recent years have improved the experience for us and other marginalized groups. If Musk undoes these changes and more, it will almost certainly enable more harassment and drive people off the site... thereby enabling the free speech of bigots but silencing their targets. Now, I've also used Mastodon for most of its existence, and I just don't think it's very good. It has most of the issues of Twitter, but with extra ones piled on top such as a rather small user base, yet terrible discoverability. As others have mentioned, the federated timeline is extremely noisy, and as such your experience is almost entirely dependent on which instance you join. I think forums and mailing lists, both of which VCF already has, are much better formats for an organization like this one. So I would not recommend a Mastodon instance. Deborah