Musk you caused another scandal on Twitter by posting a picture of Stalin.

Result? Thousands of angry shares calling him an “idiot”.

But Musk is just using the same media tactics as Trump:

making an incendiary or incredibly stupid statement
which are then shared by 1000 of supporters
but also shared by, most importantly, 10’000 of his opponents

In the times when media is all about “clicks”, “enagements”, “shares”, “brand recognition”, it’s not Musk who is an idiot here.

We somehow forgot about the most efficient social protest strategy - ostracism. Just block toxic people and never see them again.

@kravietz
I've been thinking about this phenomena a lot and this is what I came up with: a lot of people are still on social media for attention, when they post photos of their arts and crafts, long thoughtful texts — it gets little attention, but when they start bashing someone famous, they start getting hundreds of likes, follows from people whom they didn't know before.
Social networks encourage such behaviour — but it's not about algorithms, it's how people work — they like gossip.

@kravietz
Even here, where there are no algorithms, my posts that get the most attention is me besmearing Google — not those 5000 character longreads. I'm not the attention-seeking type so I'm fine, but a lot of people — they go for what's easier 🤷

@m0xee

That’s apparently deeply embedded in human nature, but if we learned not to defecate in the middle of the street I guess we can also learn to control our compulsive negative reactions 😉

@kravietz @m0xee

I've more or less stopped using mastodon for in depth long form discussion.

Instead I discovered the joys of usenet!

Mastodon is still ok for short comments and discussions, if you have a nice home instance, but otherwise, it is not so deep I find.

@h4890 @kravietz @m0xee

It's pretty tough to say anything deep or nuanced in 500char.

Twitter launched before smartphones had widespread adoption, so the primary way users posted updates was over SMS. Twitter's char limit was not a design choice, but a technical limitation imposed upstream by the SMS architecture.

Mastodon on the other hand is arbitrarily designed to discourage meaningful discussion based completely on one man's esthetic preferences.

@nicholas

That “arbitrarily designed to discourage meaningful discussion” part was exactly my impression after first experiences with Mastodon, but then the character limit is configurable - even in Mastodon itself. My own instance runs on Pleroma with, I think, 5000 character limit (don’t remember, never reached it).

@h4890 @m0xee

@kravietz
Exactly! And it's not like blogging platforms didn't exist when Twitter was launched or lacked social features, e.g. LiveJournal. Strange, but at the time when blogging just came to be and when LiveJournal was still invite-only, it seemed to me that blogging is something low value, attention seeking and all that. But now that we have slided first into photos of feet, lunches and stupid faces (with Insta) and even silly dances (with TikTok) — I think that maybe blogging wasn't that bad 🤭 Hell, even microblogging isn't that bad.
If I wanted to put my serious face on in full, I'd probably start posting on my gemlog. I have a Gemini capsule and at times I make attempts to post something there, but it requires… maybe more discipline, I don't know.
Social networks offer a good compromise of being a source of information, even only giving you hints on where to find more info and… fun — some lighthearted interaction that might or might not encourage more meaningful discussion that might be continued in blogs.
And yes, character limit isn't hardcoded, it can be increased, on Pleroma it's 5000 — and I DID run into it a few times 🤣 I think it's possible to increase it up to 10000 in Pleroma, but I'm not sure other Fediverse software would support it — might make interaction problematic.
I have to admit, at times I find 500 character limit useful. When I'm not limited, I tend to wander of into adjacent topics, e.g. yesterday I was drafting a reply, but decided to go back in time to give some context and ended up transcending even the 5000 character limit, at some point it was 1700 words (!) long and I realized that I'm only half-way through with what I wanted to tell. So I just stopped — this isn't what interaction of social media should be, I'd better make an article out of it and just post a link on Fedi for those who might be interested. Of course it would take more effort to make it more interesting to others in addition to the one my reply was addressed to — but it would also make it more useful than just a reply on social media. I think it's worth it 🤷
@nicholas @h4890 @m0xee

@m0xEE@breloma.m0xee.net @kravietz @nicholas @m0xee@librem.one

I agree. Depends on the purpose. For lighter memes mastodon works great. For in depth information I would never use mastodon, but as you say, blogs, books, etc.

I hope usenet will improve now that google groups have disconnected. =)

@h4890
What good NNTP clients are there today?
TUI preferably, I suppose GUI doesn't make any sense even 🤔

@m0xEE @kravietz @nicholas

@m0xee@librem.one @m0xEE@breloma.m0xee.net @kravietz @nicholas

I use alpine (https://alpineapp.email/), although that is not the gold standard. I use alpine, because it is my email (TUI) client so I just find it convenient to not have to switch programs for news.

I tried http://www.tin.org/ as well which is faster than alpine, so it seemed quite nice as a dedicated news reader.

Alpine you can speed up with some tricks and you can script it to extend the functionality which I like.

But tin is probably a