I'm converting my mastodon critiques into a word document that I will likely use to post mastodon local versions of those large threads about mastodon that I've made on twitter.

Having said that, I'm not really "anti-mastodon," as much as I am trying to point out that the fediverse does not have the tools to support the ways that marginalized groups built community on the bird site.

And it really comes down to affordances of the platforms.

By affordances, I mean in the STS sense which is parallel to the husserlian sense as enabling a human agent to extend themselves through an environment.

This bit is important because I understand digital environments, like social media, in the truest sense of the word "environment." And this is where the Deweyan comes out: organisms, communities, cultures exist by means of an environment, through transaction with it.

This is important for my critique of mastodon.

(This is also important for my transactional theory of social media, coming soon whenever the fuck I clear this current slate of papers.)

When I say that a community emerges by means of the environment, I do not mean that the community structures form in response to the environment. I mean that the communities, and the organisms within them, incorporate the environment into themselves to maintain their patterns of action.

This is also true of social media as an environment. The affordances of a platform are what enable communities for form by means of how they enable transactions among members.

This gets me to the affordances that are crucial to the formation of things like Black Twitter, like Disability Twitter: hashtags and quote tweets.

Now, some of this has been overcome through the addition of the ability to follow a hashtag, which itself is a recent invention. Hashtags, as Andre Brock notes, enable users to become identified with a conversation. They allow the conversation to take shape by means of the environment.

They do not do this alone, however.