It is pretty amazing that verification, a security feature meant to protect users against the malicious impersonation of well-known accounts, is behind Twitter burning and crashing into the ground, for the “lulz” as Musk tweeted.
In a sense it’s lucky that the “verified” accounts have been used for lampooning and parody mainly. Someone could’ve impersonated the US president in order to start a war with Russia and China instead.
Account verification may end up being a problem for the much quieter, but rapidly growing Mastodon network although I suspect its volunteer admins would hit the delete buttons on their virtual servers if the situation got to that stage.
The birdsite migration is gathering pace with plenty of lovely people I interact with on Twitter having opened Mastodon accounts.
Mastodon isn't the same as Twitter though; far from it.
It's not the tech. Don't believe people who say you need a post-grad degree in Linux administration to be on Mastodon; setting up an account and posting are both easy.
But, social media posting needs content moderation, no matter what free speech absolutists like Musk, who has in fact very thin skin and suspends accounts that offend him, claim.
Content moderation is very difficult. The always straight-talking journalist Quinn Norton pointed to the US and UK, with their shared language and culture as an example.
Norton noted that in the UK "to smoke a fag" means to have a cigarette. In the US, it means to shoot a gay man.
Here, Twitter mostly ignores nuances and errs on the side of say-what-you-like until users go berserk and moderators have to step in and slap them down.
Mastodon in comparison is the opposite, with a complex, multi-layer moderation system designed to shield users from abuse from the get-go.
This includes acceptable use policies (AUPs) that admins can tailor to their liking, and which vary from site to site. It follows from that that it really does matter which server you connect to. Before setting up an account and posting to a particular Mastodon instance, read its AUP carefully to see if the rules fit your views. Don't sweat if you get it wrong though. You can move yourself and your users to another instance.
Most Mastodonts take safety very seriously and they post screeds of helpful advice on what to say and how to communicate it. So much so you soon wish there was a default "content warning" or CW to filter it out.
The CWs form another layer of moderation, allowing users to filter out content they don't want to see like food, politics and Twitter news.
Twitter has similar filtering to CWs that can be a useful feature, although it's hard to second-guess when to use it.
Mastodon servers can have different CW policies. What's required on one server might not be needed on another and it can cause grouchiness if you fail to label your "toots" (a term the Mastodon developer Eugen Rochko now regrets, for obvious reasons) correctly.
Searching toots using text terms is limited too on Mastodon, again for safety reasons. If you’re a Nazi searching for “Jews” to find users to stalk and harass, well, it’s a lot harder to do that on Mastodon.
If on the other hand you want content to be found by others, use #hashtags with terms that Mastodon search engines can find. It kind of works, but Twitter's search function is much more comprehensive.
Another content moderation feature allows admins and users to block Mastodon instances they don't agree with. This stops content from the blocked sites from appearing in the federated timeline on the server you connect to.
It's a double-edged sword that for example prevents troll Mastodon farms from poisoning the discourse, but could also hide content you may wish to see.
Business accounts could also be disallowed on some instances that wish to stay clear of corporate influence and communications. Corporates, media and governments are of course free to set up their own Mastodons, which other admins can then allow on their federated timelines or block.
You might want to share a fun or interesting "toot" elsewhere, or report on it as a journalist, but some servers ban quoting of content despite it being published on a public forum on the Internet.
Anyone who doesn't heed that rule could be blocked.
If the above seems over the top, you only need to look at the suspended and banned servers on some of the New Zealand Mastodon instances to appreciate why content moderation is a must.
I'm not totally sure that I've got all attempts at engineering out unkindness right, but they feel like spontaneity killers that suck the fun out of posting as you worry about offending others.
Ah yes; I think we’ll miss Twitter, the warts and all hellscape that it is.
