CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@taylorlorenz

Twitter was like being stuck on a cable news panel of people shouting at each other. Every interaction was fraught and involved people obsessed with correcting or reinforcing each other's opinions.

Mastodon is like a coffee break at a conference. Like walking through a constant stream of interesting conversations that I can drift in and out of without fuss or pressure.

I don't have to surf an emotional high as I scroll. People here read posts all the way through and engage intellectually and emotionally instead of only emotionally.

And I curate my timeline, so I can manage how much emotional exhaustion I'm willing to incur and I mostly don't get random crap that infuriates me or is designed to upset me.

There are still microbloggers, and there are moderation problems, but Mastodon doesn't track "influence" so I don't get many influencers in my feed.

It's restful.

@WolvericCatkin @weezmgk I crashed just after I found out my instance was shutting down, and by the time I was well enough to come back it was gone and I couldn't migrate anything. Thanks, #LongCovid.

@budududuroiu @mike @firefoxwebdevs It's not about being able to turn off the features. It's about having to download and store them and give implicit permission to have them on your computer in the first place.

It's like someone saying "Hey, I mailed you that stack of books you want, but people told us they wanted more pictures so we made illegal copies of artworks and bound them in. The art pages come with preset double-sided tape on them so it's easy for you to stick the art pages together and not see them if you don't want. No harm, no foul, right?"

The harm isn't in the viewing (or not viewing), it's in the implied consent to the unethical behavior that made the viewing possible, and in asking customers to fix it after the fact.

@mike @firefoxwebdevs This is precisely where I get confused.

The web is an enormously large sea of connected dynamic content.

Why does the interface to that sea of content need to provide AI? Shouldn't the user use the interface to -find- AI in the sea of content?

For example, instead of the browser providing translation services, people who want translation services can go to their content page of choice to obtain them.

Make "default translator" a setting and let the user choose where to get it.

People who want AI-generated slop can go to their AI-generating slop provider of choice.

Why is it necessary to put it in the interface instead of leaving it in the sea?

This feels like Netscape Navigator "we must have an integrated email client" all over again.