I remember when I first discovered Reddit back in 2010, and spent hours and hours basically living there reading things constantly. I also remember when I started wanting to find places to share my work as an author, and then suddenly finding out that largely, Reddit as a whole, is extremely hostile to people who want to share what they do, unless they’re already famous. In order to share your work as an independent artist, writer, or musician on Reddit, your work needs to already be known by the masses. Else you will be harassed, you will be moderated, deleted, and banned.
And you might think, “This is really only an attitude central to Reddit, and nowhere else.” And for thinking that, you’d be wrong. In the years since, this kind of mindset has taken over spaces all over social media. One of the biggest spaces this thinking has infected, is, unfortunately, Mastodon.
Identifying details blotted out because this person doesn’t deserve any more attention from myself, or people who read what I write.
In the post I did here yesterday, I was kind of going on about this conundrum I have where: I really like Mastodon, but I find it really hard to reconcile going all-in with the platform. Because you run into people like this. People who don’t use the internet to share creative work, who aren’t trying to build a career out of things they enjoy doing. Who don’t use social media, partially, to share what they do.
They’re here to post, fabricate uncharitable ideas about strangers in their own minds, and then log off.
In fact, there are a minority of people across the fediverse, like this person, who believe it to be some sort of capitalist, consumerist, corpo crime to engage in the act of … showing other people things you’re doing, or making. To the point where you’re thought of as no better than people who post in a disingenuous fashion in order to get you to engage (see: engagement farming). Which, couldn’t be further from the truth.
I brought up Reddit in the beginning of this post, because this is where this type of behavior and mindset sort of comes from. An arena of people who don’t want to know anything about you, or what you do, unless you’re already at the top of the charts, already a celebrated artist, already an A-list author with millions of fans.
It’s the least counter-culture way to look at things, especially if you’re on a platform that is in itself, counter-culture. To believe that all the creative work and entertainment that’s worth a damn are things the media tells you to like, and anyone using social media to share new things, that others might potentially like, is bad, and evil, and click-farming, parasitic behavior.
Someone on Threads was talking to me about all of this, and mentioned to me, they’ve probably muted, blocked, and suspended more people on Mastodon than they have on other platforms. And thinking about it, the same is true for me.
With an open source platform, run by the people, for the people, inevitably you’ll run into people who are unsavory, unpleasant, and toxic, even. And that’s just an unfortunate fact. But maybe that’s the trade-off. You can be on Threads and be hit with hundreds of pornbot follows in a month, or join Mastodon, curate your feed, and sometimes be told that you’re corporate scum for creating things that you enjoy.
And, whenever I talk about these points and experiences, some people assume that I’m brand new to Mastodon, and that’s why I talk about this stuff. But I definitely ain’t. Like I said before, I’ve been dabbling in the federated network since 2017. I’ve run my own GNU Social instance, and multiple Mastodon instances.
The only thing keeping me from throwing corporate social media in the garbage, is the fact that I don’t like posting things on Mastodon, and running the risk of being told that I’m scum for making things, wanting to share them, and maybe build some kind of following.
But maybe I just need to be even more militant about suspending people. I really don’t know.
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