I gave up on Twitter in Nov 2017 due to their complete inaction around
online abuse, particularly that of women. I setup a Mastodon account at
that time and didn’t use it much initially but ramped up activity recently.
Despite all the articles written recently about how Mastodon is the nice
anti-Twitter, the sad reality is that asshole behaviour has nothing to do
with the tech or the tools, it has to do with people being assholes.
And so I watched as the pious asshole mob last week piled on to Wil Wheaton
shortly after he started using Mastodon regularly. What I saw made me
realise that the whole concept of Twitter-style sites is completely
ridiculous in a self-justifying asshole-dominated world. How were we ever
so naive to think that anyone being able to message anything to anyone else
publicly online would end well?
Wil’s blogpost on it: The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. His experience of early Twitter was identical to my own. And then the assholes arrived, as they always do.
A few months ago I put together a spec and a plan for a friendly social network. Then I got some sense and deleted it all.
So that’s me done I think. Some blogging, photo sharing and private group messaging only for the foreseeable future.