+ Comfortable and uncomfortable truths

Let's start today with some comfortable truths. Here are a few things I believe.

I believe that Elon Musk is a very bad person. He is easily swayed by misinformation which confirms his preexisting biases about how the world works, and I think he is a dumb person's idea of what a smart person is. I think he supports racism, transphobia, and disinformation at a scale few human beings on Earth have ever managed. He's probably second to only one…

I despise Donald Trump. I think he is the worst of us. He makes this country worse, and I think we will be studying and reckoning for decades with how one of the least successful and least popular US Presidents of all time, who was resoundingly beaten in 2020, somehow became the choice for Americans 4 years later. I think he has done immense, lasting damage to the United States. I think he is the number one purveyor of hate and misinformation on the planet. I think it is macabre that so many Americans decided they could overlook his coup attempt in 2021, his brashness, his lies, his affairs, his harassment, his felonies, and his overall failure in his first term to deliver what he said he would…and yet they could cast all of it aside because they thought he would balance the budget (he's made it worse).

I believe that open social networks are how all social networks should work. I think email and RSS are the GOATs of the open internet, and it's a shame that the internet has moved away from open technologies like these. I believe Mastodon comes closest to that ideal.

I believe X is too permissive with what it allows on its platform, and I think that makes lots of people feel unsafe and makes using the platform unenjoyable, to say the least.

It is also hilarious that the Grok AI pretends to be politically neutral when all the evidence shows that it presents more right-wing opinions than left-wing opinions. When left to their own devices, these models do tend to lean a little to the left, which, as a wise man once said, is because reality happens to have a liberal bias.

I am extremely uncomfortable with the rightward shift in politics among the major nations over the past decade. It is a serious problem and has led to countries dipping into fascism, which has been cheered on by those on the right. It turns out that fascism is okay when it is owning the libs.

I endorse the safety and rights of LGBTQ+ people. I do this by speaking out on their behalf, by trying to persuade those in my life who do not feel the same way, and by donating to causes that try to improve the lives of these people.

Let's do something uncomfortable, please. As someone who shares these opinions, I can see that there are more people who share most, if not all, of those opinions on X than there are on Mastodon. I am not saying this is a good thing.

Like many other readers of this blog, I left Twitter almost 4 years ago. It was both a statement and an attempt to move the needle in public discourse. I gave up an audience and more than a decade of posts, and started over on the fediverse. I also really wanted Twitter to fail. By using whatever level of a platform I have, I tried to inspire people to do the same. That certainly worked to some effect.

However, I keep coming back to this uncomfortable truth: most people did not leave Twitter, even amongst those who agree with all the statements I made above. Others left for a while, before deciding the other networks weren't any better for them, so they went back.

I obviously bring this up because of what happened this week, when Federico Viticci and John Voorhees brought the MacStories brand, as well as their personal accounts, back to X. This immediately became the drama of the week on Mastodon.

Most Mastodon users agree on most of the big things, but what they agree most about is that thou shalt not use X. I do not particularly love the decision, either, and I do not think there was any way they could have done this that would have gone well, either on Mastodon or among their contributors. But I think it was made worse by springing it as a surprise on everyone. As Federico said in his oddly-not-on-MacStories post, the decision was his and John's to make, which is completely within their right, but they should have let their contributors know ahead of time that and why they were doing it. Since they did not, it felt like one of those situations where you find out you're getting fired because your CEO tweeted it out to the world.

I think the move hurt people on Mastodon even more because MacStories had so prominently embraced the Fediverse and spun up their own Mastodon server. It had generally been all in on the platform for several years, so for them to say that being Mastodon-only is untenable as a business hurts.

At the same time, I am generally uncomfortable with a lot of the conclusions people on Mastodon have drawn from this move. I have seen everything from, “This is proof that MacStories is fascist,” because anyone who uses X is a fascist, to that anyone who uses X doesn't have any morals.

I am personally less of a hardliner here, and it all comes back to that uncomfortable truth. There are many people in the world who feel very similarly to me about the issues I discussed in the first half of this post, and more of them choose X than Mastodon. I simply cannot support the idea that only people who use Mastodon are good and everyone else is irredeemably bad.

This also touches on my general anxiety about the left's tendency to disengage from wide and popular platforms. When they do not get everyone else to follow, they have siloed themselves off into a niche and lost impact in more influential places. Sometimes it's worth it, but I think we're too eager to do it in some cases, and it ends up marginalizing our impact.

All of this is to say that I think it is completely valid to be upset with MacStories, and to stop following it if you find this decision to be crossing the line. X is bad for many reasons. Elon Musk is bad for many reasons. I just think it is a messy situation when 4 years after Musk took over the company, more people who feel those things use X than use the competing social networks I spend time on.

P.S. This is an extremely touchy subject, and even though I feel this post was very fair and grounded, I'm still worried that even my suggestion that not everyone on X is a fascist will draw ire.