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Riley Taylor @Riley

Another tech media article misunderstanding Mastodon as a Twitter competitor.

They can't understand Mastodon because they can't imagine a technology that doesn't cater to them.

Tech media personalities can't understand a world where their opinion means less than that of a random furry.

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@Riley a lot of these articles also tend to focus on things like account verification. This is important for brands and celebrities who are not the target audience here.

There's no need for me to verify their identity of people I interact with as long as I'm enjoying the interactions.

This is really how internet was originally envisioned to work. You don't need to know anything about the person on the other end, the interaction itself is what's valuable.

@Riley Well, I find that when open-source projects are mentioned in the press (which is rare), they are universally described as "the open-source version of _____". They're never framed on their own terms.

@Riley

They can't understand a technology that isn't trying to make a profit for investors.

@Riley I really think the best thing about Mastodon is that it isn't a 'competitor' to anything. the people running instances do it because they think it's worth doing, not because they get money for it. No one is trying to monetize it like every other social media platform is monetized. No ads, no corporate presence, no fees--people aren't trying to make money off it.

@Felthry Yep. People in tech media just don't seem to get that people can run instances off Patreon and be happy with the little niche community they build. Awoo.space doesn't need to be Twitter. It doesn't even need to be Furry Twitter. It can just be.

@Felthry @Riley That's a big reason why I'm not comfortable calling Mastodon a "twitter killer". Because that's not the point.

Besides, Twitter is doing a good job at killing Twitter all by themselves.

@Nezchan @Felthry @Riley I stopped thinking Twitter's rules were worthwhile the moment they decided that removing checkmarks was the proper response to famous people breaking the rules instead of using the ban hammer.

@Felthry @Riley The tech news assumption that a federated system needs to compete with the likes of twitter is based on the assumption that creating a big and centralized social media was a good idea to begin with.

And twitter is good, arguably, for those people who want to control how people engage in conversations.

@Riley @Felthry So it's not a great surprise to me that a generation of journalists who grew up and started their careers in a singularity of media consolidation are skeptical of opensource, federation, and self-hosted projects that don't connect to or compete with big media.

@Felthry @Riley I agree with that. Mastodon also doesnt filter the Posts for you like FB/Twitter do. (Except Language Filter | Limited by how many Connctions your Instance has)

What if Lance Ulanoff became a furry

@Riley he never found will shatner... but he found his inner wusky

@Riley I really don't know what this is I'm just here cuz a friend told me it's better than Facebook