Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth::Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth
Is this an issue with… social media, or corporate social media? Mastodon technically is social media and it can potentially have the problems of Facebook or Twitter, or not. Depends on the instance owners control. Even then, however they can’t control every little detail when it’s federated but, that’s a good thing for the freedom of ideas.
If you want my actual opinion, places like Lemy and even Reddit are better for independent voices, because you can go into a dedicated community and get what you want specifically. While places like Mastodon, is more like a timeline of, hey I did this thing, or hey Elon musk did a thing today. Lemy is less like that, but it can also be like that.
Lemy or reddit seems to encourage discusion and Lemy seems to do great at it. The best interaction i’ve seen on an opensource social platform even compared to mastodon, dispite mastodon having more users.
I would have agreed with reddit before but the moderators are killing it the other way. Too much power, zero oversight, and quick to delete or even ban without having knowledge of what they’re supposed to be moderating.
It’s one of the reasons I’m here now, hoping for less of that. And I don’t mean “the vaccines are making my 5G reception weak” type of posts. I mean factual information just getting removed of it doesn’t align with the random moderator of the day when someone inevitably reports it. So much information there is scrubbed that’s accurate and what remains is just an echo chamber of outdated or false information. I don’t know how anyone can solve it other than relinquish control to our robot content moderator overlords.
