This article from 2017 is worth a read for anyone trying to figure out whether/how to separate the art from the artist.
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? By Claire Dederer, Paris Review, November 20, 2017 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/
I’ve thought this. Maybe I just ignored the Gaiman parts because they were boring, but I’ve read it a few times and I honestly can barely think of a part that reminds me of Gaiman’s other writing…
One of my friends owned a synth module and the company owner turned out to be some kind of mysogynist racist asshat (or at best an edgelord indistinguishable from that). He wanted to get rid of it, so he put it up for sale for the market price, with a clear note on it that he’d be donating all of the money to some feminist charity. It sold, someone got the product while knowingly contributing to a good cause, and he got rid of it without it feeling like a waste.
Something like that could be an option?
I think Mirrormask and Coraline were fairly original?
I dunno, I thought it was pretty fucked up first time around too.
Pratchett had a deep sense of justice, and was driven by a righteous rage - as described (ironically) by Gaiman in the introduction to Pratchett’s “A Slip of the Keyboard”.
Pratchett also has multiple books with a primary focus on feminism (Equal Rights, Monstrous Regiment), and lots of his other books have feminist takes sprinkled through them.
I’ve read a bit of Gaiman (not as much as of Pratchett), and I don’t think I remember reading anything explicitly feminist. He seems much more obsessed with fantastic mythology than anything with sociopolitical relevance.
Anyway, who knows how Pratchett would have reacted, but I kind of wish he WAS here to see it, because I suspect he would have said something really good about it…
With what expertise and training? Do we all have to wait until big_fat_fluffy has concluded his investigations before we can trust that any criminal activity has occurred?
Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.
I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.
I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.
I think you’re making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.
Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a “please boost and follow for federation” post to get them kick started.
But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how did you choose an email provider, or a phone service? How do you block spam? Those are basically identical questions, and yeah, they can be annoying, but I don’t think anyone finds them that hard to comprehend.
Yeah, Lemmy is good because of the topic and threading focus. Mastodon seems better for exploring lots of issues. I’m finding them fairly complementary, they cover different bases.
Still need something I can pull my IRL friends in with though. Pixelfed might work for people who are used to Instagram, but I think it’s probably still a bit sparse content wise.
Mastodon could definitely do with some more discovery methods. Hopefully something like bluesky’s starter packs get implemented eventually (but I understand why they aren’t rushing it, there are abuse risks).
Best approach for now on mastodon is to follow all the hash tags you’re interested in, and then follow everyone in your feed who posts anything interesting. Takes a few weeks to ramp up, I guess. My feed got good once I was following around 1k users. You can always unfollow if someone’s annoying.
Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.
I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won’t see that for another couple of years… Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.
Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out…
But also I don’t really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is “nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to”.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
Is this actually true? The UIs don’t seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon’s design that’s bad?
You might be right. I’m not a lurker. I’m not a heavy poster either though.
It sounds like you should just try it out, and find out if your assumptions are true