[Allison Hantschel in DAME]

Hand-wringing over people leaving overtly unsafe spaces like X to find communities that are actually enjoyable to hang out in (like Mastodon and BlueSky) is absolute nonsense.

"With that user growth, mostly from liberals disgusted with Musk’s nonstop promotion of conservative disinformation, came criticism that people were merely seeking out an ideological “echo chamber” to reinforce their views.

They’re complaining that Americans are underexposed to fresh new ideas like “non-white races are inferior” and “trans people shouldn’t exist” and “we should hunt the poor for sport” and without algorithmic pressure will suffer without such content. They’re upset that they’re not allowed to promote their toxic work into the eyeballs of people who aren’t looking for it."

Let's put it like this. If you're at a party and it's full of assholes, it's quite reasonable to leave and go to another party. There's no law that says X is the social networking platform for everybody (at least, not yet). There's nothing that says you have to be on Facebook or Instagram. Everyone gets to use the law of two feet to find a community that's comfortable for them.

Hantschel puts it like this:

"There’s no obligation to stay where you find nothing useful or interesting, and there’s no homework assignment that requires you to allow people to ruin your experience. You’re not required to spend a certain number of hours a day engaging with hateful people, or even people you just dislike, in order to accumulate Intellectual Diversity Points."

What these commentators are really complaining about: they spent well over a decade building up followings on these platforms and now people are looking elsewhere, rendering their investment moot. That's just too bad.

#Technology

[Link]