once more, worse is better

A lot of people on Mastodon are there because they believe decentralized and open-source techologies are essential tools for resisting coercive power. The fediverse is innately resilient to censorship, advertising, and hostile takeovers. For these reasons, I made the switch from twitter sometime in the early 2020s, but I think it's important to remind ourselves that these virtuous properties are not a panacea to all the ills of social media. It doesn't matter whose database the posts exist in: we can all still be ragebaited. It's a fundamental vulnerability of our psychology, with or without Elon Musk intentionally exploiting it. this comic is from 2008 I've maintained for a long time that the good part of Mastodon is that it's kind of shit by default. You have to put quite a bit of effort into finding people to follow and tweaking your settings to get it to surface a lot of interesting content. I haven't done this. I follow a few randos and some bots that post clipart. I like the…