I’ve often heard from Mastodon techbros how Twitter is toxic, and Mastodon is “better” since it doesn’t have the damaging algorithm that promotes negativity onto your feed. However, if you’ve been using fedi for more than a week, you’ll know it’s just as horrible, if not worse, than Twitter. And now, one of these techbros may be thinking, “But how? Wouldn’t the lack of algorithms make it the promised positivity utopia we all want?” The thing is, for an algorithm to show you negativity, it needs something to show, and we are all complete fucking assholes, so it has it plenty.
We all subconsciously fly towards negativity, there’s this hate/love relationship with complaining at random people on topics we like, and social media only glorifies it in us with how public everything is. You just need a strong will to avoid reacting to something you disagree with. Algorithm-based feeds usually work with the basic idea of showing you what will make you keep using the app for longer, which usually tend to be stupid shitposts or heated arguments. A chronological feed will only show you what you follow in a chronological format, so it should be better right? No, because even if you don’t post negative content, the people you follow will, or even people in comments of their posts.
There’s also the constant simplification of language!
We keep everything simple for ourselves but not for others, exaggerate to maximize the emotions in the text. Even if there isn’t a character limit, we keep it as short as possible because we don’t want to write for long and know they don’t want to read for long either. If something isn’t said to not be or exaggerated enough to show it’s not a joke, we will take it as one, no matter how fucked up it might be in retrospective. Which all ends up with even more toxicity, yupiii
The magic solution?
There’s none. Unless someone creates a magical algorithm that limits toxicity and feeds you positive content without feeling like something out of a dystopian young adult novel (which, by the way, is what the original Pebble/T2 wanted to do; I still remember laughing when I discovered that every post on T2 had a broken “toxicity” meter attached to it), we’re all doomed, and we can only train ourselves to avoid it in case we genuinely care. While blocking and making word mute lists can help minimize toxicity, they will not completely eliminate it from your timeline.
This post doesn’t really have a super interesting conclusion, I just wanted to yap about this in a blog post format.