Hey so if /pol/ was created by Epstein et al to seed political discourse that advantaged the upper-class, and commercial social media was managed by Maxwell et al to disseminate that discourse across commercial social media, and Mastodon was set up to provide an alternative forum for that discourse... ...doesn't that mean Mastodon is a growth of the seed of Epstein's distraction? Like, I'm not shitposting. Think about it. Pretty much everything here is responsive to habits of commercial social media, which were literally encoded by folk who were trying to mislead the conversation and public thought away from certain ideas. And in fact, the same corporations gave grants to have certain Mastodon features developed, that have brought its functioning more and more in-line with the functioning of commercial social media, over time. And this has even led to a linking of the datasets, repeatedly! In fact, the only real difference, technologically, between how the two maintain discursive norms, is whether or not the moderators doing the day-to-day enforcement get paid directly by the network, or do it "voluntarily". [edit: This wasn't meant to be followers only when I posted it! Whoops.] [second edit: I'm realizing that a lot of people don't know that Mastodon's development is literally funded by corporations. They allocate money to grants that they give to organizations they serve on the boards of who then give it to select open-source projects like Mastodon, so that they can thrive, while other projects starve. I'm sorry to ruin the illusion of "free and open source software" as any sort of liberatory thing, but, well - there did actually use to be "libre software" and it got starved out. I know it probably falls flat because it's text but truly I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that this software's development was funded by the same corporations you thought you were escaping. I want to spin this into a wider lesson about settlerism's habit of assuming new territory is virgin territory capable of saving a people acting out their own redemption, but this is already a pretty long edit.]