Receiving advice, even unsolicited advice, can sometimes be quite useful. For instance, if I suddenly and inexplicably found myself performing open heart surgery on somebody and a huge jet of blood started squirting out of their chest after I’d been a bit heavy-handed with the old scalpel, a bit of advice from someone who even had the vaguest idea what to do would be welcome. Although why would they have let me perform the surgery in the first place?
But what about being told you’re wrong by some smirking “well, actually…” type and then being subjected to an unwanted PowerPoint? That is beyond fucking annoying, I’m sure we can all agree.
And that’s where we find ourselves with current social media. Or at least the social media where all the “good” people are supposed to be.
When electric car-shagger and cage fighting enthusiast Elton Mask took over Twitter in late 2022 and started to immediately drive it into the ground, I realised it was time to find an alternative. Word on the street (or at least the virtual street) was that Mastodon was the place to go, so I signed up. My plan was to run both until the end of the year and then phase out my Twitter use. I didn’t even last until mid-December as the man whose name sounds like a variety of cheap aftershave decided to allow orange democracy-thwarter and proprietor of the ironically-named “Truth” social media platform back on Twitter, in addition to seemingly actively promoting dangerous conspiracy theories and far-right bullshit.
I found Mastodon to be easy to use — I mean all social media platforms are fundamentally the same, aren’t they? Well, not quite. The timeline looked similar, but without adverts and the kind of whack jobs who populated Twitter and Farcebook at the time. But there was a new kind of user on this platform.
The “YOU’RE DOING MASTODON WRONG!” user.
I encountered the first “YOU’RE DOING MASTODON WRONG!” user (henceforth referred to as YDMWs) within hours. Their post wasn’t directed at me or any individual in particular and included an essay-length post with a list of dos and don’ts. I found it strange, but it didn’t irk me too much. Sure, Mastodon had been around for a little while and some of its veteran users were maybe concerned about people from Twitter bursting through its federated doors and turning the place into a cesspool quite rapidly, but they could have perhaps eased back on the lambasting a bit.
But this was far from the last time I would see such a thing.
Before long, YDMWs were declaring that anyone who didn’t use alt text in the photos they posted was ableist scum and anyone who was still on Twitter was a fascist. Yes, it took that turn very quickly.
It became apparent to me that some Mastodonians (#NotAllMastodonians) and pretty much all YDMWs seemed to be engaged in a battle to become the most right-on person on the platform. Some of them were bragging about the hordes of people they’d blocked and demanding that some people be cancelled for the flimsiest of reasons, in between diatribes such as “I refuse to save money by using a well-known supermarket loyalty card scheme because one of their partners is a newspaper I don’t like and anyone who uses this card is a nazi enabler”, “if you don’t support Just Stop Oil 100%, then you’re entirely responsible for the death of the planet” and the more bizarre “you don’t get to call yourself a trans ally, only trans people get to call you that”. I mean, if there were any clever right-wing comedians (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one), they’d have a field day with this.
I know there’s a lot to be enraged about in the world, but the fact that your neighbour still drives a petrol car and doesn’t wear a mask while doing so or that that new pub in town doesn’t have 107 different gender-specific toilets probably aren’t top of the list for many people. But ultimately, the crusade towards mega-wokeness will have millions of casualties and only one person will remain. They can then be angry about that.
But that’s not to say Mastodon is a bad place, because it absolutely isn’t. There’s a better standard of humour on there and this has led to me having to up my game with more intellectual poo and dick jokes. There’s also a lot of great people on there who I interact with semi-regularly. The kind of people who aren’t YDMWs and who hopefully won’t be too upset with what I’ve written here.
And then there’s Bluesky. Run by Jack (formerly of Twitter and we’re supposed to forget that he’s the man who turned that site into a shithole by selling it to Elgin Mosque), BS (hilarious if that’s what anyone is calling it) is a social media platform with a difference in that you require an invitation to be allowed to join and the app makes you look at a Simpsonian picture of blue sky with lovely white clouds for a minimum of 20 seconds before it will open properly.
“How the hell did this reprobate get an invite?” you’re probably asking. Well trust me, it’s not as exclusive a place as they’ll have you believe. Anyway, as is de rigueur, my first post was something along the lines of “I don’t understand how this works.” Less than 10 minutes later, I encountered my first YDBSW who responded to my message with a long list of dos and don’ts. Later that afternoon, I saw a post from someone else moaning “This place is just the same as Twitter with all the usual shitposters.” A cursory glance at their posts revealed them to be something of a shitposter extraordinaire. Oh dear.
And yes, I know that I can mute or block all these people — and I have — but it doesn’t stop me being annoyed by them., And it doesn’t stop more of them continuing to crawl out of the woodwork.
While the jury may still be out for many regarding Bluesky and Mastodon, I think it’s now quite apparent that the halcyon days of Twitter many of us experienced around 2010 or so are long gone and nothing will ever be able to recreate that time. Perhaps we should stop trying?
Disclaimer: This is all based on my own experience, so if you’re a YDMW or a YDBSW, please don’t tell me I’m wrong about any of it.
