I think that Mastodon has a lot going for it, and indeed It think an open source federated system is a great idea I hope to see succeed, but I don't think that RT is the main problem with Twitter.
Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.
I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.
Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.
These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.
Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)
This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.
If you follow people on Twitter based on the quality of their activity then Twitter is incredibly valuable. My problem has never been about people tweeting things which were offensive, it was about them tweeting things about their dogs and cats all day long.
If you follow people because you like them, because you are friends with them, or because you hope they will follow you back, Twitter is a fucking disaster. There are people I really wanted to follow, but if I see 30 tweets/likes/retweets in my feed for every 1 incredibly useful tweet, they have to be unfollowed. Unsurprisingly, this approach pretty much cleans out all of the off-topic annoying non-sense, irregardless of your political views or lack there of.
The flip side to all of this is, if a lot of people follow you, the very open nature of Twitter can certainly be a problem. If you are a celebrity or a well known person and are not able to ignore what I imagine is basically a hate stream, then for your own well-being you probably should not use Twitter.
There are plenty of people who are addicted to the algorithm drip feed of content now. Snapchat and Instagram/Facebook have turned this in to a compulsive behavior and the ad revenue has followed. My guess is that as a "solution" to whatever is going on now, Twitter is going to move toward this model. When they do, I sincerely hope that Mastodon or some other open ActivityPub platform is good enough that all of the really smart people who post fantastic content to Twitter, like John Carmack and Tim Sweeney, will follow.
"there are people I disagree with also using this space"
Claiming that is what people mean when they claim something is toxic is just as lazy, if not more so. And you’re basically saying that it’s on minority and underrepresented groups to be the one to engage, rather than those that are antagonizing them.
Alex Jones is an even more egregious case because he’s gotten in trouble not just because he “said things people disagree with”, but because he sent a harassment mob against the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook, claiming it was a “false flag operation.” Several of them now are not able to visit the graves of their children, the harassment is that bad.
I’m sorry, but I just do not see this as anywhere near the “slippery slope” you’re complaining it is.
I understand the bad things Jones does, like the doxxing and maybe that is sufficient enough to ban him (and reasonable in that case), but he's just an extreme example for the slippery slope for speech and censorship that IS already here (and which takes almost no imagination to predict where it will ultimately go) https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1031544806823141376
Additionally, I would rather US companies try to favor behavior honoring the Constitution generally, even though they don't have to.
Maybe I'm lucky that few pay attention to me, but I haven't had a lot of trouble making Twitter incredibly, if not the most, useful social network. Its easy to find your interests and fairly simple to ignore/block things you don't care about.
I also don't think that "there are people I disagree with also using this space" === "this place is toxic" which seems to be the lazy default these days. I prefer Twitter, being a US company, tread as close as it can to the 1st Amendment. I think that people need to engage with views they are unfamiliar with or misunderstand -- though there's certainly the echo chamber problem, to never face ideas that challenge you is to never grow yourself and understand what you believe as most often reflected in classrooms that now boycott professors or require everything come with some trigger warning.
Twitter has a ways to go to provide tools for dealing with trolls but it's making its way there in a way that seems more methodical and less reactionary than something like FB, and while I find characters like Alex Jones offensive, I find the rush for people (particularly some journalists and 20's something safe-space-mobists that are every bit as vocal as the mobs on the right) to default to the ban hammer more offensive.
These companies have immense power over speech in a way that should frighten us, not encourage us to have the centralization as an excuse to circumvent the 1st amendment. True, no platform is obligated to host someone, but given they are effectively monopolies (extremely responsive to legislator outrage that would otherwise have to fight the 1st) this should give everyone more pause than it appears to.
Jones fell like a domino once Apple removed him first. When Spotify removed the reprehensible music it did, the other companies fell in line and the immediate reaction was for activist groups to demand more and more be removed to varying degrees of things being actually offensive (do we now remove old NWA tracks?)
This is all an incredibly slippery slope, and to me the sign of the times is that the trolls have made it so that any difference of opinion is now something everyone flees from and that the default is to assume the worst of someone who might have a different point of view than you do.