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.

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 fact that when I check the fridge¹, there's just the same head of cabbage that was there last I checked. Paradoxically, the better Mastodon gets, the more I'll check it, the less good for me it will be.

Recently, someone I follow started boosting posts I found to be confidently wrong. I started getting emotionally invested in the thoughts of complete strangers. Getting provoked. I wanted to write replies to correct their misconceptions.

I've mostly been able to resist: it would not change anyone's mind. It would take a lot of time. I would get even more emotionally preoccupied by a hamster wheel.

Instead, I think I'll employ another cool thing about open-source technology: you can usually adapt it in ways to suit your needs². I can filter this person's boosts and hopefully that will be sufficient.

But there's a tension here. For the structural factors outlined in the introduction, I want the fediverse to grow. For it to grow, it needs to attract users that aren't already sold on the structural selling points - it needs to be better. For it to be better, if we optimize for engagement, it could easily become worse.

A ragebaiting machine that people can tinker with is still better than one they're forced to use, but I will maintain my wary distance in either case.