Although it’s been a real delight to see so many people joining Mastodon over the past few weeks, I’ve found that there’s also a disadvantage that I hadn’t expected: I’m spending a lot more time scrolling through Mastodon these days than I ever have since setting up my Mastodon accounts.

When I began setting up Mastodon accounts and shifting away from Twitter back in April, I felt like I had made a big leap forward in terms of my online consumption. One thing that I’d always struggled with on Twitter was the feeling that I needed to see every single post from every single account. I’d eventually helped with that by consuming Twitter via RSS and narrowing my followed accounts down to the ones that I really, really wanted to follow. By virtue of converting Twitter to RSS, I was still consuming all the posts from those accounts, but it also forced me to only pick those accounts that wouldn’t overwhelm my RSS reader with posts I didn’t really care about.

What a weird week it has been in Twitterland.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any worse. Will be really interested to see if Dorsey gets banned.

This has been one of the most delightful moments I’ve experienced in my relatively short time on Mastodon. This week has been a good one for Mastodon: Musk’s continued missteps have brought more people, and a meme like this one helps give the fediverse more of a shared culture.

I’ve posted a bunch of articles about this already, but Masnick’s take is super helpful.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

I’ve been trying to avoid dire predictions for Twitter since Musk took over, but this seems more and more like a turning point in the identity and reputation of the platform.

I got my job largely because I can work with Twitter data, and my tenure application is built on the premise that I do good Twitter research. I probably shouldn’t take as much pleasure as I do from watching the platform fall apart right now, but I was ready to move on anyway.

I mean, I’m willing to wait a bit and see what Twitter and Musk have to say about this, but this sure doesn’t seem like the approach that a free speech absolutist would take.

Musk is getting pettier and more self-centered.

Streisand Effect must be real, because I’ve never cared this much about a single plane in my whole life.

How does such an already bad story get so much worse over the course of a single day?

Twitter left up other flight tracking accounts but took down Musk’s?

This is petty and concerning.

I think this headline captures one of the worst parts of all of this: Musk isn’t just dismissing concerns about behavior, he’s fueling that behavior.

I haven’t been following Ken White as much as I used to, but this reminds me why I appreciate his perspective. This is someone who knows what free speech is and advocates for it, not someone who uses it as a buzzword justification for reprehensible behavior, à la Musk.

If I could pick one story to demonstrate that Musk’s Twitter tenure has been blundering and inconsistent…

I have deliberately not been following the Twitter Files stuff, but I did read this and found it helpful.

For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study. Of course, I agree with many internet researchers that this does not absolve me of my ethical responsibilities (I find Fiesler and Proferes’s 2018 paper on this subject particularly helpful). This becomes even trickier, though, when the unwitting “participants” in my research espouse views that I find objectionable. To what extent do I, as a researcher, owe a Twitter (or Gab) user privacy and dignity if they are engaged in homophobic, misogynist, or white nationalist behavior? I’m still figuring this out, but my approach right now—informed heavily by this paper—is to try to err on the side of respect for the user whenever possible.

Infertility sucks, and stories like this make me even more upset about Musk’s callous and chaotic Twitter takeover.

I’m glad I began reading Techdirt before this whole mess started… Masnick’s persective has been a helpful guide.

Is he serious? Does he really think this is a good idea? Also, I love the increasing sass that The Verge and other outlets are putting into their comments about Twitter no longer having a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This seems petty, immature, and misguided.

I didn’t expect 1,200 resignations!

Oh good, so on top of the unexpected chaos, the expected chaos is also still happening.