Wednesday 28 December 2022

Twitterers be Capitalists to

Been listening to a lot of my podcasters lately and given that a lot of them are fairly left wing, other than in the tech community, there has been a bit of silence around any potential move to Mastodon.  I couldn't quite understand this, particularly someone like Phoebe Roy complaining that the Mastodon interface is too complicated or that they just can't understand it.  Given these are all pretty technically savvy people I found it strange that they were seemingly so inept at using a fairly intuitive interface.  I mean for fucks sake we all grew up using the far more basic and clunky original message boards and chat functions of things like Yahoo which Mastodon is ten times better than.

But then it struck me, these are people with thousands of followers on Twitter.  They have both a significant social and financial stake in Twitter insofar as their careers are partly based on having a large number of people who follow them on Twitter and react to their postings.  They are part of the Twitter fabric and thus wont want to lose the social currency they have built up on the platform and which is inherently tied to the platform.  Like capitalists building up their capital, Twitters community of posters are building up their Twitter capital and the last thing they want is this fucking Mastodon thing coming along and diminishing it by creating an alternative platform which diminishes their social capital.  They will paasively resist it until the time comes to actively resist it.  

Just like a good capitalist defends their own capital against all alternatives....

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