![]() ![]() Bardin, the founder of Post, might have more investment money Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko might have more utopian engineering cred but Bouzy lived and breathed Twitter, and I wondered how the instincts he’d honed there might serve him as a founder. But beyond that architectural conceit, Bouzy seemed to have something else going for him: a true affinity for the culture of social media. ![]() “You will never have to beg us to enforce our rules and policies,” he promised, “nor will you have to wait days for us to take action.” Thanks to these safeguards, Bouzy asserted, his platform would be free from the poisonous influence of the internet’s vilest characters-the Nazis, misogynists, and nihilists who delight in filling reply sections with bile.Ī Twitter alternative designed to let good vibes reign supreme sounded appealing. Bouzy also aimed to create a responsive moderation system that would aggressively stamp out accounts that spewed hateful rhetoric or lies. Users could then filter out interactions from everyone whose score registered above a certain threshold or just block accounts flagged as suspicious on a case-by-case basis. He planned to weave Bot Sentinel’s technology right into its infrastructure so that each account could be assigned a score based on its 400 most recent posts-the higher the score, the more likely a person is to be a bad-faith actor. Yet quite unlike Musk, who has reveled in letting Twitter go largely unmoderated, Bouzy said his goal was to run a platform that would proudly identify as a safe space. And because the Bird App’s awfulness kept hitting new lows, it seemed the cycle of restless searching was bound to drag on. In the race to supplant Twitter, there was no clear winner in sight. Mastodon’s labyrinthine structure was a pain, Post’s commentariat was bland, and Hive’s app kept crashing. After an initial wave of excitement, I’d lose interest within a matter of days. But all of my trial runs followed the same dispiriting trajectory. Though I usually try to resist nostalgia, I couldn’t help hoping that one of these novel platforms might rekindle the elation I’d felt in that Oregon motel. For all their differences, these platforms were unanimous in voicing one aspiration: to recapture the spirit of “early Twitter.” “Post could be a winner if there were a critical mass there.” Legions of gamers, meanwhile, flocked to Hive Social, an Instagram-influenced app run by a trio of recent college graduates. “Mastodon is complicated and unsatisfying,” tweeted Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator in Wisconsin. Media obsessives gravitated toward Post, a news-heavy platform founded by Noam Bardin, the former CEO of Waze. ![]() But the enthusiasm quickly waned as people struggled to navigate the platform’s sprawling “Fediverse,” and the Twitter exodus flowed elsewhere. For the briefest of moments, everyone seemed to agree that this brainy successor was destined to save social media. It started in October with a wave of defections to Mastodon, an open source, ad-free, decentralized community that was hosted on an archipelago of independent servers. This validation sent me over the moon: The account I’d always thought of as mere public scratch paper actually had an audience that considered my ramblings worthwhile. ![]() To my surprise, that tweet earned what seemed at the time like an avalanche of approval-a whopping six retweets, plus an admiring reply from a minor internet celebrity. In a reflective moment, I also managed to craft an earnest observation about my job: “The more social media makes journalism an Everyman’s game,” I mused, “the more I’m inspired to dig deep for non-digitized sources.” With a 22-ounce bottle of high-proof beer, I whiled away the evening by churning out a random assortment of tweets: an article I’d read about the hunt for wild garlic in Quebec, images of an apocalyptic Los Angeles mural, my reasons for adoring the 1985 B movie American Ninja. I was in a small Oregon town for work, coping with loneliness and stress in a shabby motel. Looking back, I believe I can pinpoint the exact day I loved Twitter most: May 24, 2011. ![]()
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