We Don’t Need a New Twitter
When I first started using Mastodon I felt a bit overwhelmed by angry toots from certain communities.  One of my pet peeves is leftists who,  just as the John Birch Society saw &quot;communists&quot; everywhere,  now see &quot;fascists&quot; everywhere.  (For the record I am a leftist,  a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web,  I&#x27;ve been to Howie Hawkins&#x27; house, etc.)  It was clear to me that the &quot;explore&quot; tab was toxic because it listed things that got the most boosts and angry content spread like a virus.<p>At that time I was looking for an open source sentiment analysis model for social media (as opposed to product reviews) and couldn&#x27;t find one.  From a machine learning standpoint it didn&#x27;t seem difficult to me but I thought I&#x27;d be destroyed by the process of collecting 5000 angry toots to train it.<p>With such a model one could:  (1) filter incoming toots so you don&#x27;t see them,  (2) filter outgoing toots so my own anger doesn&#x27;t escape (I even thought of making one that enforced<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;E-Prime" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;E-Prime</a><p>but then realized instead of saying &quot;Kier Starmer is a (borderline) fascist&quot; (according to sci fi writer Charlie Stross) you can just load adjectives:  &quot;Fascist Kier Starmer promotes fascist policies that his fascist supporters applaud&quot;) or (3) put filtering in the network itself to bring down<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmission_coefficient_(epidemiology)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmission_coefficient_(epid...</a><p>which would be the most effective.  Now (1) and (2) have the advantage of being less political,  that is,  people are very unlikely to find out you are blocking there but angry people will become aware of (3) and have  something new to be angry about.<p>Over that time though I:  (a) discovered that I get really good engagement sharing photos I take,  particularly that are tagged #bloomscrolling,  (b) I&#x27;ve added a lot of really great people,  (c) got very quick to block &quot;anti-fascists&quot; and people who proclaim they are uncomfortable in their own skin or that I should be uncomfortable in mine,  and (d) blocked a few keywords and I am enjoying my Mastodon experience a lot more.<p>If Threads or somebody else wants to make a serious attempt at (3) however,  I am all for it.