Big-name journalists we all love to hate, as well as many you’ve never heard of, loved their gatekeeping role on Twitter. They decided what you were permitted to know, and Twitter played along, happy to enforce the Mean Girls’ rules on their behalf. But freedom of speech has returned to Twitter under Elon Musk, and journos are desperate for a new digital meeting place where they’re the Mean Girls clique once more.
So they turned to Mastodon, a totally Woke (and decentralized) social media platform of individual servers, where NPR’s Adam Davidson set up the journa.host server for like-minded media wokesters. According to NYT, there are something like 2,000 members who have to prove who they are in order to join. A safe space to call people Nazis. But not all is well in liberal paradise: "Journalists signing up on mastodon at the jou. rna[.]host server should know that through no deliberate fault, the server has quickly gained a reputation for transphobia and has been widely banned/blocked." - Vox.
So journa.host is getting blocked by other Mastodon servers, effectively trapping our would-be gatekeepers behind a gate of their own doing. [enter laugh track here]
It’s all very technical, but the readers digest version is that it started with a New York radio host named “Mike Pesca, fired from the sleazy website 'Slate' for defending his right to use the word 'nigger', posted a transphobic NYT article and allegedly the first thing the journa[.]host mods did was ban another user for complaining that they hadn’t banned Pesca.” Mastodon is so touchy that it somehow managed to find a NYT article transphobic. 🤣🤣🤣
Chaos ensued when a super woke transgender writer named Parker Molloy got itself suspended from journa.host. for a digital shouting match and pissing contest, ending with Molloy calling Pesca an “utter hack.” 🙃 And down the hill it goes.......
But the upshot is that a whole bunch of woke journalists, in trying to flee Musk’s “oppressive” Twitter, somehow got their server labeled transphobic, and now they’re fighting one another like it’s the Hunger Games, and may the odds be never in your favor.
Maybe this is just the natural and unavoidable result of putting insanely powerful digital tools in the hands of overprivileged Karens with the manners of hangry toddlers. Meanwhile, traffic and user interaction are way up, according to Elon Musk, on the Tweeter that those screeching journos are trying to replace.
But there's more. Mastodon is not the end of the story, because it looks like our refugee journos are also trying 'Hive', which looks like it might just be the FTX of social media platforms.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
I know I'm not the only one who gets a vision of an adrift lifeboat full of filthy, thirst craven journalist looking for a deserted island of safety. 🤣
[VOX]
[PJM]
