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To this question, I want to say no. Actually, let me be clear, based on the history as interpreted and as supplied by long term mastodonians, this should not be the case.

As has been communicated to me in defense of mastodon, this is a history of a protocol and platform developed by LGBTQ and other marginalized groups to avoid the kind of harassment found on Twitter AND in "white tech bro" spaces.

mastodon.art/@wackomedia/10937

Mastodon.ARTPeter Stolmeier (@wackomedia@mastodon.art)@shengokai@zirk.us Mast has a lot of work ahead of it to be better, no doubt, but I'm a little confused where you say "more that twitter." Twitter was very white tech bro when it started and grew as more members joined. Should we not expect the same here, only faster?

I call this "history as interpreted" drawing on the work of John Dewey and Thomas Alexander who call this a "mythos." For Alexander, a "mythos" isn't a false story, but an organizing narrative of where something came from, where it is going, and its assumed place in a social world. A mythos gives us context for how we can and cannot transact with it.

Mythoi don't need to be narratives, they can be slogans: "move fast and break things" is a mythos which animates Meta/Facebook.

Now, having said that, Mastodon's history as interpreted, which is to say that the history of mastodon as understood by long term mastodonians as giving shape to mastdodon, explicitly argues that masdoton was designed from the ground up to be a safe haven from the kinds of nonsense found in "white tech bro" spaces, and on twitter.

As such, this history as interpreted has been deployed as a defense against the whiteness and ableism of the platform.

Further, if we take up Sara Ahmed, a history orients us towards the platform in specific ways. Mastodon's history is supposed to orient us towards the platform as a "twitter alternative" and "the future of social media" by virtue of how this history should predict a certain kind of future. Put another way, this history is a promise of happiness for users who join the platform, specifically marginalized users.

To this end, when marginalized people are not made happy by the things that they should be made happy by, that is, when they are not made happy by the actuality of a platform that promises freedom from the abuses they found on twitter, but does not live up to the actuality, they are viewed as getting "in the way" of the happiness that everyone else takes in the platform.

Examples of this abound in my mentions and replies.

Which gets me back to the platform "shouldn't we expect white tech bro culture here?" And my answer is still "no." Because of the history as interpreted, because of the promise of happiness, we should not EXPECT white tech bro culture here because that's not what we've been told by -other marginalized persons- and that's not what we've been sold by the history.

This, point of fact, is a problem for people coming to the site.

Dr. Johnathan Flowers

It is a problem because they will expect a safe-haven on the basis of the history they've been sold and then discover the same old bullshit in a new package. They will be promised happiness in the form of a platform free of abuse, only to discover new kinds of abuse cloaked in the kinds of "nice" whiteness that Jessie Daniels describes in her book "Nice White Ladies." It is, in the words of Admiral Ackbar "A Trap."

And it is an interesting trap because mastodon, despite all of its claims to be different, hasn't learned any of the social lessons that Twitter should've taught it.

But that's a whole other thing. So my answer is that we do expect things to be done differently, and they are, but they don't result in a different experience. Just abuse in a different name.