>>7
Hot take: Mastodon has been advertised as a ``Twitter without Nazis''. It is not better because of some artificial barrier to entry. People might have trouble selecting an instance to register on, but it is actually very user-friendly. The reason its content is better is the branding. It has been specifically designed to be unappealing to the online Nazi crowd, with emphasis on effective moderation tools that quickly shuts down their harassment campaigns. It is better because it does not have the hordes of right-wing imbeciles that do nothing but poison every single online conversation with their brain dead delusions and stupid-ass dog-whistles.
Regarding Twitter, the Spectacle and constructed realities, the recent reaction to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone has been very instructive. You could see in real time how the positive feedback loop of derangement works. The same people would create "memes" to slander it, only to conveniently forget that the lies were made up by them and to a mere minute later accept them as genuine truth that further reinforces their existing delusions. Then they would proclaim that "the memes writes themselves"!