never met a part of the stack I didn't like. sr. engineer at clique studios in chicago, perpetual creative hobbyist, bird friend, local gay agenda promoter. she/her. tips: https://ko-fi.com/carlymho
In general I think the level of vitriol and general stressful content is a bit lower, compared to Twitter; I think it helps a lot that people can set content warnings on posts, so if you know a lot of your followers are getting hackles up over an issue, you can allow them to choose whether to engage. I think it probably varies by instance—I imagine the local timeline is a lot spicier on some of the more politics-oriented instances—but I think it's a lot easier to mediate exposure. A lot of instances also enforce much stricter codes of conduct than Twitter.
As far as privacy for who you follow, it's possible to hide your following list, yeah. A lot of blocking seems to be done on an instance-wide scale, since some instances allow illegal content or certain types of behavior while others specifically don't. If you're on a pretty general instance like mastodon.cloud, though, you're unlikely to get blocked by anyone just based on that.
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In general I think the level of vitriol and general stressful content is a bit lower, compared to Twitter; I think it helps a lot that people can set content warnings on posts, so if you know a lot of your followers are getting hackles up over an issue, you can allow them to choose whether to engage. I think it probably varies by instance—I imagine the local timeline is a lot spicier on some of the more politics-oriented instances—but I think it's a lot easier to mediate exposure. A lot of instances also enforce much stricter codes of conduct than Twitter.
As far as privacy for who you follow, it's possible to hide your following list, yeah. A lot of blocking seems to be done on an instance-wide scale, since some instances allow illegal content or certain types of behavior while others specifically don't. If you're on a pretty general instance like mastodon.cloud, though, you're unlikely to get blocked by anyone just based on that.