this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Frankly? I'm happy that they didn't end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.
Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who'd spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That's regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.
Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying "this is fine, this is how it's supposed to be". And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.
Someone might say "but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They'd behave better." Well... we're talking about a large horde of users, they'd be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.
A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I've been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I've been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It's exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.
It's fine if it's only a handful of users. Even if they're from Musk's Xithole*. My issue would be if a lot of people saw Mastodon and said "it's Twitter, with an elephant instead of bird!", still behaving like Twitter users.
*desculpe-me pela piada besta; não resisti.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I'm referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren't able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.
Wild that Reddit's creation is closer to the start of the Eternal September than it is to today (19 years).
I agree that it's wild. And it's a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I "endorse" (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you're supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they're algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It's like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that's why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we're going to say "a shame that it died".
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
Kind of - it doesn't happen "all" the time; it has a beginning, but no end.
If you consider it's the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?
What's "eternal" in "Eternal September" is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.
That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.