Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#141

Post by xigma » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #91

simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. It's not even the right problem. The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at…

Is this really such a big problem, especially for the average user, to make it a key feature of the platform?

Sure, occasionally an otherwise obscure person might find themselves at the end of an unexpected shitstorm, but otherwise it generally affects more prominent users, who are well aware that anything mildly controversial can turn into lots of angry replies.

Is that even a real problem? Isn't it actually valuable information to know that people get really angry about this-and-that? Aren't researchers able to use this data to learn something about human behavior?

Seems to me like people want to blame technology for something that's really amplified human nature. A rehashing the old story of the "basically good" human corrupted by some foreign evil.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#142

Post by codesections » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter

I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter.

My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of toxic elements (dog piles, turning everything into angry politics, new "features" designed to increase engagement/number of ads you see, etc.). I'm guessing that "Twitter, but without everything you hate about Twitter" is enough to overcome the network effects, especially as Twitter keeps finding new ways to annoy its users for money.

But maybe I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#143

Post by ohtwenty » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

teleclimber wrote: post #73

tablethnuser wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like things to go in this direction as well, but with slightly different tech than rss. What you really want is the notification layer of social networks as a standard, so that ppl who follow you are merely alerted that they should visit your site. RSS can be used for this of course, but it's really meant for content syndication rather than as a notification transport layer

You're describing ActivityPub, which is a W3C recommendation[0], which happens to be what Mastodon uses. At least one blogging platform is set up to interact with the fediverse[1]. Hopefully many more one day. [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ [1] https://discuss.write.as/t/activitypub-support/64

Plume is a WIP, and has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17411173

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#144

Post by urtrs » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

ohtwenty wrote: post #120

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…] Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still b…

Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#145

Post by ohtwenty » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #9

Worse UI and fewer users, can't recommend.

>fewer users

that's just a bad point to make? I mean of course a newer platform will have fewer.

UI is a good point (although I prefer it this way). But there's Pinafore[0] or Halcyon[1], or Brutaldon[2] that allow you to change the UI layout if you log in with those.

0: https://pinafore.social/ 1: https://halcyon.toromino.de/login 2: https://brutaldon.online/about

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#146

Post by ohtwenty » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

urtrs wrote: post #144

ohtwenty wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…] Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still b…

Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.

Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#147

Post by codesections » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #101

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and…

Yeah, I agree that this is the biggest usability hurdle, and its actively being worked on.

That said, there are plenty of good general-purpose instances and it's not that different from picking an email host. Sure, you can spend hours figuring out which email host to use, but most people go with a name they've heard before (e.g., Gmail) and don't need to think much about it at all. I could see Mastodon getting to a similar point once it gets more established.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#148

Post by ohtwenty » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #126

ohtwenty wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever). But consider twitter: >Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done! And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen…

Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better? It does not make an iota of difference.

>who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?

the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjoy it.

Mostly because you join, you think "this is confusing but I've arrived" and there's a few hundred people on the same instance who are interested in similar things, who know people from other instances who have similar interests, etc. I think it might help build a network quicker (or at least, that's what I've heard from a lot of newer people that have joined since I've been there!)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#149

Post by mortenjorck » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

This is about as useful to countering toxicity as, say, not supporting avatars and claiming your experience is superior to Twitter because no one can upload a swastika.

To start, the author doesn't get the terminology right: A retweet on Twitter is the un-commented repost to which Mastodon's "boost" is analogous, whereas a "quote tweet" is the thing Mastodon doesn't have native support for. Twitter didn't natively support quoting either until comparatively recently in its history, and there was plenty of toxicity on the platform before then.

Before native quote-tweet support, you would just see a URL to the tweet someone was commenting on, and you'd have to click to view it rather than seeing it expanded inline, which is no less possible on Mastodon. And since this is really up to the client anyway, there's no reason a Mastodon client couldn't auto-expand quoted "toots," nullifying this supposed advantage.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#150

Post by xigma » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

dangom wrote: post #64

simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

> Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. Not necessarily true. > Showing bad ideas to be bad is very important in civil discourse, not being able to point out bad ideas by "retweeting" them with commentary will likely make this social network an echo chamber devoid of intellectual curiosity Theoretically yes, but the problem with Twitter is not "properly" refuting ideas, because there is no such t…

> Not allowing awfulness to spread could be more efficient than helplessly trying to refute it.

Didn't you just basically say that what is "awful" is subjective? You're basically saying "maybe echo chambers are better".

I generally agree with "people will tend to believe whatever they want", but many people do change their minds, especially as they age. Pushing people into the underground just makes them more extreme.

Also, don't underestimate the power of public mockery. What makes Nazism most unattractive isn't the fact that it's abhorrent from some moral perspective (that not everybody shares), it's the fact that most actual Nazis are total losers by every measure.