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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#321

Post by cabalamat »

komali2 wrote: post #237
tomohawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress. Th…

>The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. I think this is untrue. I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand. Your "100%" implies that everyone on say Facebook has to have the same belief system, when that obviously isn't…

> I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

I don't think that's true. Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population, yet he was banned from Twitter.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#323

Post by jamesrcole »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #210
jamesrcole wrote: post #25

I think the term "toots" is spectacularly bad, and could majorly hinder broader uptake of their service. Word of mouth (or 'word of text') is a major way services like this spread. Imagine discussions of Twitter in the media but where the words "tweet" and "tweeted" are replaced with "toot" and "tooted".

The main dev of Mastodon is not American. Toot just means the noise that is made with a trunk, like tweet is supposed to be the same for birds. It's only in the U.S. that 'toot' is some kind of synonym of 'fart' or whatever and I'm honestly tired of Americans imposing their own cultural thinking on everything, instead of trying to actually understand it. The majority of people do not live in the U.S.

It's not just the U.S. I'm from Australia and it's the same here. I would imagine it's also like that in other countries.

In any case, even just considering the US market, it's clearly a very large and important one for any software system. And, what a word means there has nothing to do with Americans imposing things on others.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#324

Post by yumaikas »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #263
papaf wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing. Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free. As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.

Yeah, but I remember when the same thing was said about Diaspora. I remember when the same thing was said about various indie game consoles. I remember when the same thing was said about a whole bunch of social network alternatives that never went anywhere.

I get the feeling that regardless of how much more growth Mastodon gets, it's going to be around and in active use for a long time to come, if only because it's provided a space that is meaningfully different to Twitter.

Will it be the biggest social phenomenon? Probably not. But it already has the critical mass to keep funding its continued development, and lot of interesting voices, if you know where to look.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#325

Post by WilliamEdward »

TillE wrote: post #117
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…

You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032

The problem is that there's a catch-22. Mastodon is actively trying to get more users when more users will inevitably mean a worse community.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#326

Post by s73v3r_ »

jejones3141 wrote: post #319
s73v3r_ wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them” That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.

If the TOS effectively forbids disagreement, what's the difference?

It doesn't. The question still stands.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#327

Post by WilliamEdward »

antidesitter wrote: post #193
simonh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users? It’s also not true of all tech platforms. It’s not true of desktop operating systems for example. Today the desktop is dominated by Apple and Microsoft. Who dominated it 30 years ago? So there’s nothing inevitable about these things.

> If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users? That’s the worst argument ever. You’re just assuming the alternatives will have no users. That’s the worst argument ever.

It's actually in Mastodon's best interest not to attract users since users will rip apart their kind, loving, and neat little community limb from limb.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#328

Post by WilliamEdward »

znpy wrote: post #153
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…

Meh. I see your points, they are all valid and true. Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.

You put a lot of trust into twitter dying, but don't seem to concede that inertia is a gigantic part of what holds twitter above water. Users are already too well established on twitter to leave even in the worst of times (see: facebook incidents), meaning I'm quite doubtful it will die in our entire lifetime let alone soon. Social networks haven't been around long enough to be able to tell whether dying is actually even possible for them.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#329

Post by undoware »

quadrangle wrote: post #261
undoware wrote: post #71

What I find amusing about all these "solutions" to "online outrage" is that they are invariably made by comfortable centrists, with a smattering of libertarians. I can say this with some authority as both of these terms would have aptly described myself, before I lost my career, my home, and everything else in gender transition, and ended up working three minimum wage jobs instead of coding for 2 years. Let me tell y…

I can get behind or at least validate the concerns of everything here except "…bodies who…" If this language aims to show the blunt physical way that others dehumanize the people in question… well, that's not clear. Maybe exploitive actors see others as just "bodies", but that's not a good way to see people. The concept of a "person" is bigger than just their physical body, in the same way that this sentence is bigge…

I used 'bodies' specifically, because that is what we, the precariat, are to the systems that govern our lives.

We are warm bodies. Useful for interfacing with other warm bodies. When those bodies cool, they are discarded.

Yes, it really is like this. If you doubt me, by all means, come check it out.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#330

Post by lokedhs »

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…

Arguably, Twitter doesn't have much "regular users" either.

Most people have never logged in to Twitter, and have no idea how it works. Ask around among the normal people you know if they've ever posted there. A somewhat larger number will say they've used it to read messages from famous people but for most normal people, their Twitter consumption consists of media reports of what someone said on the platform.

As someone who uses Mastodon on a regular basis, I can tell you that it's usable right now, and that I have much better interactions there than anywhere else.

At the moment, Mastodon isn't Paris or London, and thankfully it isn't Las Vegas either. And that might actually be why it's such a nice place.

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