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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#341

Post by PurpleRamen »

scabarott wrote: post #311
adventured wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To simplify the issue here: Amazon made buying books 10x easier, and expanded the easily purchasable selection by more than 10x. Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances. It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquire…

>>It's the standard techie failure to understand average users You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.

Except those techies fail all the time. But they are big enough that the fails don't matter on the long run.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#342

Post by zimpenfish »

bitbckt wrote: post #262
irq-1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas for killer features: Feeds. Creators collect and filter on subject, importance and volume. Follow a Feed instead of a person. Locality. Connect people in an area, like Facebook starting in schools. Use age and membership (church, work, school) for getting people onto a server where they know people. Events and Calendar. Instead of posts with date/time information, make a different type. Let people view aggregat…

Using “tweet” infringes on Twitter’s trademark. (IANAL, but former tweep)

You'd have to think that the trademark would be sufficiently diluted by common usage by now that it was heading rapidly towards invalidation (cf hoover, xerox, etc.)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#343

Post by ivan_gammel »

danShumway wrote: post #312
ivan_gammel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In good old times we had IRC, where you could go to channel op and report an abusive message. Or to bot master, or to server admin. Depending on personality of that guy (usually they were guys, not girls), it could end with a ban for the offender or personal attack on you. The problem with actual human is that actually you cannot trust him to govern without being accountable, even if you know him and even if currentl…

> I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding. Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they…

That's exactly the point: regular users don't care, so they won't consider Mastodon based on whether it can be trusted or not. For those who care Mastodon pretends to provide a trustworthy service, but in fact it's no better than Twitter or anything else. Even if current situation with moderation is better, it's the same as to advertise participating in some deadly stunt on the ground that "noone died yet". Where are the guarantees that an instance admin that is "out of patience" (you can find such example somewhere in comments here) would not decide to ban you from her instance in a bad mood?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#344

Post by nanimo »

tomjen3 wrote: post #218
teaneedz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you nailed the USP of Mastodon. Keeping out the marketers, advertisers, vanity metric chasing or fandom makes Mastodon that peaceful scenic beach where your fellow beach goers say hello and share some of their food with you. I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.

That is kind of funny, because Twitter can totally be that, if you want it. You have to be liberal in your usage of the block button, but the advantage is that you have so many genuinely interesting people to follow and learn from. I wouldn't have 1 in 1000 of those on Masterdon, and with their doubling of tweet size, I don't see the problem with arguments. Before anybody goes about the ecochamber: I ban obnoxious pe…

> I don't ban for sincerely held, well argued politics.

But that's subjective, so you'll just end up reinforcing your own opinions, which is exactly what an echo chamber is, unless I'm missing something...

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#345

Post by ivan_gammel »

egypturnash wrote: post #301
twblalock wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds more arbitrary and a lot worse than Twitter’s policy.

shrug You want a more lawyer-like policy with tons of explicit rules for people to try and work around, then run it yourself. You trust your admin to not screw you over the same way you trust, say, the people who run that chill coffeehouse you’re a regular at.

Coffeehouse is heavily regulated. There's consumer rights protection, all sorts of safety inspections etc. The only thing that requires your trust in a coffeehouse is the quality of their coffee and the only damage you'll get with the breach of that trust is the price of a cup. Being banned from a social network harms you more than that.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#346

Post by zimpenfish »

cabalamat wrote: post #321
komali2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population

Do you have a source for that number?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#348

Post by yborg »

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".

People thought precisely the same thing about "tweet" when Twitter first came out.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#349

Post by yborg »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #62
wool_gather wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?

It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English: 1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn , which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]". 2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children. Notably, an elephant using i…

So I'm born and raised in the US Midwest, and in my entire life 'toot' was never used as euphemism for 'fart' except in the context of the elementary school rhyme. I can perfectly understand people not liking the sound of the word or even how it looks, but the fart connotation seems like a manufactured rationale to me. Actually, for the population that would possibly use the word that way, i.e. 8 year-olds, the usage would be a positive feature, not a negative.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#350

Post by icc97 »

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…

I see this as similar to a Windows vs Linux thing. Where as Mastodon might never be popular there's nothing to stop it existing. People can find their own communities however small and be content in those.

Regular people never used Linux and they still don't use Linux desktops. But there's still lots and lots of Linux desktop distros that people who use love. Not many people have genuine affection for using Windows, but when someone's installed their own distro they have genuine affection for using it. They'll donate hours and hours of their free time fixing issues.

People currently have genuine affection for using a mastodon instance. Genuine affection is a very powerful tool.

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