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Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

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Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait and see what happens. The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.

> The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. Have they not changed? This is a genuine question. How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives? Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise unti…

>>The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.

>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.

A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.

With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#302

Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome. Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.

How do posts from other Fediverse networks work on Mastodon?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's censorship is even worse than Twitter's, so I would expect Reddit to be next on the list of places to liberate on the Internet.

"Censorship" has always been a dog whistle for "not letting propaganda and incitement run rampant".

Reddit banned r/TumblrInAction, a subreddit whose purpose was pointing out hateful content on other social networks.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#304

Obligatory reminder that Mastodon is a user interface for a defederated network commonly called the Fediverse, and that referring to the Fediverse as "Mastodon" is like referring to the web as Chrome. Spitting into the wind at this point, I know, but it still bothers me.

Is that true? I thought that e.g. PeerTube was part of the Fediverse, but Mastodon doesn't work as an interface to PeerTube.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#305

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

Or an opt-in for submitting a piece of private information like a phone, an email, a public key, etc. so you can prove who you are to your friends. Who am I kidding, these people are looking for an audience, not their friends.

I wonder how email as private information would be different to the mastodon username, aren't both practically identical with the exception of one additional @?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#306

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter. The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to chang…

So instead of Mastodons @user@server.tld we would use user@server.tld and that would help how?

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#307

Doesn't this prove the value to users of a centralized platform over a federated platform? The centralized platform made it very easy to find people. Now people who are moving to a federated platform miss the value of centralization, so they are writing a tool that will leverage that value and import it into the federated platform. Maybe if Mastodon was a centralized Twitter-style platform it would be more usable, an…

even if this were true, which i'm not sure it is, it isn't a reason to make the whole platform centralized. you could argue that there's benefit to centralized friend-finder tools, but there's no reason that has to be tied to a centralized platform. a decentralized and open-access platform allows for choice and competition amongst friend-finder tools

Also wouldn't it make sense to have different friend finder tools with different content/parts of the fediverse?

I'm thinking if I'm a Nazi I mostly care about other Nazis and would not go to the normie mastodon friend finder tool but the one which finds all my friends on our Nazi mastodon instances and vice versa.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#308

When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason? It's easy to build silos, which is what most instances are. Mastodon just reinvented single sign-on. It's not a terrible thing to build, but whenever you make a product that's just imitating someone else (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mas…

> When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- y…

hmm, that's the example that made it click for me: my identity has little or nothing to do with my topic, in email, twitter, blogging - having an identity that's related to a themed server doesn't feel like the right layer at all.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#309

If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.

For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might have content policies in place.

But all the social networks are owned by a few individuals. Even twitter before musk bought it was owned by a select few (with real control), and they already dictated the rules based on their own likes/dislikes... that's what started this whole thing in the first place.

Re: Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon

#310

On the topic of Twiter, Mastodon, and the Fediverse, why do federated FOSS alternatives to popular platforms not offer a read-only version of said platform as one of its instances to augment its lack of content? In the example of Twitter, Nitter already exists as an alternative front-end. Now what if there's a Mastodon instance that uses Nitter to wrap official Twitter content and serve it as if it where the twitter.…

There is a lot of Twitter content out there. Too much for a single instance to proxy. I believe there are projects to mirror specific Twitter accounts to a (personal) Mastodon server so you can switch apps without needing two apps. I'm not sure what the implication would be for privacy/data usage regulations if you open those messages to the public, though; blindly reposting everything may actually violate data priva…

Interestingly I started using Twitter as a write only medium, which means I didn't have any interactions there with anyone. This led to the subscribers stagnating, everyone who already was subscribed stayed subscribed but no new people would subscribe for years.
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