doesnt seem like many when you realize there's only 300k verified users, and they're part of the base that generates the most content/engagement.
it really doesnt take a lot of users to destroy twitter.
Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
71–80 of 276 posts
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Centralization makes it harder to deal with bad actors, because the cost of moderating a huge platform is massive, and the centralized social media platforms we have today have been unable or unwilling to do it. Federal platforms like Reddit and Discord are able to moderate effectively, on the other hand, because the cost of moderation is devolved to the municipal governments: subreddits and servers. Moderation at th…
That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.
What if the only thing that exists that can do that is (gag) Facebook?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#73It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi ol…
> So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers. That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy; most of the people I follow are on other, more specialised sites.
This is very confusing. Why do they largely interconnect? (Why do they connect at all / why don't they always connect?) What's the point of multiple sites if they connect to each other?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up
Ok, what about Google+?
Google really timed that badly. Launching it branded that way precisely when their own brand was starting to become "uncool" and at a time when Facebook was in heavy ascendance.
But it was a better product, to me, and I enjoyed the groups and such I was on in G+. I think if it was around today, maybe with different branding, it would actually be doing quite well.
Internally @ Google most Googler's resented G+ for the way Vic ran the project and the way L&S let that happen. But it was implemented fairly well. I think it mainly confused the public because it was not Facebook and not Twitter, a bit nerdy, and it did poorly at the kind of network-effect "friends gathering" thing that boosted Facebook in its growth phase (and MySpace and Friendster before that...)
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#75To those who say Twitter has such expansive network effects it can't be replaced
AOL was replaced
Twitter is AOL
QED
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#76Is that significantly more than average over the same time period? Would imply a fairly low adoption rate even at that peak, if it was one.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#77Can someone explain how Mastodon works?
Right now I can sign up at twitter.com and get to see and talk to everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for Mastodon and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same?
(the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream)
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#78That's 0.003% of Twitter's "monetizable" daily active users.
No one was expecting that half the users would just go away in the first few days of the Musk regime. The problem for Musk is that he can't afford to drive anyone away, or reduce engagement with the platform. Unless he is willing to subsidize the losses out of his own pocket.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than counting users, I'll be more interested to see if any specific communities actually manage to collectively transition to another service. It's not 2006 anymore, nobody makes an account on Twitter because they want to "microblog" about the sandwich they had for lunch; no, you make an account on Twitter because, say, you're a ML researcher and all the prominent ML researchers are talking on Twitter. If the…
I suspect that this framing will make the number feel even worse. The number of complete (or even majority) communities that this 70k number represents is surely very nearly zero.
It could be better or worse. Communities tend to follow their core members. If those 70k users were the most connected and central nodes in any of Twitter's thousands of subcommunities, it would precipitate a significant shift. But if those 70k users are leaf nodes, then it will amount to no change as far as Twitter is concerned.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy Mastodon is a mess. Pawoo.net is the LARGEST userbase Mastodon node, professionally ran by a company and is one of the few that can scale appropriately to demand. You'll find that mastodon.social has limited its federation abilities with it. Your choice of Mastodon nodes matter.
So it's not even decentralized but centralized into multiple competing blocs? That just sounds like the worst of both worlds.
From my personal experience in using Mastodon, the node operators basically have different ideas about what is acceptable or not and black/white list different nodes based on these ideas rather than leaving it up to the user to decide who they want to see posts from.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is really unclear when you're first trying to dip your toes into the fediverse and it gets really confusing in some threads when you're missing some of the messages.
I think the worst part is that they've previously advertised you have control of your data. But I can tell you that if you accidentally post something on Twitter and want to delete it, it's trivial, it's gone. On Mastodon, tough, it's been federated and now your deleted message lives on across multiple nodes and you can't delete it -- not out of maliciousness, but because of oversight in the federation protocol design.
The reason I bring the above up is, again, you can miss a lot of bits of conversations entirely dependent on which node you are because some messages are now deleted on the origin node, but not the nodes that has other people replying on.