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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

theguardian.com

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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#201

Post by VectorLock »

lapcat wrote: post #88
kibwen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on t…

The biggest beneficiary of a Twitter exodus may be... our free time. There's no reason we have to go anywhere after Twitter. Global social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., didn't even exist 20 years ago. We're probably better off without them IMO. The best Twitter replacement may be nothing.

There is a good argument that Twitter and a whole class of other social media and related sites (HN, Reddit, YouTube, TV etc) are "time wasters."

I think if any of these disappeared, or all of them, are people suddenly going to start finding more productive uses of their time? No, they're just going to find other time wasters.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#202

Post by VectorLock »

Krisando wrote: post #69
capableweb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.

As someone with seven Mastodon accounts. I know from experience that it's so easy to choose the wrong node and find out it's not being federated with on other Mastodon nodes. Worst part is even when you run your own Mastodon node, there are some nodes that operate instead in a whitelist mode, so you still lose out.

Federation really does seem more and more to be like a major shortcoming vs. its material benefits.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#203

Post by beeboop »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #168

Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that'…

The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#204

Post by VectorLock »

Krisando wrote: post #80
MichaelZuo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Let the instances choose their own moderation" that people think is a great feature seems to have serious downsides like you're describing. Before on Twitter you knew, generally speaking, what was allowed on Twitter and what wasn't. Now you have not just a whole panoply of different moderation standards, but instances making decisions on if what other people's moderation policies are acceptable to them, which ads a whole level of indirection an opaqueness to users. And forget about any ability to try to appeal...

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#205

Post by VectorLock »

yborg wrote: post #182
MichaelZuo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?

It's not "advertised" as a replacement for Twitter; the word "Twitter" does not appear on the Mastodon homepage. It's talked about because at the moment there aren't many similar alternatives.

Mastodon looks like Twitter, functions like Twitter, apes Twitter's features such as using @username, and even calls its posts "Toots." You really can't honestly argue that Mastodon isn't trying to be Twitter.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#206

Post by VectorLock »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #40
Spivak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s a microblogging platform.

Does a platform of mostly invite only communities count as microblogging? Is Facebook a microblogging platform too?

You can use a service; not all of them are invite only, or you can setup your own blog software. Federation is pretty close to RSS. Yes it's trying to be microblogging.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#207

Post by Sin2x »

ceejayoz wrote: post #65
Sin2x wrote: post #60

Quoted post unavailable.

That doesn’t make sense. ”Mastodon” isn’t a single entity. My just-for-me self-hosted instance certainly doesn’t have censorship.

You are literally one search query away from it making sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_6.pdf

There was a huge uproar about it a couple of years back.

EDIT:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/jkiw1y/can_someon...

Gab was "banned" in that the vast majority of instances blocked it and blocked any other instance that didn't do the same.

If that's not censorship, I don't know what is. You can have your sandbox but you can't play with others unless you accept their censorship rules and politics.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#208

Post by lapcat »

VectorLock wrote: post #201
lapcat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest beneficiary of a Twitter exodus may be... our free time. There's no reason we have to go anywhere after Twitter. Global social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., didn't even exist 20 years ago. We're probably better off without them IMO. The best Twitter replacement may be nothing.

There is a good argument that Twitter and a whole class of other social media and related sites (HN, Reddit, YouTube, TV etc) are "time wasters." I think if any of these disappeared, or all of them, are people suddenly going to start finding more productive uses of their time? No, they're just going to find other time wasters.

> are people suddenly going to start finding more productive uses of their time?

I think switching to "less destructive" would be a big step up.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#209

Post by wintermutestwin »

beeboop wrote: post #203
wintermutestwin wrote: post #168

Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that'…

The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.

So I translate that as "Twitter is a toxic cesspool" :~)

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#210

Post by wintermutestwin »

tensor wrote: post #189
wintermutestwin wrote: post #168

Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that'…

Think of it as a socially driven RSS feed. On the one hand I enjoy following e.g. Science magazine directly. But the social part is that I follow people who post things they find interesting and often I find those things interesting as well. It's not really a platform for discussion as much as sharing links to content.

So it is really a link aggregator with a focus on personalities more than specific topics. Did I interpret you correctly?

If so, I think I'd much rather get the content from a topical aggregator (reddit/forums/blogs). I am interested in such a wide variety of topics that it is much easier to organize my browsing time by topic.

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