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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

41–50 of 472 posts

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#41

I liked Mastodon when it first came out. But nowadays it’s seems to be more like a Left wing version of Gettr. Wouldn’t use either.

We're more polarized now compared to when mastodon, and twitter, were first introduced. I'm convinced making a twitter clone is going to be impossible as most people are seeking to sort themselves into ideological buckets at the outset.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#42
post #26

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know…

My impression is that he has a unique way of building “Brand Elon” which seems to work because of the times we’re in.

He enters like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything regardless of quality or value. He then hands over day-to-day running to a team of competent people to build it back up as something new, but leveraging the original brand. Elon Musk then gets the credit because of legendary stories of all his hard work.

His social media presence causes competent people to underestimate him as a joke, not realising he’s playing by different rules to most businesses. On the other hand, it causes his personal army of fanboys to overestimate him as some kind of business genius. Really, he’s just a social media celebrity in an age when people give huge financial value to that status.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#44

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.

people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#45
post #26

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know…

>But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails.

This works in small starting companies not in a Behemoth like Twitter.

And I doubt he fixed so much. The traffic problems he claimed to fix with the Boring Company are nowhere near fixed, same with FSD.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#46

I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon. I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it…

Email isn’t really an exception - it’s largely another federated system failure with most users on one centralized system (gmail).

You can’t even run an email server yourself without getting blacklisted these days. I doubt Twitter is going anywhere, I’m not even sure it can be replaced, it’s an unusual niche product of its time and network.

Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems that lead to centralization either so most users end up on one server. Back to the same issues, except the experience is also worse than a competent centralized system.

To solve this for real you have to solve spam (need IDs), there can’t be a distinction between a user account and a server, and the server needs to be trivial to run and manage with automatic updates.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#48

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

For Mastodon to 'work' in a way I'd enjoy, it would need a culture that it just does not have, and that has never emerged from any microblogging platform. The Fediverse as a whole is filled with enraged culture warriors, going out of their own way to be upset and exclude others.

I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion. And I know for a fact that the large instances that operate in that way would immediately defederate for wrongthink.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#49
> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out

So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?

Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

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