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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

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Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#241

Post by mritchie712 »

tchaffee wrote: post #201
tga wrote: post #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.

Accessibility is supposed to change and improve. It's fair to expect that to halt when the entire staff has been fired.

isn't Accessibility one of those things that's "everyones job"? Why would you have a separate team working on it?

Not kicking up shit, genuinely curious why you'd have a separate team work on that, seems like something every engineer needs to know (at least on the frontend) for an app like Twitter.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#242

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

tchaffee wrote: post #219
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #176

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k follow…

Or the simpler answer that doesn't fit your narrative is that lots of folks don't like Musk and his actions and his approach to running businesses. Lots of people find Musk repulsive. It shouldn't be a surprise that those people want to leave.

No post body was provided.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#243

Post by tchaffee »

vorticalbox wrote: post #78
joeevans1000 wrote: post #69

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.

there could be a number of reasons other than "Elon doesn't care about xyz" other members of the dev team can/are already doing this Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job Maybe he has his own team to replace it We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.

> we have zero knowledge

So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#244

Post by newaccount2021 »

atoav wrote: post #188
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #176

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k follow…

For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there. I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.

> For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform.

Maybe you should invest your time productively instead

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#245

Post by briantakita »

twohaibei wrote: post #221
tchaffee wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility is supposed to change and improve. It's fair to expect that to halt when the entire staff has been fired.

In my opinion it's the opposite. The smaller the ship, the sharper the turn.

Especially when the accessibility team acted as political speech commissars.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#246

Post by zero_shift »

atoav wrote: post #188
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #176

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k follow…

For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there. I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.

This is how I feel as well: I’ve been pretty ambivalent about twitter for a while (seems like a good machine for getting into arguments online), but network effects have kept me on it. That network effect might be now be breaking.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#247

Post by hrbf »

Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance.

The alternatives appear to be

* paying around $9/month for a managed instance

* hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service)

* signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest)

None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service.

From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances).

For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#248

Post by briantakita »

kramerger wrote: post #154
tga wrote: post #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.

He also gave you a specific non-political reason (accessibility) in the sentences right above what you quoted.

After watching some interviews with some Twitter employees, I suspect that many in the accessibility team were very political & their politics influenced their decisions.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#249

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

davedx wrote: post #193
schipplock wrote: post #87

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithm…

I constantly switch Twitter back to chronological and immediately notice when it pushes me onto the algo timeline. Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me. I think the only site I…

I haven’t been pushed to algorithmic timeline in months. I think they are just sticky user choices now.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#250

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tchaffee wrote: post #211
sshine wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point being made that Twitter was owned by rich people before Elon bought it.

Twitter was also owned by average people. As are the vast majority of publicly traded companies.

This is false, unless you mean "pension funds".

Most people do not own individual stocks. And in fact, most people do not own stocks at all. The set of stock-owning people is far from average.

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