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Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

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Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#11

Post by woah »

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities.

Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there.

Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#13

Post by ipaddr »

woah wrote: post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#14

Post by metadat »

amelius wrote: post #4

Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?

He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources.

p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#15

Post by Ericson2314 »

woah wrote: post #11

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities. Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the…

It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs.

I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#16

Post by cratermoon »

r721 wrote: post #5
cratermoon wrote: post #2

Who do Mastodon's boosters believe is going to be installing and running Mastodon servers?

Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...

A list of the servers is data, but where does one go to find out about the people or organizations running them? How do we know that that a couple of thousand of them aren't all run by one group?

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#17

Post by sseagull »

chatterhead wrote: post #12

Quoted post unavailable.

And yet, lots of people are on there at this moment just having fun. Even if it doesn’t last, oh well.

These complaints remind me of the famous dropbox comment, as well as this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/359/

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#18

Post by cratermoon »

dmitriid wrote: post #10
r721 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...

And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.

I wouldn't say "most". According to that site, of the 4880 instances list, 1909 are close and another ~300 are invite-only.

> it's expensive to run this

As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it was too much work for a little one-person experiment. This is why I ask about who is running instances. Yes, I had a strong hunch it would be all nerds, but I didn't expect it to be require so much sophistication and outlay. One very dedicated person could certainly set up and run an instance, but most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#19

Post by Robotbeat »

metadat wrote: post #14
amelius wrote: post #4

Wasn't it the idea of Musk to give everyone on Twitter absolute freedom of (amplification of) speech?

He stated his true plans privately, these comms were unveiled by the discovery process from the Twitter lawsuit. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources. p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!

That actually seems… pretty reasonable and probably a net good? Why are people so mad about this? The Twitter status quo seems incredibly toxic.

Re: Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media

#20

Post by r721 »

dmitriid wrote: post #10
r721 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is running current 5k servers? Same kind of people. http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...

And most of those servers stopped registrations when the exodus from Twitter began. One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.

Well, the scale of exodus was unanticipated? I mean Paul Krugman who has 4.6M Twitter followers just announced his Mastodon account. I think things will stabilize in a couple of days/weeks.
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