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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

11–20 of 521 posts

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#11
For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it won't be the case.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#12
Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone.

If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#13

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better.

So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#14

I think a lot of instances are about to experience their own version of the Eternal September.

I agree. It’s going to be the worst thing that happened to some of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the entire thing doesn’t fall over.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#15

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Why can't it get enough reach?

What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#18
post #15

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction:

If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV).

Is the same true for toots?

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#19
post #15

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

> Why can't it get enough reach?

> What if each news outlet ran their own server?

I think you answered your own question.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#20

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.
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