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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

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

#191

Post by TaylorAlexander »

addajones wrote: post #35
nimbius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the…

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

People really like twitter. They’re concerned about the new guy coming in and making rash decisions with shaky justification. Millions of people have to deal with the implications of his decision. Just because it’s his legal right doesn’t mean people have to be happy about what he’s doing. And it’s yet another reminder that we’d rather be on platforms where users have some amount of power, but network effects and billions in investment favor platforms where that’s not the case.

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

#192

Post by fsdjkflsjfsoij »

code_runner wrote: post #132
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…

I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated. I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work. Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like th…

> and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers

Doing that with this level of success in these domains is extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the investors are far more important than the workers.

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

#193

Post by bombcar »

gpm wrote: post #84
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and I'll accept the claims of federated platform.

Mastodon publishes RSS feeds, take a username and server and make a url that looks like this: https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss

You can import https://twitter.com/elonmusk directly into an RSS reader if you want, still.

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

#194

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

miked85 wrote: post #137
greenie_beans wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mastodon's ux is terrible, but urbit's ux is like 100x worse

I'm pretty sure no one (including myself) even understands what urbit is.

It's very simple, this summary explains everything: https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945

Kidding aside, I think it's unlikely that a deliberately obfuscated project will conquer the world.

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

#195

Post by galangalalgol »

torginus wrote: post #149
code_runner wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated. I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work. Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like th…

If that's all he is doing - paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?

Because it is hard to trust those you hand your money to and not get in the way by checking in too often. Also, not every passionate engineer should be trusted that much. Being able to spot those that are passionate about what you want done, while simultaneously being both competent and trustworthy is a skill that will make you very wealthy, and almost no one has it consistently. A success or three may show that he is one of those people. Or that he is survivorship bias waiting for a reality check. I don't know how to tell, or I would be quite wealthy as well.

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

#196

Post by bluesign »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #50
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

> I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN.

I don't think this is empathy related to be honest ( as your statement is "a man that rich firing loads of people." )

It is either wrong to fire those people, or not. If it is not wrong to fire those people, it shouldn't matter who did it.

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

#197

Post by toofy »

papito wrote: post #71
nimbius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the…

And he doesn't even take it that well. Criticize Musk and the whining ensues. You see, the richest man on the planet IS the victim.

> And he doesn’t even take it that well.

no, he really doesn’t. he very publicly blocked the ceo of an advertising company when they attempted to—professionally and politely—explain to elon what some of their concerns were.

it’s unreal how he’s so loudly demonstrating his instability and then complaining that people are saying he’s unstable.

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

#198

Post by jurassic »

smcl wrote: post #83
squidbeak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have man…

Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...

The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to buy it.

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

#199

Post by robswc »

petepete wrote: post #89
abzolv wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.

It definitely is. You just need to look at some Mastodon conversations from non-tech Twitter. People are confused about: * there are so many servers - which do I join? * how will I be able to tell people are who they say they are without the 'blue tick'? * if anyone can verify how do I know who is important/celebrity/official? * what do I do when the instance I want to join isn't open to registrations (and why on ear…

Exactly. Think of how many products succeed just because they're "easier" than the alternatives.

You could probably be up and tweeting in just a few minutes. You could be posting or commenting on reddit (provided the sub) in just a few minutes.

I remember being interested in Mastodon as a technology a few years back. It has _always_ been confusing for a significant # of people. A decent % posts about it shouldn't be "how do I sign up, how do I follow people, how do I subscribe, which do I join, etc." That's all the Mastodon reddit was a few years back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/top/?sort=top&t=week

Seems like minus all the posts about current events, it's still largely lots of confused users. Which sucks, because the idea seems pretty good in theory. My only qualm (besides what's already been mentioned) is what's to stop instances from colluding like reddit with it's "powermods" ? Which can honestly be worse in a lot of cases.

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

#200

Post by PebblesRox »

adam_arthur wrote: post #187
sydney6 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are so many people calling Elon Musk by his first name, like he's their buddy or neighbor? This reminds me when Steve Jobs had passed away, many people were walking the streets with candles and cards in memoriam of "Steve". How come?

Probably because it's a unique enough name to not introduce ambiguity. Nobody can just say Steve or Bill without confusing people

Plus Musk is kind of a weird word.
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