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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?

#201

Post by raytube »

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…

I have no clue which previous server I signed up to. And looking through themed servers I found one with an interest, but it's hardly my only interest and was met with welcome text saying post something interesting.

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

#202

Post by expensive_news »

eftychis wrote: post #142
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…

Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?

He’s kind of said it himself on multiple occasions.

“Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/jack/status/1518772754782187520

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

#203

Post by unity1001 »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#204

Post by pjc50 »

sydney6 wrote: post #178
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…

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?

Celebrities induce parasocial relationships. None of those come close to the response to the death of Diana.

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

#205

Post by rvz »

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…

This. They're right you know.

> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.

This is the media capitalising at the maximum over the emotions of the tech crowd to move to a platform that is worse than Twitter, especially in UX and is essentially a solution that is creating more problems than it is trying to solve.

It really is not early days anymore with this, and the hype around Mastodon is manufactured by outrage due to 'Elon Musk' being the new villain of the month. If you have to explain what Mastodon is, which server you have to choose and how to find which people you followed on Twitter are on Mastodon due to its poor discoverability, then it tells us that it is another pointless hurdle for users to bear with, resulting in a worse experience.

Mastodon clearly is a solution that is creating more problems for users and the media is clearly parroting over the hype and emotion to pretend that it is an alternative or a threat to Twitter.

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

#206

Post by stormbrew »

bombcar wrote: post #159
Timshel wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be kind of awesome I think :).

It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over various instances themselves that were infighting. But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.

Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it.

Ya know, like their email servers.

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

#207

Post by unity1001 »

expensive_news wrote: post #202
eftychis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?

He’s kind of said it himself on multiple occasions. “Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.” https://mobile.twitter.com/jack/status/1518772754782187520

He will likely come back.

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

#208

Post by CuriousCosmic »

vorpalhex wrote: post #31
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…

The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)

An AI ethics team is 100% a core team for a business like twitter. Facebook has already proven that such a team is necessary [1] to prevent atrocities from occurring. Being able to identify biases in the content selections by "the algorithm" (read: a bundle of fancy heuristics) is a core part of their job. Their job is to identify ways bad actors are abusing their content propagation algorithms and ways to mitigate these abuses.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

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

#209

Post by georgeg23 »

darawk wrote: post #161
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…

How many rich people and fund managers around the world have been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for the past several decades? How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.

The mastermind behind SpaceX is not Elon. It's this guy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

He gave Elon the ideas, initial team, govt connections, contracts, etc.. Elon was the company jester.

Rocket landing work was taken from the DC-X

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

#210

Post by pessimizer »

wheats wrote: post #21
primeradical wrote: post #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.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the plat…

> you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run.

As long as "your data" doesn't include your history, as far as I understand? You can leave your home server as long as you're willing to leave everything you ever wrote.

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