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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?

#241

Post by nemo44x »

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.)

No post body was provided.

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

#242

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

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…

One could argue that the centralization process is already in place. Only servers that are deemed 'acceptable' are recommended ( I think the criteria for acceptability no hate speech, no transphobia, no homophobia ). It is interesting to the point that Guardian in its article trying to describe mastodon suggested it is left leaning. I chuckled. I mean, I suppose it is, but the whole point of an individual instance is just that..

I agree with your point. I think people are generally missing forest for the trees.

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

#243

Post by trident5000 »

georgeg23 wrote: post #209
darawk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Its almost like Elon hired him knowing hes smart or something...

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

#244

Post by cmrdporcupine »

So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up.

A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote. Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what do those people do all day anyways"

Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the legal letter of the GPL? "Don't care, it writes my boiler plate code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose"

A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some popularity? "It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-reaction."

Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the Internet went through several of its early growth explosions, lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture and the open source and free software movement grow throughout the 90s and into the milennium.

People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of that same movement.

When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark -- what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?

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

#245

Post by BryantD »

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.

Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how it works.

You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.

Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.

When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the next prediction.

A track record of success is not sufficient evidence, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades and especially when even the first random success (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.

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

#246

Post by trident5000 »

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #225
georgeg23 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The criticisms are getting more and more comical. Michael is a friend of Elon and trusted Elon with many of his ideas and contacts. I'm sure Musk would say as much. Do you think Michael was sharing these ideas and contacts with just anyone? Why do you think he specifically chose to work with Elon?

"Elon hires people he doesnt do all the work!"

Yes thats why you hire people...to not do all the work. Im pretty sure Elon is aware of this.

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

#247

Post by drstewart »

nimbius wrote: post #25
jmann99999 wrote: post #5

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…

>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…

>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter

So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter?

That's the take you're going with?

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

#248

Post by baby »

georgeg23 wrote: post #209
darawk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit

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

#249

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

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…

>but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it

sure, if you ignore the very only communication method that everyone has - the email.

a myriad others came and went, and none that exist today will be relevant in 50 years, but email will

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

#250

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #192
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…

> 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.

Eh. I dislike Elon, BUT being able to efficiently allocate resources and identify an opportunity and/or valuable employee, who is more than just talk is a valuable skill that surprisingly few people have.
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