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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?

#251

Post by georgeg23 »

trident5000 wrote: post #243
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

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

....and Griffin gave him ~$2B of taxpayer money. (DARPA and COTS contracts before SpaceX flew a single rocket and CRS for Falcon 9). All discussed in the link above.

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

#252

Post by ceejayoz »

colin_jack wrote: post #214
PebblesRox wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic, and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even bigger bump. I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the ye…

> The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter Yeah definitely, feels like they should have seen this coming though. They have an opportunity that won’t come around again, and poor performance and confusing UX seem like pretty serious problems.

“They” describes a non-profit, low-resourced set of volunteers. Seeing it coming and being able to do something about it aren’t the same thing.

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

#253

Post by mirekrusin »

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

Why there has to be "one mastermind guy"?

It seems safe to say that you need to dovetail at least dozens of people to have successful rocket launching, well, startup?

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

#254

Post by baby »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #244

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 t…

HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all.

Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.

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

#255

Post by 01100011 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #244

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 t…

Hackernews isn't for hackers.

If anything, it's geared towards software engineers, most of which aren't anything like "hackers" and can swing fairly convervative on many topics.

This place isn't old school slashdot. If anything it's more for people that just want to get rich in tech at all costs.

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

#257

Post by drstewart »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instanc…

Yep. Look at how Signal displaced Whatsapp (if anyone remembers this app that no longer exist) when users flooded over to it due to Musk-related controversies!

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/7/22218989/signal-new-signup...

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

#258

Post by robryan »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instanc…

Google plus had 90 million users sign up in the first 6 months.

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

#259

Post by sangnoir »

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 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.

Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years.

The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.

Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-Twitters.

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

#260

Post by gaoshan »

Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.
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