Earlier quoted context omitted.
Terrible take, sacrificing integrity for uptime.
Well, this is obviously become I'm a terrible person lacking integrity.
Your words.
Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
181–190 of 257 posts
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in their hands today. Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's explore... They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every touch point. They preserve your…
They also have obvious downsides, so I don't think there's any harm in attempting to create alternatives.
They do, but that's kind of my point. Libraries full of articles have been written about the negative aspects of these services. Many perfectly accurate, no disagreement here.
But think about it. We have networks in which we can connect to any other connected human being. Post near-unlimited amounts of content which is reliably preserved. We have well functioning-apps and reliable services, and relatively clean content. For the price of: 0$, and ads.
What I'm getting at is that all this stuff that we take for granted, isn't a given or free when you scale Mastodon. It costs real money to run instances which hampers growth and sustainability. There's a steep human costs to moderation.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember how pessimistic they were about Reddit? And some other successful startups? Someone made a full list of the predictions that were completely off once... No idea how to find that but it's out there.
HN has become The Establishment, it skews older, and thus is extremely skeptical of any change to the comfortable status quo. It's of course supremely ironic in a community that (originally) represented the Silicon Valley startup culture of Disrupt Everything.
> Silicon Valley startup culture
The answer might lay in that, I guess. Mastodon isn't much of a venture capital opportunity. No startup in the space is likely to return billions.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is another question. For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being closed. Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all media…
I feel like you give too little credit to the "normies". My 92 year-old grandmother figured out how to join plenty of forums for her birdwatching and knitting and whatnot hobbies (classic phpBB style things). Choosing an instance is no more complicated than that, but you get the added bonus of being able to interact with the other forums, too.
I suspect we disagree on what a normie is.
I do a lot of tech support for the elderly in my family and they don't grasp concepts a hundred times simpler than a server/instance, and they're in their 70s. It's not an age thing, it's an education thing. The vast majority of the world is lowly educated.
Besides tech skills, the additional issue is that some people are entitled. They reject any service that adds friction, since they're used to zero friction. The Tiktok effect.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are some differences that are key. 1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100 million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine. Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small percentage of their twitter audience. 2. Usenet failed largely because it was ove…
Regarding 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any messaging service that intends to connect people across the world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one. Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?
The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers.
The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service.
So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse servers despite the lack of any current or former presidents there.
People who want to follow whatever Obama wants to say can do so in any number of ways. The Fediverse might be one of those ways, or not, and it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse if it weren't.
I mean, I see stuff from the most recent former president all the time, and he's on neither twitter nor the fediverse.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) sign up for twitter 2) tweet 3) no one responds 4) quit twitter This problem is magnified with blue check marks. The engagement problem is obvious. Twitter prioritizes influencers over end users and doesn’t have the appeal of Facebook.
I don't understand. Are you entitled to someone's attention and engagement?
How can Twitter make money without high engagement scores? Do you know of a profitable social media platform with users that do not partake in content creation and commenting?
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#187I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it. Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and…
I agree that the thing preventing people for years from making their own Twitter Clone was never the technical hurdle of replicating twitter's microblogging platform, but the network effect that Twitter had. Twitter at its source is a simple CRUD system. Yes it encounters exciting complications at scale to manage that amount of data, but its still a CRUD application.
However, if there ever were a time when the network effect could shift enough to "cross the chasm" to public adoption, it is now (and quite literally TODAY).
People are looking for an alternative. Mastadon is the closest to achieving it. There are plenty of things I don't like about Mastadon, but unfortunately I think thats what we have. I do believe that the time is right for a clone to exist and actually gain significant adoption. As more and more prominent "influencers" (i hate that term, but its the reality) move off of Twitter and onto Mastadon, the masses will move where the influencers are. Remember that something like 95% of social media users are "lurkers". They don't create content, they only consume it. So they will move to where the creators are and if their creators are on Mastadon, then the masses will move over there.
Note: "Crossing the Chasm" is a marketing term that refers to the inflection point where early adopters and mass minority have joined a platform, and then majority mass follows. For example, when your parents started joining Facebook, that was Facebook "crossing the chasm".
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#188If I was in charge of Twitter, I'd remake it so that it's just a Mastodon server.
Suddenly, no reason to migrate to another server, as you can just stay in the biggest one and keep your clout.
Google pulled off something similar with gtalk and XMPP. Remember Jabber?
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it. Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and…
Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter user).
That’s the Mastodon Fediverse, it went like Twitter but faster.
Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…
Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average…
> maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience
It certainly needs less features. I'm sure quite a bit of Twitter's infrastructure is dedicated to ads and analytics.