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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?

#101

Post by onion2k »

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…

Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.

You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough.

What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful.

Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)

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

#102

Post by gonehome »

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 issues.

Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.

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.

To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

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

#103

Post by krisoft »

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?

> Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs?

There can be many different perspectives on it.

A possible perspective is someone who uses twitter. If Elon cut jobs too hastily that might risk the stability, safety, or moderation of the platform. That is a valid concern for users.

If you are an advertiser for a big brand you are concerned about what content your advertisement appears next to. Brands don’t want to see their names plastered next to things which are too controversial, or frowned uppon. This is called “brand safety”. They might worry that a deep cut in twitter’s headcount will mean that twitter can’t quarantee that they can maintain the required level of moderation for this.

There is then the perspective of a regular everyday person who is not a twitter user in any way. They are interested in a safe society. If the changes at twitter lead to an under moderated free-for-all that can give power to all kind of dangerous individuals. Radicalisation is a real thing. Free rethoric against groups of people can lead to more radical rethoric. And more radical speech can lead to violence.

> It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish.

Of course! That is without dispute. One can be concerned about how something is managed even if the owners of said something has every right to manage the think the way they want it.

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

#104

Post by nimchimpsky »

ambrozk wrote: post #65
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…

> 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, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers…

No post body was provided.

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

#105

Post by manmal »

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

I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by _djo_ »

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.)

The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi. It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about it.

The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices.

Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them.

Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that.

[0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand...

[1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...

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

#108

Post by Reventlov »

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…

You mean, federated systems like the web or email won't succeed ?

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

#109

Post by kemayo »

expensive_news wrote: post #98
forgotusername6 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it’s been public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took over. If jobs don’t generate money they can’t exist in the free market, and the real shock is that the previous board of directors didn’t initiate layoffs sooner.

I've seen it claimed that the $4M/day figure is mostly because of the debt servicing cost that Musk's acquisition added to the company's books.

The new debts apparently add over $1 billion / year in interest payments alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/elon-musk-twit...

(Being able to do this as part of a buyout sounds ridiculous, I know. And yet.)

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

#110

Post by locallost »

Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More and more people are posting that they're trying it out without leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too. Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know. But they got the ball rolling a little bit.
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