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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

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

#111

Post by briantakita »

sigmar wrote: post #55
vorpalhex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than the various other social media sites that don't require subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notific…

> Why can't it work for twitter?

Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter?

> Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.

Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.

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

#112

Post by nojito »

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…

Not sure why this growth is relevant. Think back to people moving off of Github to alternatives.

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

#113

Post by tayo42 »

kemayo wrote: post #88
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? 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. Absent a few questions about whether the layoffs have been done in a way that violates employment laws (which I've seen enough debate about that I imagine we'll have to see how lawsuits turn out), I don't think anyone is say…

To add to that first point there's rumors they're asking people to come back. Maybe confirmed by now?

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

#114

Post by nathias »

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…

> It's the worst of both worlds.

Yea, I've been saying the same for some time. I really want for decentralized solutions to proliferate, but federation is a terrible model.

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

#115

Post by gonehome »

Reventlov wrote: post #108
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 ?

Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.

The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.

We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.

[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

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

#116

Post by parineum »

notimetorelax wrote: post #54
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I recently started reading history and it speaks a lot about land ownership and how peasants would get indebted to barons for working on it. On the surface that made a lot of sense, and yet this was not the type of society we wanted. Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is…

> Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land

I'm pretty sure you missed the important point of that history you've been reading. The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership.

> On the surface that made a lot of sense

To whom?

> So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the peasants didn’t earlier.

There are a plethora of companies that behave in this exact way that millions of people continue to patronize in a much more substantial manner than they do Twitter (Food, vehicles, electronics, etc.).

Musk's behavior is not new, unique or shocking. These people are overplaying their outrage over his behavior because they don't like the man and Twitter is their safe space. It has absolutely nothing to do with his actual business practices.

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

#117

Post by thorncorona »

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…

You say this but people have tried this with voat.co against Reddit

The only people who end up sticking are the ones banned from Twitter.

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

#118

Post by Timshel »

manmal wrote: post #105
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 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.

That would be kind of awesome I think :).

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

#119

Post by Karunamon »

joshmanders wrote: post #72
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.

> "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong. Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!

It is somewhat telling that those who used to dismiss all complaints about Twitter's moderation practices with a variation of the "private companies can do whatever they want" canard, are not really repeating that one anymore, or worse, seem to have abandoned that principle outright and are now complaining that the owner is, indeed, doing whatever he wants.

Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its acquisition. It has had 2 profitable years in its entire life. Corporations are not charities and it absolutely beggars belief that people seem to think radical changes were not both necessary and inevitable.

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

#120

Post by nathias »

Reventlov wrote: post #108
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 ?

email is one to one, and works well with that model, but twitter is many-to-many and loses a lot with federation
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