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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

121–130 of 521 posts

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

#121

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…

mastodon's ux is terrible, but urbit's ux is like 100x worse

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

#122

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…

> Too much friction. So far that's all I've seen from the twitter users I follow. "which one are you on?" "why is this so complicated?" etc.

Not unlike how email was until Hotmail, for example, came along.

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

#123
post #21

Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone. If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the plat…

Those decisions should not be taken at server level but at the level of the user. The way Mastodon is organised it is up to the server administrator to decide whether you get to interact with users on other servers. If the administrator has a bee up his bonnet on some specific subject he'll block any server which doesn't fit his idea of wrong and right with regard to that subject. This quickly leads to islands of server-groups which do not communicate with each other and as such increases the polarisation of the (small-n) netscape. Those on the "progressive" island won't hear much from the "conservative" island and vice-versa.

I've seen several comparisons between Mastodon and email servers where server administrators also have the power to block communication with other servers but those comparisons do not hold since I have yet to find a mail server administrator who blocks communication with certain other servers on ideological grounds. Mail servers are blocked because they are sources of spam, not because they host users with different opinions. Mail content itself is not moderated other than through spam filters which (for now?) do not censor on ideological grounds, "Tweets" and "Toots" are.

A better solution would be to have users select their own moderators just like they can choose their own content filtering (e.g. uBlock Origin) rule sets but I do not see how something like that can be implemented given the way Mastodon works.

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

#124
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the plat…

> Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?

The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of each of your followers informing them of your new handle, which in theory then gets updated seamlessly.

It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.

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

#125
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not describing Elon's content as spam. I'm saying he receives more spam than most people, particularly because he likes to respond to ppl that @ him and is very into crypto.

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

#126

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…

> As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.

For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.

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

#127
post #61

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.)

Do you have a source for those 'silly teams'?

No post body was provided.

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

#128

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…

mastodon's ux is terrible, but urbit's ux is like 100x worse

I don't disagree, but the design of urbit is such that there's a path to it being good - that's not true of any other system built on the current stack (imo) because they don't fix the underlying incentive failures that lead to centralization in the first place.

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

#129
post #71
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…

And he doesn't even take it that well. Criticize Musk and the whining ensues. You see, the richest man on the planet IS the victim.

Not everything people discuss involves a victim.

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

#130

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…

>don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve

I mean it does somewhat solve the problem of Musk running twitter into the ground. For most people, I imagine mastodon is a lateral move, not a step up.

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