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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?

#131

Post by parineum »

kemayo wrote: post #96
joshmanders wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?!

Is this the moment to snarkily bring up "corporations are people, my friend"? :D

"Corporations are people" is the plural of "a corporation is people". It has nothing to do with assigning person hood to a corporate entity. "Corporations are people" is in reference to the 1st amendment free speech rights that the _people_ who make up a corporation still maintain when they are acting as a group.

Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians without understanding the context.

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

#132

Post by code_runner »

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’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated.

I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work.

Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like the media/everyday people hate him for no reason is just dishonest.

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

#133

Post by _djo_ »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
baxtr wrote: post #66

I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now. But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore. Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on ins…

The deal for Musk to buy Twitter was agreed in April. He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.

He had no access to internals during that time, and the calibre of the 'planning' revealed during discovery in the trial was neither deep nor substantial.

There are now reports that some of those laid off are being asked to come back, in a belated recognition that it was a chaotic and flawed process.

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

#134

Post by Gigachad »

gonehome wrote: post #115
Reventlov wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underly…

It’s not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on a vps a few years ago and didn’t have much issues with spam lists. Only gave up because I couldn’t be bothered updating the thing.

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

#135

Post by etchalon »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #48
nemo44x wrote: post #10

The “Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus” is in overdrive this weekend, now providing manuals on how to sign up for a different social network that none of them heard of last week because of Current Thing. We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.

Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and I'll accept the claims of federated platform.

A lot of places never stopped publishing RSS feeds. It's just not a lot of people read them anymore.

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

#136

Post by parineum »

onion2k wrote: post #101
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…

> You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't.

Someone should tell the journalists.

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

#137

Post by miked85 »

greenie_beans wrote: post #121
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…

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

I'm pretty sure no one (including myself) even understands what urbit is.

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

#138

Post by concordDance »

papito wrote: post #71
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…

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.

Money can't buy social acceptance. And once you get beyond the amount needed to live comfortably the latter becomes much more valuable.

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

#139

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains

People also dismiss his failures in hard domains, like The Boring Company.

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

#140

Post by youngtaff »

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.)

He’s burning money because he loaded the company with a billion dollars of debt

Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape

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