I must be missing something, all I'm seeing on Mastodon is people talking about Mastodon and Musk and Twitter. Its even more insufferable than the twitter discourse right now.
Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
131–140 of 245 posts
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…
> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months.
But things probably will change meaningfully in the near future. You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise.
People trade futures options all the time.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…
I would be much more afraid of a world where the major public square is privately owned and governed by a single individual with a proven history of public manipulation.
Identity politics is just a stupid sideshow, a distraction.
A private Twitter?.that's terrible. 100 times Bezos WaPo. It's the ball park of Mordoch publuc manipulation.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#134If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…
> it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote…
>He is tearing down moderation
How? Indeed, he hasn't changed anything about moderation (except applying to to everyone universally)
>crapping on verification
By expanding it to anyone willing to pay instead of it being some exclusive club where people had to literally bribe twitter employees tens of thousands for the coveted blue check? Yup - he's totally going backwards!
> and injecting itself on electoral politics.
lol - Twitters whole reason to exist for the last six years was to be the amplifier for one particular political ideology. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't an injection into electoral politics?!? How rich!
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#135Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new se…
The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are. Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.
A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
They literally link it at the end of the article with "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com " On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
Mastodon is federated, so users of their instance are able to interact with the wider set of Mastodon instances, much like people with @google.com emails can interact with people with @microsoft.com emails, despite both instances being separately controlled and not open to people outside their respective companies. Not having an account on an instance, in other words, is not the same as it not being accessible.
Has anyone ever watched a single person try to understand what you just said?
"I have a mastodon account. Why can't I view their mastodon posts? Mastodon is broken".
End of story. Platform is done. The fact that people are trying to say this is good enough absolutely infuriates me, and is makes me wonder if people actually know the technical level of the average user, not the programmers they work with.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future. > Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. I me…
Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
>Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses.
Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems more likely than it did a week ago, that he has no idea how to actually turn Twitter into a success.
>What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
Content and followers on Twitter cannot easily and directly be transferred somewhere else. Any personal investment a user makes into Twitter today is at risk of being worthless if Twitter disappears. Whether that matters you or not depends on why you use Twitter. If it is for fun, that isn't a real risk. But plenty of people use Twitter as part of their job and these people really need to start considering if investing in their Twitter account is worth it compared to moving that effort somewhere else.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
should be wordpress-level easy at least. But last i checked it wasnt easy. Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers
Just today I paid for a domain name in name.com. As part of the package, they sold me a hosted & managed WordPress installation for $60 USD a year. I was positively impressed (last time I setup a WP server I paid $5 a month for DigitalOcean, which makes it $60 for something I have to manage). Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" se…
Now if only there was a popular registrar with a streamlined interface that wasn't constantly trying to up sell you.
Personally I would prefer to see registrars limit themselves to providing domain names. But for that to work seamlessly they all need to support an open DNS protocol that makes it easy for users to delegate subdomains to 3rd-party apps and services. Something like DomainConnect[0] but with better support for selfhosting[1].
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are. Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.
It's actually infuriating to read. If it's harder than "App downloaded, account made" then you've already lost. Anything more complex than that is a complete non-starter.
Lost what, exactly ? Contrary to the capitalistic world of Twitter, where bigger faster is always better, the fediverse is not about that. If you don't want to adapt and are just trying to recreate Twitter, it's a complete non-starter.
Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server
#140If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…
Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.
If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long.
I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.