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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?

#141

Post by BlueTemplar »

jimbob45 wrote: post #27
raytube wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

There’s probably a good test for competing products that one could apply. Between my daughter, me, my mother, and my grandmother, how many of us can or will want to switch to the competing product? If it’s too hard for at least two generations, you’re probably not going to meet success because you’ve already lost a large chunk of your potential user base before we even begin discussing if the users want your service…

That's an unfair comparison though. What about someone that never used either of them ? Like someone that just hit 13 (or whatever the minimum legal age is). (See also : TikTok.)

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

#142

Post by eftychis »

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…

Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?

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

#143

Post by __alexs »

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…

Google ad revenue is considerably more than Meta and Twitter combined.

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

#144

Post by raytube »

qabqabaca wrote: post #47
colordrops wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

Nobody uses email to discover new email addresses, outreach is direct. Discoverability is a massive part of social media platforms and is hindered by the isolated pod structure that Mastodon supports

Discoverability and onboarding and authentication is hard.

I remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know' suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross referencing.

I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to grow the list.

Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in Mastodon.

Are we talking timeline/search promotion?

I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did add people if you recognised them.

Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need some nudging.

If I read an article and the author had an easy lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.

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

#145

Post by collegeburner »

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…

i'm pretty sure they know this, but i'm pretty sure they're intentionally trying to "make it a thing"/fake support for it because there's a lot of hate towards musk. i don't like him much but i do like the fact that all these types of blue check journalists are pissed about it.

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

#146

Post by haunter »

sseagull wrote: post #33
abzolv wrote: post #22

The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.

Neither could twitter at the beginning: https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...

Yeah but Mastodon is 6 years old at this point. Is it still the beginning?

6 years old Twitter already had ~200m users in 2012

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

#147

Post by pjc50 »

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.)

> $8/mo is nothing.

Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.

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

#148

Post by karmajunkie »

nathias wrote: post #120
Reventlov wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So all the newsletters I'm on are getting sent out to subscribers one by one? Man, seems really inefficient. If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...

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

#149

Post by torginus »

code_runner wrote: post #132
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 th…

If that's all he is doing - paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?

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

#150

Post by concordDance »

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…

300k users a week? If that rate keeps up for a few years Twitter could be in real trouble...
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