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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#151

Post by Exuma »

codesections wrote: post #142
bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter. My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of…

What he's saying is that's not a good enough reason to switch. Regular users simply do not care about any of that, and that's where 90% of your base comes from.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#152

Post by themusicgod1 »

masklinn wrote: post #91
simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit. Refuting bad ideas often takes longer than 240 characters. It's not even the right problem. The problem is not mocking people, disagreeing with them or whatever (incidentally the twitter character limit doesn't preclude external links or tweet chains, which are extremely common at…

> And more generally that kind of crap is easily weaponisable, twitter provides few tools to deal with it, and they don't usually apply their own rules. I don't know that Mastodon is any better.

The key difference here is that, once we've noticed that this lack of context (ie..."has someone already made the point about $G_OUTGROUP_MEMBER_23049 or $G_OUTGROUP_234 that I'm going to make?")...we can actually change the code to Mastodon/whatever fediverse server/client to provide solutions to it(see, for example, pleroma's "did you type 'open source' when you mean 'free software'?). Technical measures could be considered and tested in small instances and then scaled up as they are found to work/not work.

With birdsite you just throw up your hands and say "well, the corporation doesn't think it's a priority. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ "

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#153

Post by znpy »

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

Meh. I see your points, they are all valid and true.

Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#154

Post by tomohawk »

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress.

This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system.

No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#155

Post by gfodor »

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

You realize similar dissmissiveness was levied against Twitter before it took off.

It's hard to predict the fate of social networks.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#156

Post by codesections »

simula67 wrote: post #52

> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…

> I think "Right problem, wrong solution". The reason people mock bad ideas on Twitter is probably because Twitter has a character limit.

Well, I didn't mention it in the post, but Mastodon also ups the character limit to 500 characters (really, even more, because links always count as 24 chars, regardless of actual length). So if you're right that that's part of the problem, then it's also partly addressed.

But I think the bigger issue is that retweets encourage you to try to refute/mock/engage with bad ideas in a tweet. With Mastodon/boots, users tend to just ignore bad ideas (or, if they're really bad, respond at length in a blog/medium post)

You're right that it could become too much of an echo chamber, but it will at least avoid becoming a rage-generator.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#157

Post by teleclimber »

bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.

You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that).

I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as much a part of the social network as something that was posted natively.

It's very much a work in progress but the promise of Mastodon is not so much replacing Twitter as it is a gateway to an internet-wide social graph with no walls.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#158

Post by mynameisvlad »

ohtwenty wrote: post #148
randomsearch wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better? It does not make an iota of difference.

>who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles? the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjo…

But you can only create your account on one server. It feels limiting compared to subreddits, which you use a centralized account to subscribe to several.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#159

Post by xigma »

codesections wrote: post #142
bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter. My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of…

Everything I hate about Twitter is getting content pushed into my timeline that I don't care about.

I unfollow everyone who becomes overly political or comments on every outrage-du-jour. These people are inviting the bullshit. They're not making important contributions to political discourse. I don't care if they get dogpiled for it.

As a result, my Twitter experience has been smooth.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#160

Post by twblalock »

teleclimber wrote: post #157
bilbo0s wrote: post #112

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at…

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that). I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as muc…

Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is.

What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?

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