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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?

#151

Post by bombcar »

Gigachad wrote: post #134
gonehome wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too much work in the long run.

They work great when they're the ONLY option in town, but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as they did with email.

Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb, but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a single company department might have 10+ machines that could receive email (email addresses would look like name@machine.department.company.com).

Then it devolved to one per department, and then one per company, and now one per massive IT provider.

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

#152

Post by __alexs »

parineum wrote: post #116
notimetorelax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started reading history and it speaks a lot about land ownership and how peasants would get indebted to barons for working on it. On the surface that made a lot of sense, and yet this was not the type of society we wanted. Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is…

> Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land I'm pretty sure you missed the important point of that history you've been reading. The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership. > On the surface that made a lot of sense To whom? > So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, s…

> The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership.

I guess you're not familiar with the Inclosure Acts? (To name but one of the grossly amoral uses of land ownership in the past few centuries.)

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

#153

Post by Jnr »

gpm wrote: post #91
whimsicalism wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping up with the new traffic.

I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening. Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.

I wonder if Mastodon can even scale because of the federation.

When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.

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

#155

Post by fsdjkflsjfsoij »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #50
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

> I've never understood the complete lack of empathy

A lot of Twitter employees have spent years being about as obnoxious as they possibly can be to anyone with even slightly different views. I've seen a Twitter employee practically in tears calling someone a fascist because they insisted on putting semi-colons after statements in JavaScript.

> Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people.

I don't think it's distasteful at all. Twitter isn't a charity and it needs to fix its finances. Even the previous CEOs recognized that there's a ton of Twitter employees that do basically no relevant work.

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

#156

Post by _djo_ »

expensive_news wrote: post #98
forgotusername6 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it’s been public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took over. If jobs don’t generate money they can’t exist in the free market, and the real shock is that the previous board of directors didn’t initiate layoffs sooner.

Twitter's net loss in 2021 was $221 million, far from $4 million a day, and there's nothing to indicate that had changed before he bought it. The figure he quoted is made up predominantly of the $1 billion in annual interest payments Twitter now has thanks to Musk's leveraged buy out.

There was no imminent need for Twitter do anything. It still had a healthy enough cash pile and leeway and time to layoff 10% of the workforce or so to return to pre-COVID staffing levels.

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

#158

Post by pjc50 »

karmajunkie wrote: post #148
nathias wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...

Getting an email with a really large number of recipients to be actually delivered is difficult enough that there are entire companies e.g. Mailchimp devoted to making it work. You can't just bung a million addresses into BCC and hope.

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

#159

Post by bombcar »

Timshel wrote: post #118
manmal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.

That would be kind of awesome I think :).

It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over various instances themselves that were infighting.

But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #50
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

[deleted]
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