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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#161

Post by api »

codesections wrote: post #156
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 th…

"Rage generator"

I've been calling certain social platforms and areas "hate lasers" for a while.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#162

Post by radus »

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…

Personally I'm looking at using this with my small network of friends and family and could care less whether or not Kim K joins. What you can do here (and with other similar applications) is share things with your friends without ads and without your data being owned and sold by a corporation.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#164

Post by Barrin92 »

twblalock wrote: post #160
teleclimber wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub.

I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#165

Post by that_jojo »

tomohawk wrote: post #154
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. Th…

And right at this moment, no one gives a shit about Mastodon.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#166

Post by xigma »

ohtwenty wrote: post #132
xigma wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E-Mail doesn't have moderation (besides Spamfilters). It's unclear to me how this all ties in, if I follow someone and they get banned from their instance, how does it affect me? How does it affect their content? Not saying there aren't solutions for this, I'm saying it's unclear from just looking at the service and I don't care about moderation in the first place . So it's unclear to me how this is "better".

so join an instance with lax moderation. or set up your own. if you're thinking "that's expensive", look into Pleroma, it can run on a $1 a month server or a raspi. Set something up purely for you, then find some people on other instances you'd like to follow

That's not really answering my questions. I understand that different Mastodon instances have different moderation. I don't understand how that ties into the usage of the service as a Twitter clone.

Who decides how content is relayed? Can I be on multiple instances at the same time? If don't like my instance anymore, can I seamlessly move to another one?

Frankly, I don't even want to have all these questions, it's too complicated. I'll just stick with Twitter.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#167

Post by GW150914 »

tomohawk wrote: post #154
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. Th…

Maybe, but I heard the exact same argument played out around Reddit and Voat, and we all know how that ended. Maybe if the future plays out in accordance with all of the hysteria and slippery slope arguments Mastadon will take off, but otherwise it’s not replacing anything. While I don’t doubt that eventually a replacement for current social media giants will emerge, I doubt we’ve seen them yet. At the very least, I don’t believe the replacement will be a more cumbersome version of an existing service that appeals to technically minded people, or raving ideologues. I’m fact I think it’s possible, if not likely, that people will outgrow social media as we know it today.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#168

Post by qznc »

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…

Has anybody tried business models on top of Mastodon/ActivityPub?

For example, a premium instance. Costs 100$ per month. Gives you 24/7 phone support, a free iPhone X, and the opportunity to toot exclusively to other premium users.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#169

Post by pmyteh »

tomohawk wrote: post #154
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. Th…

One of the ways this ends is that people of different political persuasions set up their own (social) media platforms. This has happened before with print media, where the US used to have and most of Europe still does have media with expressly partisan positioning.

This has happened to some extent with Voat, and if there's really a demand for like minded people to communicate without having their discourse contaminated by opposing partisans then I'm sure the same could happen here.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#170

Post by pmyteh »

Rjevski wrote: post #124
TillE wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032

The internet and a social network are two different things. The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful. The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump. I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup th…

The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.
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