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Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

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Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#161
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences . Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN webs…

What makes Mastodon not able to accomplish this?

As far as I know, Mastodon is a federated system, so there‘s no mechanism to have an algorithm pick certain content and massively boost its distribution across the network.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every word of that is seething with a deep hatred for people you have never met.

If they're "seething," what are you doing?

I don't know, but why don't you ask a leading question about it instead of actually making a point?

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.

How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.

No post body was provided.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#164
post #83
post #6

We've already got a replacement that's owned and administered by users, with no ads, that can't be bought and ruined by billionaires: Mastodon. The ex-twitter employees are already running their own server: macaw.social

Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown. Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed. Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.

> Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads.

Too true. And in cases like that, I have already blocked bitcoinhackers.org .

And it's trivial to block individuals OR whole servers from your account. And server admins can block as well to the whole server.

So, sure, go ahead and make a spam-stodon. You'll be defederated within a week.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.

How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.

The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#166
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's always been the assumption, but a lot of people are trying it anyway.

By a lot of people, do you mean 0.3% of Twitter users?

A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for.

That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure for Mastodon. This isn't a zero-sum game.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#167
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.

Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.

You find what instance your friends are on and sign up there, same as any website? I did it last week and it was trivial.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#168
post #36
post #18

I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb and I think more people are starting to get it. Why feed someone’s enterprise for free who will then turn it into a powerful walled garden, make billions in profit while eventually dictating what you can and can’t do on said platform. To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. Your own data is used against you. At this point…

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user. The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences . Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok. Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN webs…

Why is broadcasting the high order bit? I personally don't want to scream my message to thousands of people. I want a high signal:noise two way dialogue with a small group of people who know what they are talking about.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#169
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters…

>I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. I don't mean to sound overly dismissive, but maybe instead of putting the onus on a social media website to provide that experience, wouldn't it be more sensible to get that from a news aggregate site? I.e. Google News, Fark, Reddit, etc.? Part of the issue with how modern social media platforms is the…

I use(d) Twitter as more of a meta-aggregator. It had actual social interactions combined with the sort of pointers out to news sites, tech blogs, etc. Perhaps I'm an outlier in how I use(d) it but I haven't come across anything that provided the same degree of convergence. This is precisely because it's mixing in short snippets from friends, acquaintances, and other people I find interesting.

> Instead, limit content on social sites to the subject of the platform

That's my point. I'm saying the thing I liked most about Twitter was that there wasn't a single "subject of the platform". Don't get me wrong, I also spend plenty of time in more specific corners of the internet, but I've yet to find something that quite replicates Twitter for me.

Re: Waze Founder Noam Bardin is starting up a Twitter alternative

#170
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Small decentralized communities which users can freely and easily create and manage is the way to go! The thing I most enjoyed about Twitter was that in one feed I had a little bit of everything. The world you propose means that i'd need to belong to dozens of such sites. I loved how I could scroll down and see posts on a large variety of topics, get news updates, see the weather, etc. Yes there were clear clusters…

I’ve been finding this to be the case with the fediverse so far. I have different accounts on Mastodon and Bookwyrm, since Bookwyrm is more tailored to book reviews and quotes. But I can follow Mastodon, Bookwyrm, Peertube, and Pixelfed accounts from one main “reader” feed, providing more of a mix than I ever got on one platform alone.

Agree, that's why I say in theory it's a good replacement. I don't yet buy it'll take off. I find it much more likely that we start seeing a bunch of walled gardens pop up instead. But if I'm wrong, then great.
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