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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

codesections.com

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#171

Post by teaneedz »

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…

I think you nailed the USP of Mastodon. Keeping out the marketers, advertisers, vanity metric chasing or fandom makes Mastodon that peaceful scenic beach where your fellow beach goers say hello and share some of their food with you.

I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#172

Post by majewsky »

Exuma wrote: post #151
codesections wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#173

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

that_jojo wrote: post #165
tomohawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#174

Post by AsyncAwait »

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?

Twitter has been banning people left and right. On Mastodon, you're in control. People care about that.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#175

Post by stesch »

kethinov wrote: post #79

What Mastodon badly needs is a desktop client as good as Twitterrific that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching. Something like Pidgin/Adium is for IM. That way people can default to Mastodon where possible and fallback to Twitter where necessary.

One of the Tweetbot programmers is using Mastodon and invited his followers. Let's see where this is going …

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#176

Post by elboru »

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…

You're proving his point, count all the techie words you used in your comment, regular people don't know-care about all that.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#178

Post by majewsky »

codesections wrote: post #147
twblalock wrote: post #101

I went to the Mastodon website and clicked "Get Started" and was brought to a menu where I needed to choose a server. Many of them focus on niche interests, and it was not very clear what to do if I wanted to be a member of more than one of them. I'm a techie; I could figure it out. But it is too much to ask of the general public to wade through many niche servers they won't understand, e.g. the one for BSD fans and…

Yeah, I agree that this is the biggest usability hurdle, and its actively being worked on. That said, there are plenty of good general-purpose instances and it's not that different from picking an email host. Sure, you can spend hours figuring out which email host to use, but most people go with a name they've heard before (e.g., Gmail) and don't need to think much about it at all. I could see Mastodon getting to a s…

Except that the established big-name corps probably don't have an interest in running a Mastodon instance. (And if they do, they'll do it in the similar way that Google Talk and Slack used to support XMPP: Once they have a significant-enough userbase, they burn down the bridges ^W federation.)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#179

Post by teaneedz »

Barrin92 wrote: post #164
twblalock wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spot on. I left Twitter (well left an auto bot behind) and took my live posts to Mastodon. It's so much more relaxing with masto.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#180

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

By that logic, what did Facebook offer that MySpace didn't? What did MySpace offer that a forum didn't? What did all of these provide that a lot newspaper didn't? A lot of these platforms brought things to the table that weren't direct product features. People are motivated by more than features, though a lot of tech people seem to feel otherwise.
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