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Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

martinfowler.com

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Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#171

Post by TeMPOraL »

fragmede wrote: post #148
TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…

I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs. Sure, the site itself looks the same, the logo is the same, but there's a ton of turmoil for the people behind the scenes. Not everything is run by computers, there are a lot of humans in the loop for the day-to-day operations of the site. The core product of "post tweet" and ever…

> I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs.

Well, OK, assuming this all pans out to be true[0], that's one hell of a botched firing, which apparently (see [0]) Musk/Twitter is trying to back-track on... but that happened in the last few days. The Internet drama about Musk and Twitter started months ago, and reached its peak before the sale ultimately went through - which means it can't be attributed to this.

Or, in a hypothetical world in which the wellness team still got sacked, but the content moderation didn't, do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying, "In a surprising change of face, Musk did not fire Twitter's content moderators", or rather headlines trying to find nefarious reasons for why the team would've been retained?

I'm not denying the turmoil that's happening in Twitter, and the hard times that befell on its employees (and ex-employees). I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does. It has its own life now.

----

[0] - AFAIK we're still at the level of reporting of "sources familiar with the matter quoting two high-level people involved in the matter" - which ordinarily means journalists quoting random Twitter posts without attribution, but in this case, I don't know how to read that.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#172

Post by pessimizer »

mola wrote: post #133
TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…

I would be much more afraid of a world where the major public square is privately owned and governed by a single individual with a proven history of public manipulation. Identity politics is just a stupid sideshow, a distraction. A private Twitter?.that's terrible. 100 times Bezos WaPo. It's the ball park of Mordoch publuc manipulation.

You're posting this on a site privately owned and run by an unaccountable billionaire.

> a proven history of public manipulation.

It's better when people say that they don't like Musk, than pretending there's some sort of higher political principle here. People don't have trouble believing that objectors don't like Musk, and disagree with him politically.

The trouble is in the appeal to principles that never come up in their discussions of e.g. the WaPo, which most of the objectors will defend to their last breath, along with Bezos. Like here, when the one of the wealthiest people in the world, owner of the largest retailer, that controls a massive part of internet infrastructure, also owns the second most influential paper, becomes 100x less important than Twitter changing ownership.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#173

Post by TeMPOraL »

trs8080 wrote: post #167
TeMPOraL wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise. Thing is, he isn't saying that much. Most of what people are reacting to are people's interpretation of what Musk said, and then further interpretation of those interpretations, etc. That's what strikes me as completely bonkers.

Did you miss the news that he laid off half the company, including the content moderation team? That says plenty.

I did, actually; I caught up already (see another reply in this subthread), but my point still stands: the hysteria has been at current level for at least two weeks now. There's little causal relationship between the firings and all the noise, or sudden interest in Mastodon.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#174

Post by ahelwer »

nemo44x wrote: post #63

This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.

It is very funny watching people here not think about how federation works and then, instead of considering they might be missing something, go on a diatribe about how the way they imagined things work in their head doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine not knowing how federation works! Just... be humble enough not to immediately issue strongly-worded judgements about things you don't understand.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#175

Post by funshed »

anderspitman wrote: post #34

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new se…

I tried for a few hours to get it running on Portainer and gave up.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#176

Post by pessimizer »

Analemma_ wrote: post #104
TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…

> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. Twitter now has a burden of $1 billion in interest payments per year, which it did not several months ago. That's pretty meaningful. Completely apart from anything about Elon, it would be entirely reasonable to expect this additional burden to make the product worse, as debt obligations often do.

It looks like he might try to monetize everything, which would mean that he won't need any help to destroy Twitter entirely. I would hope this would benefit Mastodon, but Mastodon has technical problems, so instead I think it will ultimately benefit Facebook's future internal twitter clone.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#177

Post by seydor »

Saris wrote: post #157
rakoo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install yunohost. Clicks in a UI. Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.

That's still way too complex for something that wants to be widely used. It should just be an app on your phone or PC.

or at least that server hosts can support easily like they do with wordpress

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#178

Post by TeMPOraL »

afavour wrote: post #170
EricE wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to. You have the same tools to block on Twitter. There is literally no difference.

Of course there is. On Twitter someone could sign up, pretend to be a member of my organization, pay $8 to get a verified checkmark and there's very little I can do about it. If I own my own Mastodon instance I can kick them off (or stop them from signing up in the first place)

Meanwhile before the acquisition, on Twitter, someone could sign up and pretend to be a member of your organization and... there was still very little you could do about it. Verified checkmark is a red herring, because it's not something you could guarantee for yourself or other members of your org. You were better off - and still are - with something like Keybase, or... well just not using Twitter for anything important in the first place.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#179

Post by pessimizer »

chatterhead wrote: post #93

Quoted post unavailable.

> it's clearly doing so through manipulated voting

No, people really want Mastodon and decentralization to succeed, and people have really been whipped into a frenzy about Elon enough to be terrified about the future and hopeful about Mastodon as an alternative. No voting manipulation necessary.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#180

Post by riffic »

phailhaus wrote: post #83
riffic wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

find me at gmail.com

It's "email me at gmail.com". The article is about replacing a company's usage of Facebook and Twitter with Mastodon. They then link to their Mastodon instance, as if that's where we can find all sorts of external communication, the kind they'd usually have on Facebook. Nope. As a nontechnical user, I am immediately confused and closed the page without learning anything. The idea that a company could "reach millions…

I can reach millions of users, billions potentially, with WordPress. My WordPress is also compatible with Mastodon since I installed the ActivityPub plugin.

I understand the federated social web has a technobabble aspect to it. I am sorry you aren't with it but that's honestly not my problem.

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