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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#181

Post by thevardanian »

teaneedz wrote: post #171
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.

People often forget that at the beginning none of the current giants were "mainstream", in fact what made them attractive was the fact that they had a unique audience that formed a strong community amongst each other.

The idea of "mainstream" is dying, and will continue to do so. What we're seeing is a deep cultural fracture where communities, ideas, and people do not form the kind of stardom or centralized propagation of ideas that the previous decades were known by. As production gets cheaper, and getting an audience becomes easier, people will begin to form seamless self-sustained communities that support each other (think patreon).

If video killed the radio star, then the internet killed the star, and fractured it into infinite pieces.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#182

Post by yahnusername »

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 miss the old internet when we trusted each other enough to trade star wars cards by posting on forums and exchanging mailing addresses. If I tried to do that on today's internet I'd have a SWAT team show up to murder me. And not even because my star wars trades are bad, but because of my support of women's rights. When you have One Thing For Everything, all the wires get crossed. It sucks.

The place where the people AREN'T and the kylie jenners AREN'T is a perk of mastodon to some, not a flaw. It's like the tech nerd version of kids not using facebook because it's their parents' social network.

I just want to share cool pictures of my modular origami and not constantly be two degrees of separation from Trump's latest outrage

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#183

Post by [deleted] »

yahnusername wrote: post #182
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 miss the old internet when we trusted each other enough to trade star wars cards by posting on forums and exchanging mailing addresses. If I tried to do that on today's internet I'd have a SWAT team show up to murder me. And not even because my star wars trades are bad, but because of my support of women's rights. When you have One Thing For Everything, all the wires get crossed. It sucks. The place where the peopl…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#184

Post by codesections »

randomsearch wrote: post #129
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…

To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck. Technology is not the solution to this problem.

> "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business.

I'd agree with 2/3rds of that. Mastodon is a technology, not a product, and it doesn't have a business model.

But that does not mean that it can't scale and grow—it means that it doesn't have any way to turn scaling and growing into money. email is a technology; javascript is a technology, the microchip is a technology. All of those technologies have seen tremendous growth, and none of them have made money (though products using them certainly have).

I suspect that, if Mastodon grows, it will be precisely because it is a technology, not a product. Making money isn't the only way to grow.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#185

Post by davepeck »

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…

> 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, instagram, or Snapchat.

This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#186

Post by stevekemp »

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…

> "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"

And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers:

https://switter.at/about

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#187

Post by notyourtypical »

> Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter

I sort of agree, it's like Twitter users forming their own groups but it didn't make me like Mastodon. I don't like the name, I don't like the fact I have to sign up for every group, every group has its own layout, which is confusing and I just don't get the whole idea behind it. Sorry, I'll stick to Reddit

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#188

Post by simonh »

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…

>In 10 years, noone will care about twitter.

If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users?

It’s also not true of all tech platforms. It’s not true of desktop operating systems for example. Today the desktop is dominated by Apple and Microsoft. Who dominated it 30 years ago? So there’s nothing inevitable about these things.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#189

Post by Exuma »

majewsky wrote: post #172
Exuma wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Comparing buying books online vs at a physical location isn't even in the same universe as retweeting something but without a message attatched

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#190

Post by teleclimber »

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?

Fine, that was technical.

But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user for the entire instance).

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