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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

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Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#181

Post by CuriousCosmic »

expensive_news wrote: post #98
forgotusername6 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it’s been public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took over. If jobs don’t generate money they can’t exist in the free market, and the real shock is that the previous board of directors didn’t initiate layoffs sooner.

From when twitter went public(2013), the deficit decreased every year and eventually the company ran a measurable profit in 2018 and 2019. It ran red in 2020 but since then has been making a profit most quarters. This seems to indicate that while they weren't running on great margins, they were above board even if just barely.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

And the $4 million/day is from the debt incurred by Elon's purchase.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#182

Post by __alexs »

parineum wrote: post #168
__alexs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership. I guess you're not familiar with the Inclosure Acts? (To name but one of the grossly amoral uses of land ownership in the past few centuries.)

Using land amorally isn't the same thing as owning land unless you think land ownership is amoral.

I'll take that as a yes then.

OP was not claiming all land ownership was bad. Just that rich people have commonly used land ownership to harm others. There is a long and rich history of this.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#183

Post by raytube »

jayflux wrote: post #26

A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months, but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe it’s different this time? But the cycle feels the same

It's where the people are. I don't use Facebook in the main, but there is a local neighborhood group that I feel I have to subscribe to.

You don't always get to pick the venue.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#184

Post by PebblesRox »

colin_jack wrote: post #126
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…

> As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues. For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.

The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic, and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even bigger bump.

I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#185

Post by krisoft »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #53
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

> Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think, and I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon (or any other billionare - Elon is just an example). After people read so many sensationalized articles online, they adopt the author's sanctimonious opinions/views as their own. It's shocking how people can hold so…

> Stay classy, HN.

I could ask the same about your comment please.

> Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think

You set up a strawman and knock it down. There are many legitimate reason why someone might object to Musk or his wealth. Thinking that “wealth somehow equates evil” is indeed juvenile, yet somehow you assume people hold that thought and work from that assumption.

> I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon

Oh great. The sheepish masses. They don’t even have a coherent thought!

Except this is your fantasy again. There are many legitimate reasons to dislike him. Why don’t you ask people, instead of labeling them empty headed media-driven zombies? This is hardly a way to “engage in discussion”.

> It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met.

He kinda put himself in front of others. That is his brand. It has benefits and drawbacks. I don’t know why you think one has to meet someone to judge their character. If he does contemptible things through online discussion why can’t someone hold him in contempt?

> If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.

I doubt it is truly everyone. Many many individuals live a public life without kicking of a firestorm with the same regularity he does.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#186

Post by gonehome »

eftychis wrote: post #142
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…

Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?

He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have total voting power, the board (which barely even used Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad. Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5 which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon taking power and being able to actually make the necessary changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too.

Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model.

If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself.

That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#187

Post by adam_arthur »

sydney6 wrote: post #178
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…

Why are so many people calling Elon Musk by his first name, like he's their buddy or neighbor? This reminds me when Steve Jobs had passed away, many people were walking the streets with candles and cards in memoriam of "Steve". How come?

Probably because it's a unique enough name to not introduce ambiguity.

Nobody can just say Steve or Bill without confusing people

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#188

Post by metadat »

xg15 wrote: post #93
jmann99999 wrote: post #5

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

> Too much friction. Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?

All you need to do is pick an instance and register an account on said instance. The friction is pretty low, in the same ballpark as friction encountered creating an account on any website.

It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently under heavy load due to new users.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#189

Post by BlueTemplar »

thorncorona wrote: post #117
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instanc…

You say this but people have tried this with voat.co against Reddit The only people who end up sticking are the ones banned from Twitter.

Unlikely, considering Mastodon already went through this with Gab (and later Trump's Truth Social ?) joining it a few years ago.

From what I've seen, it's mostly people sick and tired of Twitter's drama that decided to leave by themselves (whether today or in the last 6 years), while the people that were so toxic that Twitter banned them end up in mostly disconnected parts of Mastodon...

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#190

Post by cplusplusfellow »

pjc50 wrote: post #139
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…

> People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains People also dismiss his failures in hard domains, like The Boring Company.

He’s in the arena. And that’s what people respect.

But has he failed at Boring?

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