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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

#191

Post by davoneus »

thal3s wrote: 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

I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example:

You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.

Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.

The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.

Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.

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

#192

Post by wilg »

dickfickling wrote: post #68
mirzap wrote: post #22

How people don't get it - you can't succeed as an alternative to something. You need to build your own thing, find your product market fit with unique proposition. In 5y nobody will know about any of twitter alternatives that are launching these days. IMO even twitter didn't find its product market fit, that's why Musk is breaking it. The more people talk about twitter (in any way) and more people go with "alternativ…

Reddit comes to mind as an alternative (to Digg) that succeeded (by at least some definitions of the word). A massive amount of Reddit's early user growth came from a poorly-received redesign to Digg's home page. There are a lot of parallels to draw to the changes Musk has in mind for Twitter.

Reddit had a clear killer feature with user created and moderated subreddits though, which Digg lacked.

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

#193

Post by skippyboxedhero »

cwkoss wrote: post #179
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #142

Sounds awful. I don't go on Twitter to "learn" from my betters (presumably, the founder includes himself in that category). If you look at FTX, you have these supposed "journalists" quoting from "Autism Capital" on Twitter...that is where their sources are. I am guessing "Autism Capital" is some random guy, in his mom's bedroom, making no money from this...and there are journalists taking down $80k/year just ripping…

The psuedojournalists you are referring to are worse than simple plagiarizers: they share content they lack the capacity to analyze, but still add their own spin. I think they have played a significant role in enabling many of the dumbest outcomes of the last decade.

They are also overwhelmingly people who get triggered by random people they don't know online, and are pushing for this narrowing of the information space so that their safety/income is maintained.

You are right, the spin is as bad as the copying. Always an agenda, that agenda is never made explicit, every event, same underlying cause. It often seems we have the worst possible people in that role of relaying information (and I do actually feel more comfortable with someone who doesn't pretend to be either objective or, shock, even particularly serious).

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

#195

Post by krapp »

edude03 wrote: post #183
krapp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.

Assuming that Twitter doesn't crash and burn in the next week or so, and assuming Mastodon doesn't draw enough users to create its own network effect, sure. But then, people don't always act according to a single metric. Mastodon doesn't have ads and it doesn't follow a single moderation policy. I can see people sticking with both for different reasons.

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

#196

Post by Lendal »

stusmall wrote: post #110
macspoofing wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who likes Twitter culture?

There was one huge part of twitters culture that I liked. It was a place where I could I read less filtered thoughts of influential people and get news that hadn't quiet met the standard to publish in reputable newspapers. It's a fine line. I just like the bar lowered slightly, not all the way so it is mental diarrhea or completely unsubstantiated rumors. I had to be careful about who I followed and keep a critical m…

I enjoyed Twitter for these same reasons. I have to be honest though that it took time & effort to cultivate it to do what I wanted, as it didn't do that straight away without effort. I'm disappointed that all that work will come to nothing and I'll have to start over at square one with a new service, whatever it turns out to be.

In the meantime, Twitter is still running and will continue to soar triumphantly in a straight line on autopilot, until its fuel runs dry and its wreckage comes to a gentle landing at the bottom of a deep dark abyss.

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

#197

Post by davewritescode »

macspoofing wrote: post #37
altacc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the ToS that people don't like about those services. What makes social media sticky is the culture. If people like the culture of a social media platform then they stay. Very few people like the culture of Gab, Parler, Truth, etc...

Who likes Twitter culture?

I wouldn't say I like the culture because I don't actively participate in Twitter. What I do like is the curated list of folks I've built up over the last 15 years.

Twitter allows me to keep up with Technologists, comedians, journalists in one location which has made it very useful to me. That made Twitter sticky for me personally.

Unfortunately, Elon has probably pissed off enough people that I'm going to have to branch out to other services anyway so that immediately reduces the value of Twitter.

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

#198

Post by davoneus »

anonporridge wrote: post #97
KVFinn wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently this is the key difference they're working on for Bluesky. Trying to make accounts truly portable between federated servers.

IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org.

Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit.

I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.

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

#199

Post by davewritescode »

LanceJones wrote: post #9

With Twitter usage apparently climbing, why is this important? Is the general assumption that Musk is ruining or wrecking Twitter accurate?

By what metric is it climbing? DAU's? Signups? People exporting all their data?

Musk has no incentive to be truthful here anyway. He's in the middle of what could end up being one of the most embarrassing failures the last 50 years. Destroying a 44 billion dollar business in 3 weeks through sheer, unadulterated hubris and incompetence. There's nothing people love more than watching people fall from grace so I have a feeling that folks will remember this.

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

#200

Post by dqpb »

dqpb wrote: post #46

> Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; > Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them. If a licensed practicing doctor recommends against getting the covid vaccine, for reasons, is he an expert or an anti-vax extremist?

lol, what do the downvotes even mean in this context? Is this a stupid question?
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