191–200 of 257 posts
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Allow users to signup in 3 seconds without "choosing a server".
Last I checked, Twitter required SMS phone number verification for all new accounts. That takes a lot longer than 3 seconds, not to mention the privacy invasion.
It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?
I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…
If I was in charge of Twitter, I'd remake it so that it's just a Mastodon server. Suddenly, no reason to migrate to another server, as you can just stay in the biggest one and keep your clout. Google pulled off something similar with gtalk and XMPP. Remember Jabber?
I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
> why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team. Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks). > Make it easy to migra…
That wasn't the case at least for me.
I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as of today) and I was told to find a server.
I guess most people would give up at that point, though I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page. It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set. I could build my kingdom, but of course I won't, since I wasn't interested in the decentralized bit anyway.
tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
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Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average…
> maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience It certainly needs less features. I'm sure quite a bit of Twitter's infrastructure is dedicated to ads and analytics.
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I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…
Keybase and IPFS seem to show that a P2P fediverse scales, I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching some encrypted data and responding to some queries a few minutes or hours a day.
people are doing things like this too. you hear about Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's the easiest to setup, has the widest network, and works "well enough" for the userbase that's grown on it organically over the last decade.
if you're passionate about a particular experimental/p2p design, go seek it out. Secure Scuttlebutt might be up your alley.
I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
I can't help but analogize how some people are famous for their achievements, and some are famous for being well known.
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Maybe I could pose this question another way, what does Twitter do that Mastodon can't?
A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is another question. For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being closed. Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all media…
it's super debatable. i take it most of your Twitter experience is through the website/app, rather than following links posted in chats/elsewhere.
i run a Pleroma server. anything from anyone i follow by default gets replicated locally. if/when those servers go offline, accounts get suspended, etc: the content is still viewable to me.
> Mastodon has poor on-boarding.
Twitter has poor on-boarding. post something as a new user? nobody will ever see it. on Mastodon? any instance in general though, yes: growing any social circle takes time: in person, or online. there's no real way to speedrun that.
> Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point: Mastodon isn't designed for drama.
at this point it's clear you're playing the "shoot down the new tech" angle, rather than honestly evaluating the two on equal footing.
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I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…
Keybase and IPFS seem to show that a P2P fediverse scales, I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching some encrypted data and responding to some queries a few minutes or hours a day.
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They also have obvious downsides, so I don't think there's any harm in attempting to create alternatives.
They do, but that's kind of my point. Libraries full of articles have been written about the negative aspects of these services. Many perfectly accurate, no disagreement here. But think about it. We have networks in which we can connect to any other connected human being. Post near-unlimited amounts of content which is reliably preserved. We have well functioning-apps and reliable services, and relatively clean conte…