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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#221

Post by florabuzzword »

tomjen3 wrote: post #218
teaneedz wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is kind of funny, because Twitter can totally be that, if you want it. You have to be liberal in your usage of the block button, but the advantage is that you have so many genuinely interesting people to follow and learn from. I wouldn't have 1 in 1000 of those on Masterdon, and with their doubling of tweet size, I don't see the problem with arguments. Before anybody goes about the ecochamber: I ban obnoxious pe…

“Rational altruistic movements” puts a hole in your armor here.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#222

Post by AsyncAwait »

radus wrote: post #15
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6

Who names these things - cumbersome, heavy, ancient ... doesn't look like they did even a cursory test. I'm as anti-marketing as the next person but that doesn't mean I'd call my child Shithead.

I'm a little turned off by posts being called toots but I suppose I could get over it.

Not everyone lives in the U.S. and in Europe toot is not offensive, it just means the sound an elephant makes with its trunk.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#223

Post by papaf »

that_jojo wrote: post #165
tomohawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And right at this moment , no one gives a shit about Mastodon.

I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing.

Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free.

As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#224

Post by AsyncAwait »

tablethnuser wrote: post #32

I am interested in joining a Mastodon instance but I don't know how to find the right one to join. Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn't built yet and the community can't agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision. I've tried some of these instance finder tools but the…

If you want a good, maintained one that's general purpose, https://mastodon.xyz is one I can recommend.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#225

Post by zazen »

asntbqjkwbucaa wrote: post #199
zazen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, your wikipedia link seems to confirm my layman's understanding of the term "standing", which is that it is about a party's right to participate in a court case. I am no closer to seeing how the English phrase "you aren't prioritizing profit" could "have standing". I think quadrangle is confused in his phrasing, if not in his underlying ideas. Of course investors may do various things. But we're particularly int…

To have standing you need to show that you are an injured party. I believe the original commenter was saying that not attempting to maximize shareholder value is in some cases an injury that is sufficient for an investor to bring a suit. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I believe that's what they were thinking when they referred to standing. In the case of a fiduciary, investors do have recourse to legal…

> A company is not legally obligated to maximize profit.

Well, if we agree on that core point - which I think is all the point that wool_gather was trying to make - then that's great! And I think there's no point in the two of us investing any more time in picking over quadrangle's slightly confused reply.

I'm afraid I can't resist pulling on one more little thread, though :-) You've sort of hand-waved "legal or financial trouble" together, but it seems to me that legal consequences are very different from other consequences, in that there has to be a legal basis for legal consequences. "agency theory and the norms of ordinary business" can't condense and resolve themselves into a law: there either is a law on the books or there isn't.

I understand that shareholder lawsuits are a thing that can happen under some circumstances. But if the law doesn't make "not maximizing profit" sufficient grounds, then it doesn't, surely?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#226

Post by sumeno »

radus wrote: post #162
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…

Personally I'm looking at using this with my small network of friends and family and could care less whether or not Kim K joins. What you can do here (and with other similar applications) is share things with your friends without ads and without your data being owned and sold by a corporation.

Only if all my friends and family are on it, and they'll want all their friends and family on it, and they'll want their friends and family... etc...

It's like the value of a social media platform is in lots of people being on it

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#227

Post by mikebelanger »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #33

I guess I don't understand why so much effort is put into these federated social networks rather then starting with a blog and rss perspective to build the same kind of network.

RSS was/is a good idea, but it wasn't implemented by browsers that well. I actually think the rise of social networks like Facebook/Twitter were partly due to RSS's usability issues, given that they provided users with functionality similar to RSS's but with much less technical terms. "Following" someone is an easier to understand idea than "click to use my RSS link into your feed reader".

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#228

Post by ivan_gammel »

teleclimber wrote: post #190
twblalock wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

In good old times we had IRC, where you could go to channel op and report an abusive message. Or to bot master, or to server admin. Depending on personality of that guy (usually they were guys, not girls), it could end with a ban for the offender or personal attack on you. The problem with actual human is that actually you cannot trust him to govern without being accountable, even if you know him and even if currently you are friends. When I checked several large Mastodon instances (>1000 users), I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy, which means that their admins are not accountable and you have no more rights than a slave of a pharaoh. Mastodon instance may protect you, but is not required to do so and there's no guarantee that it will not support your offender or it will not suddenly abuse you.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#229

Post by andyidsinga »

> The Why: Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business

This section casting twitter as being in "the outrage business" but mastadon not being a business at all doesn't quite sit right.

Even though mastodon "the open source project" is "not a business", there is an entity behind it accepting $ for it's development[1] and presumably has control over the rules by which the main line development occurs and controls the brand "mastadon" and its website.

I think that section would be more useful and convincing if folks behind mastadon discussed how the money flows in twitter cause it to be in the "outrage business" and how the Mastadon maintainer's money flows solve those problems.

[1] (Gargron - https://www.patreon.com/mastodon)

(edits: grammar)

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#230

Post by zigzaggy »

elpakal wrote: post #93
zigzaggy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a culture thing more than anything else, and more deeply how certain environments affect culture. For example, in my career I’ve seen nonprofits, large and small, being very hawkish in competition for government contracts. So much so that I developed a saying - “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.” I think Wall Street is another business environment that creates these very hawkish business cu…

What’s your view on the “not-for-profit” structure, I wonder?

Most of the time I see “nonprofit” and “not for profit” being used interchangeably. Profit, or “fee” in the government contracting world, is almost always being earned. It’s a question of purpose.

Theoretically nonprofits focus on some other purpose first (but not exclusively). “For profits” businesses have the primary purpose of making profits.

That’s the theory. In application, lots of nonprofits are loaded with business people trying to make money under the tax shelter of that tax status.

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