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Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

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Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#231

Post by ivan_gammel »

Barrin92 wrote: post #164
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?

significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub. I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.

Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#233

Post by komali2 »

adamrezich wrote: post #201
thevardanian wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 propagati…

Why did the other reply to this get killed after only having been posted for eight minutes? Seems inoffensive and like perfectly valid discussion from where I'm standing. Is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here?

I have the options to see dead/flagged posts enabled and don't see anything, what do you mean?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#234

Post by skybrian »

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…

Or is the nature of social media that people switch to get better filtering and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?

Certainly that got Google search and Gmail started.

If Twitter gets better at filtering, maybe they will be more popular?

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#235

Post by Barrin92 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #231
Barrin92 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub. I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.

Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).

the point of mastodon communities is that they are not anarchic. The fact that they're human scaled and moderated is what allows them to impose sets of rules that actually make spending a few hours there palatable. (The same advantage that say, the smaller hackernews community has over a 500k population subreddit)

That's the advantage they have over twitter, they're able to set community rules that fit to the respective communities. It's twitter that suffers from the anarchy.

When twitter users are setting up filters and mass blocks to remove all the nazis and trolls and conspiracy theorists from their feed, they're essentially just trying to painfully recreate what you get in a mastodon sized community by design.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#236

Post by rainbowmverse »

twblalock wrote: post #97
wool_gather wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the problem you see with the word "toot"?

It's clearly an attempt to make people think about "tweet" without infringing copyright/trademark, much like the way the generic Dr. Pepper at the grocery store might be called "Dr. Skipper". Mastodon should come up with its own concepts.

Nope. Hbomberguy suggested it jokingly, and then it was done.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/100419966679180204

Not everything is a cynical ploy. There are still pure and wholesome things in this world.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#237

Post by komali2 »

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…

>The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them.

I think this is untrue. I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

Your "100%" implies that everyone on say Facebook has to have the same belief system, when that obviously isn't true. You can state many belief system on Facebook, except hateful ones that target swaths of people.

This won't create a Myspace situation, it'll create a 8chan/voat situation.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#238

Post by irq-1 »

codesections wrote: post #142
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 I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter. My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of…

Ideas for killer features:

Feeds. Creators collect and filter on subject, importance and volume. Follow a Feed instead of a person.

Locality. Connect people in an area, like Facebook starting in schools. Use age and membership (church, work, school) for getting people onto a server where they know people.

Events and Calendar. Instead of posts with date/time information, make a different type. Let people view aggregated calendars with multiple filters, and make Feeds for calendars.

Private chat groups with their own invite and moderation choices. Put keys on mobile devices so the server doesn't know; can't be available on a website client.

Minor suggestions: Make moving accounts dead simple, and with that, have a global registry/dns for names. Change the name "toot"; isn't "tweet" generic at this point? A tagline of "blow your horn" with a mastadon tusk as the horn.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#239

Post by andyidsinga »

danShumway wrote: post #27

From the article: > Twitter Is in the Outrage Business; Mastodon Isn't a Business I need to spend way more time thinking about this, but I feel like in some scenarios there is a competitive advantage to not needing to care about stuff like stock prices or insane prices. If you can get a business or a project to the point where it's stable and competitive and it's funding you enough to keep going, then there's a whole…

understanding the money flows and their influence on the direction of the business/non-profit/managing entity - are really really important here (and non-trivial imho).

The money flows that direct mastadon's development and subsequent proliferation could be very good for its competitive edge (vis-a-vis twitter) or they could land it right in the same "outrage" territory as twitter. If they don't really have a good set of hypotheses on how twitter ended up where it did, they won't be able to test solutions that solve for those.

Its really hard to say what will happen from our current perspective and at this point in time. I hope the mastadon maintainers are developing a strategy to keep it in the problem-solving territory they desire.

Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch

#240

Post by adventured »

pmyteh wrote: post #170
Rjevski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and a social network are two different things. The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful. The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump. I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup th…

The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.

Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front.

Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc.

Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).

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