I tried the gamedev Mastadon, but it’s entirely hobbyists and students.
I want a platform where I can interact with peers. I’ll go to where ever that is. But so far Mastadon is not the place.
Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
241–250 of 395 posts
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an onomatopoeic term for briefly sounding a horn, but I almost never hear it used for that. In my experience, there are two primary uses of the word in American English: 1) In the expression toot [one's] own horn , which means to praise oneself. Often in the form "I don't want to toot my own horn, but [...]". 2) A cutesy word for a fart, used primarily when talking to young children. Notably, an elephant using i…
Isn't 1) exactly what tooting and tweeting both are really about, though?
Tooting is a more wholesome activity. Tweeting is an inherently performative act due to the nature of the platform. To toot is to be.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#243OK, 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…
Boost!
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.
Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?
To simplify the issue here: Amazon made buying books 10x easier, and expanded the easily purchasable selection by more than 10x.
Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances.
It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquired mass consumer use, not in decades of trying). It's the standard techie failure to understand average users. The same reason techies for nearly two decades have been baffled as to why average people haven't adopted command-line Linux - they can't be objective and properly put themselves into the shoes of other non-tech people.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#245OK, 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…
> "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!" And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers: https://switter.at/about
Probably blackjack somewhere too
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#246> One of the most pernicious parts of Twitter is how people will retweet something dumb, offensive, or awful that an opponent said, along with a message mocking that opponent. Over time, this leads people on all sides of an issue to see only a distorted caricature of their opponents, comprised of an amalgam of all the worst features of that group. > How does Mastodon solve this issue? Well, Mastodon doesn't have retw…
It's not really a solution. Screen shot; toot with your mocking comments.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
So do I, the post has since been un-[dead]'d, which is why there's seemingly two duplicate comments now. It was really shocking to see the comment become [dead] within EIGHT MINUTES of having been posted.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that). I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as muc…
Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is. What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
It's a nice place to be
No one has to care about which pair of celebs are arguing
No bloody advertising
People are building interesting stuff with it
Third party apps work
It's not run by a guy seemingly at war with his own users
edit: more
Your parents aren't there
The people who left twitter years ago because of all the harassment and you've been missing are probably already there
If you've got a feature request or something, you can just toot Gargron and you will get a reply
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#249OK, 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…
You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities.
Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in.
With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other.
I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed.
A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#250OK, 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…
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.
Moderation and content quality.
You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers?
That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale.
If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it?
People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that.
> Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access?
Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can.
I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.