Mastodon will be dead soon enough and also awful marketing, they really need to change the name as to not conflict with the band.
Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
291–300 of 395 posts
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 fina…
Thanks for the deeper back-and-forth. I did mean "standing" as brought out here. I.e. simply that failure to focus on profit can create a situation where investors can file a suit that won't just be thrown out. I'm saying that there's enough legal premise around the idea that the business is working for profit. The investors buy stock with the premise that the business is aiming to provide a return. If they don't aim…
Yes, this seems to be broadly true. TIL about benefit corporations. I deeply apologize for my repeated rudeness towards your original post.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#293OK, 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…
What if I told you that twitter can have celebrity engagement tooling mastodon can be for people actually talking to other humans, and that these are other use cases artificially slammed together by Facebook and Twitter to try and monetize services that no user asked to monetize.
Sit on your high horse until the heat death of the sun, for all I care. But don't think anyone's not noticing you're posting and talking here instead of on a reddit. There is clearly some benefits to sub-selection and partially isolated communities.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032
"You say problem, I say advantage." - What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?
> What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?
I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger.
If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares.
At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#295> Well, Mastodon doesn't have retweets; it has "boosts". Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there's no option to add your own commentary. I disagree. Retweets can be an issue but they have their place as well What all "timeline" social networks are missing is the underboost, the downvote button, call it as you want. People will boost good stuff but they will boost crap. Networks need the c…
Does the admin of your server saying "hey people on other Mastodon servers sure are reporting you a lot, stop doing that shit" count as a "wtf are you thinking posting this crap here" signal?
Because Mastodon has a "report" button, and because of the way Mastodon scales, reports actually get acted on by humans who have a vested interest in keeping their users civil, lest their server get a reputation as That One Server Full Of Jerks and find other admins telling their servers to ignore it entirely.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network. I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features: - your account is just your public key - your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed - whe…
Giving scuttlebutt a try - thanks! Here are my experiences: 1. App seems quite unpolished for Windows, it looks best not maximized. I was asked to provide a name and was a little disconcerted by the message that this is going to be public and cannot be deleted. 2. I've now joined a public server. This required going to a github page, following a link and copying and pasting an "invite" into the Patchwork application.…
I'm not a user, but I have been watching it (and its related projects on github). I believe Patchwork[0] is the social network you joined, and it is based on scuttlebutt[1].
It seems like very early times for most people even considering the downsides of centralized 'social media,' and it will take time and hand-holding to demonstrate the alternative possibilities. A great client app that could unify the user experience, but offer power-user features could go a long way. Most people that I know (older) are not overtly interested in participating in any public social network (i.e. Twitter).
I wonder if one could build a more closed, private, white-list-default (triple opt-in!) type of social network on top of SSB with the right client software?
[0] "A decentralized messaging and sharing app built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB)." https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
[1] "A database of unforgeable append-only feeds, optimized for efficient replication for peer to peer protocols" https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many, many out there. I suggest you join one with a deliberately "throw away" account and start following a few people. Then see where they are, and after a time export the list of people you follow, and move. I'm on https://mathstodon.xyz/ and https://fosstodon.org/ if you want to start on either of those. Then again, maybe you will neither need nor want to move. A quick web search for "mastodon instance t…
Anybody knows of a free speech Mastodon instance? Something that’s not banned from the rest of the network, of course. :/
I spent an hour looking and gave up. They all either get banned, don't take registrations, or they ban content too aggressively, especially under categories like racism/sexism/xenophobia/nationalism/socialism/etc, wherein the SJWs leave the terms undefined so that they can ban any opinion they disagree with. I'd love to find a server that is committed to the Chicago Principles.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example of mastodon community with clearly defined and legally binding policy, that protects rights of regular users? I could not find any (doesn't mean that they don't or cannot exist, of course) and highly doubt that any admin there has motivation or resources to develop it and properly implement. Pure declarations like "we are good fellas and don't allow abuse" mean nothing - they are not enforceab…
As a Mastodon instance admin, you just made an argument for me to never have a clearly-defined and legally-binding policy. Thanks. The main thrust of my user agreement is "hi I am queer lady who is out of patience with people being jerks and wants a nice place to talk, if you piss me off you can go find a new instance or start your own". It's not much more formal than that, either.
Sounds more arbitrary and a lot worse than Twitter’s policy.
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#299Earlier 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?
Users flagged it (I'm not sure why) and then the author reposted it using a different account. Normally we would unkill such a comment when we review the flags, since I didn't notice anything flaggable about it either, but we're not going to do that when there's a duplicate.
Here's a tip: general explanations like 'is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here' are basically never the answer. It's almost always something much more mundane. You could also know the answer to your question by using HN search to find any of countless threads that discuss these questions extensively. Even "attention economy", though that isn't one of the more common phrases, shows up quite a bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22attention%20economy%22&sort....
Re: Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
>> You know the reason why people prefer reading >> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter >> tabloids? I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.
McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit.
You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption?
What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest."
But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.