No. I went back to twitter.
The direction is promising.
Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
331–340 of 521 posts
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?
In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the connection between communities and will have worse "free speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If money could solve everything, google+ would still be a thing today.
You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech" problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the code upstream to solve many of these issues.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#333The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.
Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.
One idea is for public libraries to host instances. Public employees responsible for the administration are already bound by privacy laws that would make them more trustworthy than some rando that starts an instance.
If done on a branch by branch basis, this could be a good way to have an online local network. Maybe this would be an open Nextdoor as well.
Local account access could be limited by library card eligibility, which combined with terms of service could avoid abuse by far away troublemakers and limit the noise from local ones.
While eligibility may depend on having a library card, public anonymity could still exist. Just as libraries keep my borrowing history private, they could also shield my real identity.
This idea is inspired by the Twitter space I talk about at
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
He’s burning money because he loaded the company with a billion dollars of debt Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
Twitter took the debt. Twitter did not have to take the debt. Twitter made that choice before agreeing to Elon.
Nope. This was taken on as part of Musk's acquisition which is structured as a leveraged buyout and saddled Twitter with nearly $13 billion in additional debt.
Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated. I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work. Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like th…
Ok, but how is it dishonest ? That seems really out of whack with the rest of your post and kind of ranty.
Acting like Elon hasn’t given people legit reasons to dislike him? Anybody is allowed to overlook the flaws he has but you shouldn’t ignore them outright.
I’d actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the last handful of years.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#336If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…
I don’t know about that; for instance a number of lawyers I follow are now on Mastodon and enjoying figuring it out. The biggest problems seem to be that some popular servers are disabling signups for a bit, and secondly finding out who else is there too (but Debirdify helps with that)
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#337Surprising that mastodon has only half a million users?! Way below what I expected after so many years.
I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming: Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness. Pretty sweet.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#338Quoted post unavailable.
Only in the tech world will this be popular. The system is not friendly for people want a simple experience.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#339What's most exciting and optimistic to me about all this hullabaloo is that people are organically starting to make a move back to a more-decentralized web (decentralized in the original, 90s internet sense). What's cool is it's happening 100% organically and independent of technology. I love the idea of different "corners" of the internet becoming more of a thing again. We need more diversity of thought, not less, and this move (however small) makes it more likely, not less.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#340So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up. A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code t…
Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results. I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back. I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the l…
> it's a disagreement about the focus
So what would you like to focus on instead?