Off-topic, but is there a similar federated alternative to Reddit? e.g. each subreddit can be its own server.
[deleted]
Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
351–360 of 521 posts
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge. Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really…
Did you just compare Musk to Ghandi and Ford?
[deleted]
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#353BBC title correction according to their own article: "Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all.
> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years. The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving server…
> email has been working great for the past 30 years When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders (like people running private mail servers)... ...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their personal accounts... ...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation working great.
Still you can pick any server you want, any client you want, move your data freely if you are not happy with provider. And there's no corporation that can say that tomorrow you are going to pay $5/month more or you can kiss your contacts goodbye (sure you can loose your address if you don't have own domain, but you still can access the network).
I will gladly take it over closed protocol, even if it has reaction gifs built in.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they? Alive and kicking in the UK.
The vast majority of US comment sections went to Disqus and then Facebook comments and then shuttered altogether. Some smaller ones remain, but it's mostly gone.
And the ones that are left tend to be either filled with spam or content I'd describe as "YIKES".
If I own a media company the last thing I'm doing is investing in the IT and moderation infrastructure it takes to run a Mastodon instance.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#356Off-topic, but is there a similar federated alternative to Reddit? e.g. each subreddit can be its own server.
Ah,I forgot the Littr[0] which fits your bill even better. Discussed on HN[1] a few months ago.
[0]: https://littr.me/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all. Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be st…
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?
Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with the sheer number of users.
AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the software such that it scales the way Twitter does.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#358BBC title correction according to their own article: " Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all. > The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week. Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks m…
missing a 0 on the number of users.... also this bot tracks users on mastodon https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#359Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve. They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these iss…
I don't know if he's going to succeed or fail (or even what "success" and "failure" are in this case), but I think it'd be better for the world if he failed. Twitter isn't necessary and can be replaced, but it would be good for Musk to be mired in legal problems for a while and hopefully lose a lot of money. Reducing the power and influence of both Musk and Twitter seems like a clear win-win in the long run. I feel bad for all of the people at Twitter being trampled over in the process, though.
Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
#360So, 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…
> Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s?
The revolution eats its own children. The games industry used to be the target of hacker attacks, and cracking games, pirating them, was more fun than doing damage, according to the self-image of the 80th, 90th, 00th. Who would have guessed that such a spirit could also turn against its own community, in a community where manipulation and deception took place even in the past, as long as it served one's own goals? There has never been good and evil. Only feasible and delightful. I regret it, however there is only so much we can do.