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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

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Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#361

Post by tchaffee »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #266
low_tech_love wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, would they have done better by not acting on his antics? I think every moderation decision is a trade-off, and the final goal is always the health of the platform itself, not “society” or whatever. Yeah, some people will be hurt, but not acting would hurt too. So… I don’t know. It seems too “romantic” to me to believe that there is a handful of left-wing bigots in the company and all you need to…

> The real question is, would they have done better by not acting on his antics? Yes, they would have done better. Their business should be providing the platform, not telling the users that is 'true' and what is not. That everyone should decide for themselves. One thing is fighting spam, but what they were doing was Ministry of Truth stuff. And harm from that might be thousandfold greater than whatever Trump could e…

> Their business should be providing the platform

That's not how capitalism works. Their business should be doing whatever they think will generate the most long term profit for the owners. It's an advertising platform. Advertisers don't want a platform where users get to decide what the truth is. Advertisers don't want their advertisement next to some anti-vaxxer nutjob or a vocal racist. This is common sense.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#362

Post by tchaffee »

causi wrote: post #350
tchaffee wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people just don't want to use a company run by someone they abhor. Does there need to be a point other than that?

Not at all, but that's not what they say they care about. "Fuck Elon Musk, boycott twitter" is an entirely valid position. "Elon Musk has turned twitter into 8chan" is an absurd falsehood.

> "Elon Musk has turned twitter into 8chan" is an absurd falsehood.

What percentage of Twitter users are saying this?

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#363

Post by firefoxkekw »

mcherm wrote: post #303
firefoxkekw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait until people start realizing the privacy problems that Mastodon have unless you make your own instance. You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers. Created your account in a random instance? oh we…

I just can't get myself to see this as a genuine disadvantage. On Mastodon you can choose the server to use (and thus the moderation). Sure, this means you can choose a server run by a 12-year-old who moderates poorly. But if you don't want that... don't pick that server! The problem (no, ONE of the many problems) with creating good moderation is that different people have different definitions of what constitutes "g…

It can totally not be a disadvantage for you, I'm not debating that, I even encourage others to explore Mastodon, there is probable a market for a product like Mastodon for a small subset of individuals. But that doesn't mean it isn't a disadvantage for most people.

In the context of this thread, the blog starts by justifying the authors choice by citing the laid off of the accessibility team, the alternative for the author is Mastodon which brings the complexity of selecting which instances you trust, even when you find a good instance, at some point the owners can shutdown it and you will need to migrate to another instance. If a rogue employee sent your messages to another person, they can be prosecuted, have fun trying to do that to the owner of the instance, yes, you can have your own instance which have a monetary/time cost. Using a commercial product? Oh I really hope you instance never angry the mob or they may go to your commercial provider to demand they drop you. Obviously this doesn't make the accessibility any worse /sarcasm.

Popular Mastodon instance?

* Moderation takes time, who is going to do that for free, everyday?

* Who is paying the infrastructure cost?

Mastodon

* Daily active users is 655k spread in multiples instances 1º * Private owned instances, self moderate.

* User base of the extremes of the gaussian distribution, the extreme privacy oriented and the politically motivated.

* User base is a subset that will split into another few subsets, high tendency to form echo chambers.

* Difficult to scale, closed system with rapidly increasing entropy (no accountability, highly susceptible to the instance owner desires (affected by time))

* Hard to attract people with a big following social media since the user base is small and the opportunity to grow is very small but the leak of followers to other users with small following base is high. (High cost/Low return)

I love that Mastodon exist, that it brings to the market different types of social media experiences, at the end, the market (people) will choose what is the more efficient version.

I personally doesn't use Twitter or Mastodon, I use rss with a CA instance of nitter in a RSS reader to check what a few people in the data science space tweet and my personal opinion is that the author is motivated by his political beliefs instead of the accessibility or quality of the product Twitter.

Sources:

1º https://nitter.ca/joinmastodon/status/1588168057893318657#m

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#364

Post by fsflover »

FortiDude wrote: post #335
glenstein wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.....or they would find an equilibrium that doesn't require massive centralization. Your analogy gets from point A to point be with a lot of empty speculation and hand waving.

My only assumption is that most people will choose an instance based on its reputation and that reputable instances will be far fewer than amateurish and unreliable ones. This is a very generous assumption and if we suppose people will choose even more randomly then the situation can only get bleaker. On the other hand you hand waved everything I said without specifically refuting any points, so what does that make y…

AFAIK fosstodon.org, social.librem.one and mastodon.technology (and likely more) have more or less similar reputation, so your argument is purely theoretical, not supported by the reality. They all have a reasonable number of interesting posts (i.e., users) if you look at some common tags.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#365

Post by Kye »

oefrha wrote: post #172
schipplock wrote: post #87

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithm…

You just discovered that happy people aren’t complaining on social media. 99% of people can be perfectly happy with something that’s constantly dumped upon.

You see this with chain restaurant reviews. A great one can have endless bad reviews on Google, Yelp, etc because by and large only people who had trouble bother to review.

But sometimes the reviews are accurate. Sometimes the critics and audience concur on a movie. Sometimes the people yelling on Twitter really are in the fire they're yelling about.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#366

Post by inglor_cz »

tchaffee wrote: post #343
inglor_cz wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a promise. Its value will be established sooner or later. It is too early to call any Twitter-related promise "empty". Even new governments traditionally have 100 days before it is considered fair to rip into them.

> Even new governments traditionally have 100 days But companies do not. Buy a company and start making big mistakes and there will be consequences. The competition for users is fierce. If you want 100 days, get elected instead of being forced into buying a company you didn't really want in the first place.

There will be consequences both ways. It is well possible that new Twitter will attract other people if its politics changes.

Not everyone in America, much less outside it, wants to pretend that they share the values of Californian Democrats from the progressive tribe, which according to this study [0] makes up whopping 8 per cent of the American population.

[0] https://hiddentribes.us/#america-s-hidden-tribes

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#367

Post by luckylion »

tsimionescu wrote: post #346
luckylion wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't choose your ideology, it's assigned by the tooth fairy when you lose your first tooth. Alternatively, it seems to have a significant genetic component, and most of the rest will depend on the environment you grow up in. Choice isn't part of it, you don't evaluate all the possibilities and then pick the best one, you think the one you're part of is the best one because it intuitively made sense to you. The r…

Most people I know have the opposite ideology from their parents, who had the opposite ideology of their own. Many people change their ideologies throughout life, as incentives and personal experience pushes them (e.g. having a bad experience with a certain political party can often sour you to their whole ideology). It's true that I don't live in America, so maybe there is a difference, but you definitely are not de…

Studies suggest that genes play a significant role, and obviously there's an environmental component (ie your upbringing, for which your parents are very important but many other factors play a role, too). Hence you generally take on the ideology around you, even if that may slowly shift between generations (but it seems that people also simply have a different mindset at 20 vs at 40, so when you ask them at 20, they're very different from their parents, but that often changes when they are in similar circumstances as their parents).

Of course, some people do change their ideology later in life (which I don't think is the right term, because they don't actively change it, it's more that they change and their ideology is part of them), but that's not common, and overall it's remarkably stable.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#368

Post by NayamAmarshe »

tluyben2 wrote: post #356
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite possibly the most responsive native social media application for all platforms. It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips

Couldn't have said it better. If they would have e2e for all chats & groups I would live in this thing. It's much better than Slack etc for me, but I trust them even less than Slack. Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I gues…

Yeah, I'd really like an option for permanent E2EE on all platforms but I trust Telegram with my data.

As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.

I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.

Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#369

Post by Kye »

atoav wrote: post #188
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #176

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k follow…

For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there. I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.

It's the Trust Thermocline: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#370

Post by tomcam »

croes wrote: post #45
tomcam wrote: post #26

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know…

>But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. This works in small starting companies not in a Behemoth like Twitter. And I doubt he fixed so much. The traffic problems he claimed to fix with the Boring Company are nowhere near fixed, same with FSD.

> And I doubt he fixed so much.

Do you think manufacturing cars and rockets happens without a lot of course correction, pun intended?

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