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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

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Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#381

Post by rchaud »

rapind wrote: post #78
grammers wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails. >Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the aver…

> much more civil as well. Unfortunately that’s about to change.

I don't see how.

Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons:

a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance

b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued to a screen like bad news

c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of your follows).

Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users and shoving ads at them.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#382

Post by Swenrekcah »

darawk wrote: post #238
voxl wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They typically just purchase the company instead. See: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple. Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen, especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e. horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing. Le…

> Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has obviously been highly successful at marketing. But his "real success" has been in delivering products like useful electric cars and reusable rockets that didn't previously exist. His marketing skills help with that, but all the marketing in the world isn't going to sell a product that doesn't exist (except in crypto).

I think those aren’t incompatible views.

Undeniably Elon’s success is his tremendous wealth, the basis of which are two very valuable companies that the cofounded and has as CEO marketed brilliantly, if not always honestly.

He obviously knows a lot about what people to work with.

It is highly unlikely he knows how to build or design almost anything Spacex or Tesla makes. He knows a lot about everything they make of course, and can get more detailed briefings and information on it that anyone, but he didn’t make it.

So the wealth and the successful companies are his success sure, but his greatest personal accomplishments are obviously his marketing skills.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#383

Post by UncleEntity »

gonehome wrote: post #274
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #244

So, 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…

> I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.

Email seems pretty successful by any measure…

All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so people don’t have to care about the underlying technology. With all the newfound interest there’s probably someone working on such a thing and other people looking for somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new trend.

Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison.

IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human ever.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#384

Post by rolenthedeep »

primeradical wrote: post #76
wheats wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the plat…

Totally agree, that's the fundamental principle of Mastodon and I like it. But I think some people are just looking for "the other Twitter." Mastodon is a philosophically different idea to Twitter's centralized moderation. I think other conversations about the network affect are apt here. Yeah, you can move to a different server all you want but in reality people want to be where other people are and don't actually w…

IME, none of that actually matters at a practical level.

I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.

Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.

But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.

My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#385

Post by rchaud »

LtWorf wrote: post #64
ISL wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction: If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV). Is the same true for toots?

Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter. They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.

If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#387

Post by sangnoir »

gonehome wrote: post #327
sangnoir wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very strange definition of failure: many non-homogenous systems have Pareto distributions. That in itself is not indicative of failure. 30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of the resounding success of email federation, those domains still exist and can still send/receive emails universall…

You can’t run your own node and majority of users are on one system - that’s failure to me.

I do run my own mail server on my own domain - so thank you for affirming that email is not a failure.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#388

Post by arise »

code_runner wrote: post #132
gonehome wrote: post #102

Mastodon 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’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…

Just to extend this, there are a large number of plausibly legitimate reasons people might hate Musk. Maybe you're stuck in Tesla service hell, or maybe you retired to Boca Chica and now have to deal with rocket noise and road closures. Maybe you're an environmentalist who doesn't like to see a launch facilities next to a wildlife preserve. Maybe you're a Tesla employee who was injured due to company negligence. Maybe you're a Neuralink researcher who is embarrassed over Musk's absurdly fantastical claims about what your technology can do. Maybe you founded a visionary electric car company only to see it sabatoged and taken over by Musk and have him launch your vehicle into space. Maybe you're a stressed out worker at any of Musk's companies who resents his demands for a work/life imbalance. Maybe you're a market trader who lost money due to Musk's fraudulent "funding secured" tweet. Maybe you're uncomfortable with the constant stream of vaporware, dumb ideas, and bogus dates issued by a false messiah preying on the technological optimism of your fellow nerds. Or maybe you're just an American who is tired of seeing bullshit artists wag the dog, behave illegal and unethically, and never be held to account for their actions.

There are many good things one might say about Musk, but don't pretend there aren't any bad things.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#389

Post by moomin »

squidbeak wrote: post #68
nimbius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the…

Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have man…

I wish any of my projects had been so unsuccessful as to sell for $44 billion.

And if you think my opinion isn’t worth anything, consider the richest man in the world just spent $200 on it.

Re: Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

#390

Post by LtWorf »

rchaud wrote: post #385
LtWorf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter. They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.

If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.

Mute? They copy paste into printed newspaper.
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