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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

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

#391

Post by toss1 »

mjr00 wrote: post #317
andy_ppp wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.

It's absolutely a part of his job, though. One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old. It may not seem like…

If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing his reputation inside of a week.

Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here.

Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).

Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle of the call to sell next year's baseline because you aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply arrogant incompetence [0].

Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your advertisers [1] — your primary customers — is unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost it.

Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY they are actually pausing by one of the people in the meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with the day before...

I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the business model and the key elements, and just thrashing about blaming everyone else, when literally he is entirely to blame for the chaos.

Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5] that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it fired yesterday to return!

If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually a good argument that his initial intent was to sink Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we are)

[0] https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560

[1] https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1588718759098851328

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880

[3] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921

[4] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588622182066057216

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808

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

#392

Post by UncleEntity »

drstewart wrote: post #247
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…

>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular?…

> McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter?

Why would they when there were a handful of users there?

But now there’s a whole bunch of people looking for that one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the marbles.

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

#393

Post by abraham »

TrueGeek wrote: post #73
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…

> Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?

Moving accounts brings your followers with you. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #45

Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node: "So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instanc…

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by toofy »

bArray wrote: post #353

BBC 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…

there are six million users now, not six hundred thousand.

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

#396

Post by mmplxx »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #50
addajones wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

> He's basically a modern day king

In what way? I mean, besides him being very powerful. Other than that, his behavior here seems perfectly capitalistic to me.

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

#397

Post by rolenthedeep »

the_third_wave wrote: post #123
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…

Those decisions should not be taken at server level but at the level of the user. The way Mastodon is organised it is up to the server administrator to decide whether you get to interact with users on other servers. If the administrator has a bee up his bonnet on some specific subject he'll block any server which doesn't fit his idea of wrong and right with regard to that subject. This quickly leads to islands of ser…

You're looking at this from the wrong angle.

You do have control here. You do select your moderator, and you do have the power to change that.

You select which server your account lives on. If you disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this is probably not the right server for you. You can simply select another server.

You also have the option to run your own server. It's not hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know several people running their own servers, and a few of them just have one account.

Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild ride with content moderation over the years, and this has led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost their accounts and their followers forever with no recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep all your followers.

The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full control if you really want to. However, most of us don't want to deal with running a server, so you just have to trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place to be

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

#398

Post by cmrdporcupine »

_the_inflator wrote: post #360
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…

> 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 d…

fwiw when I say "hacker" I mean the other sense of the term. Not cracker/phreak.

But someone who 'hacks' on software. Unix hacker is an old but long lasting stereotype.

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

#400

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

gonehome wrote: post #308
throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it sure, if you ignore the very only communication method that everyone has - the email. a myriad others came and went, and none that exist today will be relevant in 50 years, but email will

Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496458 Email is an example of a federated system failure.

a failure that is infinitely more successful than any centralized solution.

and it will outlive gmail

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