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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?

#401

Post by Kye »

jrnichols wrote: post #213
nemo44x wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It’s going to be the worst thing that happened to some of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the entire thing doesn’t fall over.

the fediverse has also been a safe haven for some otherwise marginalized communities too, and I am concerned that a flood of other users that are not familiar with the culture could overwhelm things and change the vibe significantly. Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go, advertisers always follow, sadly. We'll see how long this new surge las…

I'm not sure I would call it a safe haven. The same infighting that plagues marginalized communities on Twitter is there on Mastodon. I've had to block entire instances of people I otherwise agree with because they spent all their time making callouts, many quite questionable.

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

#402

Post by the_third_wave »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #397
the_third_wave wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

What happens with you "followers" when you change servers? Do they follow along automagically or do they have to undertake action to re-connect to @you@new.server?

As to running your own server - something I have been looking in to because I support the decentralisation of the 'net - I am under the impression that Pleroma is a lot easier on the hardware than Mastodon. Does you concur?

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

#403

Post by mjr00 »

toss1 wrote: post #391
mjr00 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mid…

I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't quite alt-right). It's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term it hasn't been.

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

#404

Post by Gigachad »

bombcar wrote: post #151
Gigachad wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on a vps a few years ago and didn’t have much issues with spam lists. Only gave up because I couldn’t be bothered updating the thing.

That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too much work in the long run. They work great when they're the ONLY option in town, but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as they did with email. Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb, but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a single company department might have 10…

Security became big as well. Mail servers used to get hacked constantly and you’d have your private data leaked and your server turned in to a spam gun.

These days to host anything securely you need a team of the top minds in that domain working full time on it. Just makes no sense to run your own mail server when for less money you could let someone else do it and they will do it much better.

This is just a sign of the industry maturing imo. You could relate it to construction. Used to have people building their own mud and stick huts but now everything requires planning, regulation, codes, licensed workers, etc.

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

#405

Post by zimpenfish »

Karunamon wrote: post #119
joshmanders wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong. Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!

It is somewhat telling that those who used to dismiss all complaints about Twitter's moderation practices with a variation of the "private companies can do whatever they want" canard, are not really repeating that one anymore, or worse, seem to have abandoned that principle outright and are now complaining that the owner is, indeed, doing whatever he wants. Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its…

> Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its acquisition.

Do you have a source for that? They lost $221M in 2021[1] which is ~$600k/day (and that was after a $800M lawsuit settlement which would have put them at ~$580M profit for 2021.)

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-posts-loss-2021-stock-1301280...

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

#408

Post by rolenthedeep »

the_third_wave wrote: post #402
rolenthedeep wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

What happens with you "followers" when you change servers? Do they follow along automagically or do they have to undertake action to re-connect to @you@new.server? As to running your own server - something I have been looking in to because I support the decentralisation of the 'net - I am under the impression that Pleroma is a lot easier on the hardware than Mastodon. Does you concur?

Anyone following your old account will automatically follow the new account. The only thing that does not transfer is your post history, for mostly technical reasons.

I don't know anything about pleroma, sorry. I do know that mastodon uses a ton of resources when you get a lot of users, but for <5 you can use anything including a raspberry pi

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

#409

Post by UncleEntity »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #77
vorpalhex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)

A climate team at a company with a huge energy footprint is absolutely a great idea IMO. Twitter operates a lot of servers and I'm sure some optimization can be done there.

Laying off half the workforce will probably save more electricity than whatever schemes the climate team ever dreamed up.

Just saying…

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

#410

Post by phpisthebest »

frereubu wrote: post #228
ambrozk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers…

I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there aren't many people there, but because of the content that their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising may be prese…

As a Life long F150 owner (having owned 5 of one from each of the last 5 generations including my current one... all V8's as well, Ecoboost V6 is a terrible engine and does not belong in a truck ;) ), and a person that lives in a Red State, and a person that Knows alot of other F150 owners..

I can assure you the people screeching about twitters new ownership are not Fords Customer base. Ford's bread and butter is the F150, a class of vehicle that the twitterverse that is leaving on mass would like to eliminate from production

Ford marketing dept is extremely tone deaf listing to that crowd

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