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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?

#431

Post by syntheweave »

ambrozk wrote: post #65
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, 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…

Corporations bootstrapping their own community spaces, branded journalism, etc is historically common; the reason for not doing that comes down to cost and convenience. It saps away attention from the primary line of business to invest in a genuine, highly-engaged space like that, and it's much easier to look for platforms with a generic ad slot to insert messaging into.

But the past decades of outsource-and-automate, attaching the brand to new tech companies as they appear, has largely passed; if all the existing spaces have become unproductive sources of eyeballs, you have to change course and come up with a way to make "mcdonalds.social" an attractive hangout instead. The only reason centralized social media got as far as it did before was because the capital markets footed that bill.

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

#432

Post by losteric »

speedgoose wrote: post #347
losteric wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. Intentionally by design, or just a "MVP"/MLP limitation?

The current architecture is not designed to be horizontally scalable. You need one big primary database node. That works well if you are willing to optimise a lot, see the one example: stackoverflow. But it requires a lot of efforts and cannot scale that much. One could probably create a new implementation that scale though.

I'm very new to the project. Do you happened to know if the software architecture is inherently coupled to that physical tech choice (one big postgresql)? I have seen some well architected RoR apps sidestep that limitation, but they seem to be the exception.

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

#433

Post by pixl97 »

esskay wrote: post #289
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…

The reality is the average user could not give a crap who owns twitter, or what they do. They arent there for the owner, they're there because its a functioning social network.

The key term here is 'functioning social network' and what that actually means.

One of the truths of humanity is we don't accept 'extreme' views that we ourselves do not hold. When presented with them we will find ways to censor them from our daily lives. The opposite side of the coin is the people that hold these extreme views very commonly want to share these views with others (I would assume so that others adopt these views, but there could be other motivations). These behaviors are in conflict with each other, and if the extremists are not moderated, the moderate masses will eventually leave.

Why the owner is important is they typically become the 'buck stops here' person for policy on what is extreme and how the site will be moderated. As of so far Musk (already a controversial character to many) has not given much good information to any party involved in the continuation of twitter (users/advertisers/workers) on how this is going to proceed and given quite a fair amount of questionable information and bad signaling.

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

#434

Post by BurningFrog »

onion2k wrote: post #101
jmann99999 wrote: post #5

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. 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. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much…

Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach. You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough. What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying…

That was an odd way to agree that Mastodon isn't a replacement for Twitter...

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

#435

Post by toss1 »

mjr00 wrote: post #403
toss1 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I see that he wants to market to that not-quite-alt-right-but-not-neoliberal customer.

I just do not see how any of his actions actually help enhance that even with even an idealized version of such a customer, and does not alienate even that customer.

How does it establish any credibility with anyone to 1) be so unprepared for a critical advertiser's (your customers) presentation that customers literally cut their spend during the meeting; 2) publicly make excuses trying to blame for your failures on some "activist groups" who actually had no influence on advertisers' (your customers) decision to cut spending; 3) destroying verification and turning it into a anyone-can-pay-$8-to-say-they-are-anyone-and-get-greater-reach; 4) come into a $44B deal making a lot of noise and failing to articulate a plan, any plan that gets anyone on board?; etc., etc., etc.

I wish Elon all the success in the world, but he is seriously flailing here, and creating confidence in no one. I expect that he has a good chance of sorting it out once he understands the issues, but he's clearly done no homework up front, so is figuring it out in real time.

I do not see how this helps him, even with his ideal customer. Of course, as usual his comments have plenty of fanbois claiming whatever he does must be 4-D Chess, but seriously, how does this much public flailing, thrashing, and excuses give anyone confidence?

Can you point to any specific action that would actually give such a customer more confidence? From what I've read, the RW people are also really pissed at him because they expected to be able to rush right in and raise hell, and that's not yet happening either...

EDIT: A new case in point:

"Comedy is now legal on Twitter" 5:16 PM · Oct 28, 2022 [0]

"Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended" 5:53 PM · Nov 6, 2022 [1]

How does this kind of obviously figuring it out as he goes along increase credibility with anyone?

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586104694421659648

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589390597798125568

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

#436

Post by zimpenfish »

Karunamon wrote: post #411
zimpenfish wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Twitter hasn't even been acquired for a month yet, how are numbers from nearly 2 years ago even relevant? Straight from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588671155766194176

Ok, do you have a source that isn't someone known for playing fast and loose with facts, especially financial ones? Anything pre-takeover that suggests they were losing $4M a day? Because it is almost certain that the $4M a day he quotes is likely only due to the $1B a year debt interest Musk himself saddled the company with.

Or do you think it is even slightly plausible for a company to go from a profit of ~$570M to a loss of ~$1.4B in under a year?

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

#437

Post by phpisthebest »

mplewis wrote: post #423
phpisthebest wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have a very skewed view of who’s buying the F150 and who they’re selling the Lightning to.

No I have a very very correct view of who is buying both the F150 and the Lightning...

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

#438

Post by phpisthebest »

rolenthedeep wrote: post #430
phpisthebest wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will not happen is the Admin of the server you are one chooses to block the server you want to move to.... Mastodon has long become a political project ever sense their very public dispute with Gab... They ceased to be a neutral project and clearly showed the limitations of the federation space when it comes to putting users in control, as that control is largely symbolic and just like centralized system unless…

You're complaining that you can't migrate your account to a Nazi server. This sounds like a feature , not a bug.

ahh yes, everyone you disagree with is a Nazi......

I figured that tired, worn out, dead horse would be dead now but I guess not

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

#439

Post by phpisthebest »

pixl97 wrote: post #427
phpisthebest wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No a very loud, very vocal, minority of users that have an extreme authoritarian world view and will create the appearance of wide scale social outrage where there is none will scare marketers.. Of course if they had any real data on the impact of their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company an…

Pray tell, before the internet how many effective boycotts were there in media, are you suggesting this never existed? The vocal minority has always had the largest impact in all history, that's just how humans work. And even sometimes the vocal minority is correct and the moderate masses say "Oh, yea, you're right megacorp does suck and should probably change". Simply put there are a number of relatively high view s…

That is simply not true.... the reality is the vocal minority can only effect change is the structures of power support their cause.

This is why people are sooo upset with the management change at twitter, and why they are going after the advertisers now while they still have at least symbolically control over the structures of power.

For at least 20 years now the far left authoritarians have had total control over the media, and the large internet platforms, this wind is starting to shift to the other direction and we are seeing the inevitable attempt to tear down the system before "the others" gain control over it

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

#440

Post by notacoward »

primeradical wrote: post #12

Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone. If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.

I think I'll go look at forks of the Mastodon/Pleroma code, see who's working on a clustered mega-server to give people a more Twitter-like experience at one place instead of relying entirely on federation. Then again, maybe the people doing that are not being so obvious about it. Pretty sure there's someone, though. Probably even a VC or two throwing money at them.
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