441–450 of 521 posts
This may be the only time this phrase has ever been warranted, but...crypto solves this? I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc etc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might not be 1024, but he probably has more failures than successes: Solar City, Neuralink, Boring Company, Hyperloop (he decided not to turn this into a company, but he wasted his and his other companies' resources on this so I think it is fair to consider it a Musk failure).
Solar City isn't a failure, it's part of Tesla now. Still selling panels, as far as I know. Boring company is also not yet a failure, and has recently built several tunnels. Neuralink is an early stage research company and is still humming along. It may fail some day, but it certainly hasn't failed yet. As for Hyperloop, he specifically said he wasn't going to build it, and several companies are still working on it,…
None of those companies have any real success to show for themselves. They haven’t met the hype that Musk has put on them or shown any real progress in reaching that hype.
I can at least understand you saying it might be too early on something like Neuralink, but I don’t understand calling Solar City a success. Musk had to bail it out with his other company in a deal shady enough to trigger lawsuits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
What was he running his mouth about? Crazy stuff like landing boosters back at the pad, or on barges in the middle of the Atlantic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
What was he running his mouth about? Crazy stuff like landing boosters back at the pad, or on barges in the middle of the Atlantic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
That just shows confidence isn't always a predictor of success. They made a bad call, quite obviously.
Their rejection of his idea is what inspired the pivot to build rockets instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And regardless of the rate of loss, the fact remains that twitter, throughout its entire history, has been a money-losing operation. Even taking the literally 2 years they were in the black, that doesn't wipe out the other unprofitable years. This seems like one hell of a nit to pick.
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…
I don't think I buy that; it's not _that_ hard. Actually, I've noticed that there are a bunch of journalists (and not just tech journalists) showing up on Mastodon suddenly; this didn't really happen with the previous Twitter exoduses.
> Not enough reach.
That... depends. Not right now, no. But for the journalist use-case (low-latency access to what's happening right now, more or less a better news wire) it could be soon. And that journalism use-case is arguably what made Twitter important in the first place.
To be clear, I don't think that journalists will _abandon_ Twitter in favour of Mastodon. But if I was a journalist I'd be getting established on it now, in case things go wrong with Twitter.
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.
It sounds like a form of digital McCarthyism.
I'll have a look at the Pleroma source to see if they also engage in this type of ideological censorship. If not it sounds like Pleroma is the better alternative, being both lighter as well as (hopefully) free from censorship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted. The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful. We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underly…
> people are centralized on a handful of providers Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.
They do? Changing your email address across every service provider you use is a colossal pain in the ass, and that's when they let you change your email address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses.
Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure.
It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network).
Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.