481–490 of 521 posts
I know that signature is a bit tongue in cheek, but I love seeing this growth of a (then) unknown OSS project to potential household name.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check 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.
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…
It’s definitely not “too hard” for a professional. If someone can’t even do this much, their reporting is not trustable in the first place.
The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me: - the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well) - the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed - and the completely empty personal feed Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with t…
The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile.
Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.
Even if mastodon takes off, it will be like any other protocol on the internet: A centralized free service will appear , like Gmail did, which most people will be there . Twitter will probably convert its service to activityPub then. Slightly better than what we have today, but it wont be immune. Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users…
However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort).
So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.
If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to follow someone.
Can't say mastodon will do this but if you asked me last week I would've agreed with you, yet what I'm seeing this week is unprecedented.
Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of…
> probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact
At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum.
> the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want
> They are going there literally to get
> They will not understand
> they will see
You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up.
Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users.
All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
>For at least 20 years now the far left authoritarians have had total control over the media I try not to cuss much on HN, but what the fuck are you talking about? If you think Fox News, one of the organizations with the largest audience is far left, you're out of your mind. If you think MSNBC or CBS were anywhere close to 'far left', you are again, out of your mind. Under no definition are those far left. I think yo…
Democrat Strategy 2022
Let's see how that works out for them tomorrow...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to buy it.