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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?

#51

Post by noahtallen »

vorpalhex wrote: post #31
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 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.)

How the hell is AI Ethics irrelevant to a company that uses AI to determine what tweets people are shown?

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

#52

Post by abzolv »

abzolv wrote: post #22

The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.

Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.

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

#53

Post by qzx_pierri »

addajones wrote: post #35
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…

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?

> Why does it matter how much he’s worth?

Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think, and I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon (or any other billionare - Elon is just an example). After people read so many sensationalized articles online, they adopt the author's sanctimonious opinions/views as their own.

It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met. Even if Elon posts snarky shit online, who doesn't? If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.

EDIT: Instead of replying to me and engaging in discussion (maybe I could learn something), I get downvoted. Stay classy, HN.

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

#54

Post by notimetorelax »

addajones wrote: post #35
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…

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?

I recently started reading history and it speaks a lot about land ownership and how peasants would get indebted to barons for working on it. On the surface that made a lot of sense, and yet this was not the type of society we wanted.

Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the peasants didn’t earlier.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-g...

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

#55

Post by sigmar »

vorpalhex wrote: post #31
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 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.)

The ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than the various other social media sites that don't require subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.

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

#56

Post by chx »

oynqr wrote: post #49
lambdaba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't finish sign-up because the servers seem overwhelmed (confirmation email) But I'm wondering how something like Mastodon could scale to people having millions of followers.

Pleroma does what Mastodon't.

"neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice. It’s just where the people who’ve always been stirring up shit go."

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

#57

Post by ronnier »

whimsicalism wrote: post #36
jayflux wrote: post #26

A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months, but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe it’s different this time? But the cycle feels the same

Signal is gradually gaining adoption in the circles that I am in. Few years ago? Unusable. Now, many of the people I meet are fine starting a signal chat instead of SMS.

I mainly use only signal now. I feel very uncomfortable using other messaging platforms that keep the text sitting in a database that is either plain text or encrypted with keys they have. I mean private messaging apps, not things like twitter or HN.

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

#58

Post by grammers »

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…

>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.

Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails.

>Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.

I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent replacement, much more civil as well.

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

#59

Post by bojan »

Eji1700 wrote: post #13
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…

Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better. So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.

Same here, and even better, I'm not sure if I'm not able to do what I want because I don't understand how it should be done, or because the site is broken due to the sudden spike in traffic it is experiencing.

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

#60

Post by jasode »

colordrops wrote: post #23
godelski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't it get enough reach? > What if each news outlet ran their own server? I think you answered your own question.

Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

>Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.

The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".

Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards".

E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.)

Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.

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