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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?

#61

Post by chmars »

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.)

Do you have a source for those 'silly teams'?

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

#62

Post by convery »

wheats wrote: post #21
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.

>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea. Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the plat…

Ye, seems like a good fit for the terminally-online Twitter users as their main complaint about Elon is him wanting to be fair in terms of moderation and not favouring their side. Even launched their Twitter clone called "Tribal" to have a "fascist free" alternative without wrongthink..

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

#63

Post by ryukafalz »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #40

> The first thing you have to do when you sign up is choose a server > It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway > The server you choose becomes part of your user name > Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other b…

> OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits.

It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.

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

#64

Post by LtWorf »

ISL wrote: post #18
raytube wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction: If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV). Is the same true for toots?

Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter.

They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.

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

#65

Post by ambrozk »

nimbius wrote: post #25
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…

>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 paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.

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

#66

Post by baxtr »

I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now.

But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore.

Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on inside Apple thoroughly. Only after he understood the situation (he did product review sessions) and had developed a strategy, only then he executed it quickly. And even then, he knew that results would come eventually but not immediately.

Now, ofc you could argue that the situation is different since Musk is a long-term twitter user himself and knows the platform, at least outside in. Yet, Jobs was an Apple user, too.

I don’t know. We will see how this turns out. Musk has some other companies that are running quite well.

Still, this might be the one which won’t because he rushed it.

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

#68

Post by squidbeak »

nimbius wrote: post #25
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…

>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…

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 many user excited about the platform for the first time in years.

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

#70

Post by matthewdgreen »

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?

He has a right to buy the “public square” and do whatever he wants with it. The people who occupied that public square have the right to move to a different one. Isn’t that what TFA is all about? Obviously that’s inconvenient for a lot of people and probably disastrous for Musk and his investors but I guess we’ll see what happens.
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