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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?

bbc.com

71–80 of 521 posts

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

#71
post #25

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…

And he doesn't even take it that well. Criticize Musk and the whining ensues. You see, the richest man on the planet IS the victim.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

> "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.

Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!

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

#73
post #21

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…

> Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run

I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?

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

#75
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.)

Are they going to ban paying customers? Thats like throwing money away.

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

#76
post #21

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…

Totally agree, that's the fundamental principle of Mastodon and I like it.

But I think some people are just looking for "the other Twitter." Mastodon is a philosophically different idea to Twitter's centralized moderation.

I think other conversations about the network affect are apt here. Yeah, you can move to a different server all you want but in reality people want to be where other people are and don't actually want to migrate if they can help it. People aggregating in one place is the antithesis of the Mastodon federation.

If Mastodon does really catch on, it'll be a single digit number of high population servers that probably all end up having similar content moderation policy to Twitter to attract the most number of users. There won't be a grand utopia of a flat distribution of uniquely moderated servers.

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

#77
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.)

A climate team at a company with a huge energy footprint is absolutely a great idea IMO. Twitter operates a lot of servers and I'm sure some optimization can be done there.

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

#78

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 aver…

> much more civil as well.

Unfortunately that’s about to change.

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

#79
post #66

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 ins…

The deal for Musk to buy Twitter was agreed in April.

He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.

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