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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?

#81

Post by sosull »

ambrozk wrote: post #65
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…

> 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…

Is there even a remotely balanced alignment between the number of users on a platform and that platform’s advertising market share? I think the answer is no. Google and Meta dominate ads. No-one else really has traction, irrespective of their platform’s success.

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

#82

Post by marvin »

Twitter will do at least as well under Musk as it did under the previous leadership, in terms of user satisfaction, reach and retention. But it will have moderation policies that are noticeably different from those of the competition. My prediction made while everyone is freaking out.

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

#83

Post by smcl »

squidbeak wrote: post #68
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…

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...

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

#84

Post by gpm »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #48
nemo44x wrote: post #10

The “Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus” is in overdrive this weekend, now providing manuals on how to sign up for a different social network that none of them heard of last week because of Current Thing. We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.

Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and I'll accept the claims of federated platform.

Mastodon publishes RSS feeds, take a username and server and make a url that looks like this: https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss

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

#85

Post by mysterydip »

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…

> Too much friction.

So far that's all I've seen from the twitter users I follow. "which one are you on?" "why is this so complicated?" etc.

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

#87

Post by losteric »

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.

> The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable.

Intentionally by design, or just a "MVP"/MLP limitation?

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

#88

Post by kemayo »

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?

> 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.

Absent a few questions about whether the layoffs have been done in a way that violates employment laws (which I've seen enough debate about that I imagine we'll have to see how lawsuits turn out), I don't think anyone is saying he doesn't have the right to do this. Rather, criticism focuses on whether it was (a) a good idea, and (b) well-executed.

There's a few major strands of criticism of the layoffs that appeal to me:

1. It was less than a week. You can't possibly have reviewed who you were firing well enough to be confident that you were firing the right people.

2. The departments that were laid off are concerning. Apparently the trust and safety teams were hardest hit, and making the already-bad moderation worse on Twitter doesn't sound great.

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

#89

Post by petepete »

abzolv wrote: post #52
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.

It definitely is. You just need to look at some Mastodon conversations from non-tech Twitter.

People are confused about:

* there are so many servers - which do I join?

* how will I be able to tell people are who they say they are without the 'blue tick'?

* if anyone can verify how do I know who is important/celebrity/official?

* what do I do when the instance I want to join isn't open to registrations (and why on earth isn't it open to registrations?)

* how do I discover/follow people on other instances?

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

#90

Post by thedrbrian »

addajones wrote: post #38
vorpalhex wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.

none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay.

See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.

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