If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now?
It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future.
> Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.
>Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring.
In what ways? And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?
Twitter's product has been static for years, barring perhaps the introduction of Twitter Spaces, which has barely made a dent in usage (as far as I can see, anyway). I personally regard this as a negative: I think that they should have been innovating more. But if I were a major brand looking at my advertising commitments I'd probably be fine with it.
> And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?
I don't personally think Mastodon is the answer so I'm probably not well positioned to answer this. But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to. It is under my control and can't be bought out by a memelord playing a prank gone wrong.
Of course there is. On Twitter someone could sign up, pretend to be a member of my organization, pay $8 to get a verified checkmark and there's very little I can do about it. If I own my own Mastodon instance I can kick them off (or stop them from signing up in the first place)
If twitter fraudulently verified something there is absolutely something you could do - you could sue. And it would be pretty clear cut.
And all you can do on Mastodon is moderate your server - they can still be out there in the greater Mastodon community and there is even less you can do about that than you have recourse with Twitter.
Meanwhile before the acquisition, on Twitter, someone could sign up and pretend to be a member of your organization and... there was still very little you could do about it. Verified checkmark is a red herring, because it's not something you could guarantee for yourself or other members of your org. You were better off - and still are - with something like Keybase, or... well just not using Twitter for anything important in the first place.
Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
>Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses.
Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems more likely than it did a week ago, that he has no idea how to actually turn Twitter into a success.
>What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
Content and followers on Twitter cannot easily and directly be transferred somewhere else. Any personal investment a user makes into Twitter today is at risk of being worthless if Twitter disappears. Whether that matters you or not depends on why you use Twitter. If it is for fun, that isn't a real risk. But plenty of people use Twitter as part of their job and these people really need to start considering if investing in their Twitter account is worth it compared to moving that effort somewhere else.
I don't think it's a false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.
Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
>I guess I set up the false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.
But that is still a false dichotomy because I don't need to know the right answer to recognize boneheaded management. Any independent observer can see that Musk is going back and forth on certain decisions: saying "comedy is now legal on Twitter" then banning parody accounts for mocking him or laying people off then immediately asking them to come back. These are self inflected mistakes that I recognize as objectively bad management without knowing the specifics of how to properly manage Twitter.
>Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.
And none have been a media company let alone a social media company. Building cars, rocket ships, and tunnels are all relatively similar from a management perspective and are very different from running a social media company. Running a social media company requires a much more complex understanding of people and social systems. It isn't as simple as just building a good product. Twitter's technical product was never the primary issue with the company. The problems Twitter faces are all human problems. Musk hasn't shown an ability to fix those type of issues.
>There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.
Those apps are generally worthless at the scale we are talking about. Twitter has 450m monthly users. Mastodon has 1m. Retaining 0.2% of your audience when transferring platforms doesn't provide much value.
>What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.
Yes, the point it that it didn't seem like Twitter failing was a likely situation a year ago. Today it seems like a realistic possibility.
Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned. Parody accounts that may trick people into thinking they are real accounts will be banned. I don't really see the problem with that. If you ever look at any popular tech related Twitter account, you will see a ton of crypto scams in the replies from people purporting to be vitalic or other famous members of the community.
I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
I'm not saying that Elon is guaranteed to succeed, I'm saying that it isn't clear that he is bound to fail. Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
>Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned.
That isn't true[1].
>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.
It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.
>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?
No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.
I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.
>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.
But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.
>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.
Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.
> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio
In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.
My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.
Fair enough, but I have never seen that rule enforced before. Plenty of parody accounts don't list that they are a parody in their display name. There are several specifically dedicated to Elon Musk that are just "[adjective] Elon Musk" like "Bored Elon Musk" and "Italian Elon Musk" that have existed on the site for years.
That page also lists permanent suspension as the third punishment that comes after warnings and a temporary suspension. This round of punishments seemed to mostly go straight to permanent suspensions, but that wasn't consistent. Kathy Griffin and Griffin Newman have received permanent suspensions, but Sarah Silverman didn't. Is there a reason for that? Who knows?
Part of the problem with Musk's management is that it is impossible to know what the current rules are at any given moment. Is that page actually Twitter's current policy or not? Who knows?
Not to forget the TwitterAPIpocalypse of 2012 (?), when Twitter heavily restricted its programming interfaces, which decimated the ecology of companies that were built around it, like Flattr (1.0). I surmise that's not unrelated to Mastodon's release in 2016 ?
For instance :
IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies :
No but changes have been announced. Fundamentally altering what the "blue tick" means alone will give e.g. major brands pause. As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark. If I were Coca-Cola I'd be quite concerned about that.
>As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark.
And what are you basing that assumption on? Where did he say that for $8 anything goes? If anything he's been very plain that was NOT going to happen, yet people like you still are willing to assume the worse? Again, based on what specifically?
As of this week, Twitter will release the new verified/blue where "verified" means "payment for $8/mo authorized". No actual verification of identity [0].
If this wasn't enough, Musk has confirmed the timeline will essentially shadowban non-verified accounts [1].
So anyone can take anyone's else's name as "verified" and the non-verified will not be seen.
Essentially this means if you have the money you can run dozens or thousands of verified accounts that claim to be anyone.
Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform.
You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship.
Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring
It was none of those things and was widely regarded to be the worst-run company in tech not named Theranos or WeWork, including on this very website. It's fine to dislike Musk and it's fine to dislike the moves he's made but this revisionist history has to stop.
Maybe you can explain to me the way in which Twitter was deeply unpredictable before Musk took over because I don't really see it. I agree that it was a badly run company but in a way that meant it didn't really change very much about its product in the last few years. That's what I mean about predictable and boring. If you looked at Twitter as product in 2017 and looked at it in 2022 you wouldn't see a whole lot of difference.
Take your pick between employees acting as agents on behalf of foreign governments[0], suspending POTUS for rules not uniformly applied to other users[1], introducing a fact-checking system with poor community reception[2], changing the core feature of the product (post length)[3], or improperly collecting data and accruing fines such that the US FTC now has the company under tight investigation. All done before Musk ever owned the company.
It was a good idea two weeks ago as risk mitigation.
Now the bad thing risk mitigation was meant to mitigate is happening.
It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.
Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why.
You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why.
Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk. It would be funny to watch, if it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.
Twitter's future wasn't in any way more certain before, nor was the platform any more stable. Adding or removing random features, and screwing third parties over API T&C changes, were pretty much the trademark of Twitter already.
You're accidentally making the Cultural Studies mistake of seeing the choices of a very small number of individuals at massive corporations that are broadcast to the general public as an expression of the general public themselves. It's not a self-induced panic, it's a media-induced panic that requires a media trust (in the antitrust sense) to sustain.
> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months.
Twitter now has a burden of $1 billion in interest payments per year, which it did not several months ago. That's pretty meaningful. Completely apart from anything about Elon, it would be entirely reasonable to expect this additional burden to make the product worse, as debt obligations often do.
It looks like he might try to monetize everything, which would mean that he won't need any help to destroy Twitter entirely. I would hope this would benefit Mastodon, but Mastodon has technical problems, so instead I think it will ultimately benefit Facebook's future internal twitter clone.
I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs.
Sure, the site itself looks the same, the logo is the same, but there's a ton of turmoil for the people behind the scenes. Not everything is run by computers, there are a lot of humans in the loop for the day-to-day operations of the site. The core product of "post tweet" and everything else which is all automated, sure, but there's tons of stuff that isn't, because it can't be. All that backend stuff has changed, even if you don't see it.
> I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs.
Well, OK, assuming this all pans out to be true[0], that's one hell of a botched firing, which apparently (see [0]) Musk/Twitter is trying to back-track on... but that happened in the last few days. The Internet drama about Musk and Twitter started months ago, and reached its peak before the sale ultimately went through - which means it can't be attributed to this.
Or, in a hypothetical world in which the wellness team still got sacked, but the content moderation didn't, do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying, "In a surprising change of face, Musk did not fire Twitter's content moderators", or rather headlines trying to find nefarious reasons for why the team would've been retained?
I'm not denying the turmoil that's happening in Twitter, and the hard times that befell on its employees (and ex-employees). I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does. It has its own life now.
----
[0] - AFAIK we're still at the level of reporting of "sources familiar with the matter quoting two high-level people involved in the matter" - which ordinarily means journalists quoting random Twitter posts without attribution, but in this case, I don't know how to read that.
Yeah I mean I'm sure the facts will clear after the dust settles, but for now we get hottakes based on real Tweets, fake Tweets, Internet rumors, and lies. Some of them won't age well (including mine).
> Or, in a hypothetical world ... do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying...
Less hysterical? No. As far as headlines, I can totally see both; headlines saying it's a surprise, along with a different newspaper framing it negatively. (I think I heard the shadowban group survived unscathed.)
> I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does.
I'd say it's quite correlated as it's all based off of things Musk has done (eg suspending users impersonating him) or said/tweeted (proclaimed that free speech will reign supreme). Normally I'd say saying things and doing this are two separate matters (talk is, after all, cheap), except that this is a social media site, who's entire purpose is for saying things. For Tesla it's easy to point at the number of Model 3's produced/wk or Autopilot's shortcomings and set aside things Musk has said for what he's done or not done. Twitter, on the other hand, is a place for talk, so when Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, and then proceeds to buy Twitter, people take notice, especially at junctures where it turns out he's not.
There is a lot of stuff about Mastodon flying around, which isn't really related to Musk's speech/actions, and supports your "life of its own" part though.
All your other point are good but this one surprises me. I think at this point people can have very rational fear and hatred of this guy. He's a 50 year old man with literally the world view of and politics a 14 year old edgelord on Fortnite but with enough money and following to do real damage with that. The biggest fears people seem to have is that he actually succeeds at his stated intentions for the platform.
> All your other point are good but this one surprises me.
I'll tell you where it comes from. I used to like Musk in early SpaceX / first Falcon landing / Tesla Model S era. Then I disconnected from the news a bit, for a couple of years, and started to pay more attention recently (~last year). I saw constant hatred of Musk on-line. I tried to investigate what he did to make people so upset, and besides a name calling here and there, I found literally nothing.
On the contrary, what I found is smart people who I used to respect retweeting or posting trivially disprovable soundbites like the whole apartheid money thing. I haven't seen an argument that wasn't overblown to ridiculous proportions.
This is not to say Musk didn't turn into villain. I'm not convinced either way, and I'm definitely not trying to claim he's pristine and good. I may have missed some important stories in ~2018-2021. What I am convinced about, though, is the whole anti-Musk crowd literally went high on their own bullshit, and is a perfect illustration how it ends when you have a feedback loop of people one-upping increasingly exaggerated claims.
Similar thing happened to me, but I think a lot of the souring happened due to the weird debacle with Musk calling the diver that saved those stranded kids a pedophile. Still, I don't know how that turned Musk into another culture war badge. Is he an out-of-touch, insensitive, crappy rich person? Seems like it, one of tens of thousands. But his culture war badge status is a bit weird.
> You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise.
Thing is, he isn't saying that much. Most of what people are reacting to are people's interpretation of what Musk said, and then further interpretation of those interpretations, etc. That's what strikes me as completely bonkers.
I did, actually; I caught up already (see another reply in this subthread), but my point still stands: the hysteria has been at current level for at least two weeks now. There's little causal relationship between the firings and all the noise, or sudden interest in Mastodon.
I would be much more afraid of a world where the major public square is privately owned and governed by a single individual with a proven history of public manipulation.
Identity politics is just a stupid sideshow, a distraction.
A private Twitter?.that's terrible. 100 times Bezos WaPo. It's the ball park of Mordoch publuc manipulation.
You're posting this on a site privately owned and run by an unaccountable billionaire.
> a proven history of public manipulation.
It's better when people say that they don't like Musk, than pretending there's some sort of higher political principle here. People don't have trouble believing that objectors don't like Musk, and disagree with him politically.
The trouble is in the appeal to principles that never come up in their discussions of e.g. the WaPo, which most of the objectors will defend to their last breath, along with Bezos. Like here, when the one of the wealthiest people in the world, owner of the largest retailer, that controls a massive part of internet infrastructure, also owns the second most influential paper, becomes 100x less important than Twitter changing ownership.
Did I defend bezos? I gave him as an example for the same thing I'm calling out musk for.
I'm just saying that Musk owning Twitter is that times 100(a made up number, obviously) because:
1. Twitter somehow became the place where most "journalists" get their news from.
2. Politicians spread their propaganda at
3. Musk has no scruples about public manipulation and abusing his power. He is set on whatever made up vision he has, and he'll do whatever it takes to get there.
Why won't he use his control of where journos and politicos create the public discourse? How is that not just expected? His company, his rules, no?
BTW you turning me calling out Musk as somehow diminishing Bezos damage is hardly in good faith. Same as your godlike mind reading , that I just hate musk and turning to principles is me hiding that fact.
Try to assume I'm speaking in good faith, it leads to much better discussions.
It was so poorly run that there's a chance Musk could have come in, fucked up pretty badly, and still maybe improved the books.
However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.
If Musk is so much of a shrewd, evil business shark it's been portrayed as in the last months, you can imagine he'll find some nasty underhanded way to attach Twitter to an IV with Starlink on the other end, and flood it with money until the blue bird is back on its feet.
Once again, self proclaimed rational thinkers and scientific and engineering minds can't see their glaring biases. As long as my team is winning all of the problems "aren't so bad", but as soon as it's the other team, everything is a firebrand. Metas preparing to have massive layoffs and yet here we are arguing over someone making obvious and I mean obvious business decisions to cut waste, bloat, and start turning some profitability. We've lamented some of these financial woes about Twitter here for years, and now someone finally has started walking the walk and all of a sudden the world is ending and its time to jump ship?
Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.
If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long.
I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.
Mastodon and ActivityPub in general have UX issues. I can't imagine trying to explain to non-technical users why they have to open a pop-up window to another website just to be able to follow someone, or why people keep changing handles, etc etc.
For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.
In an alternate, saner universe we normalized running "apps" backed by email rather than only backed by the Web, and Twitter and Facebook are just special email readers made by companies worth low-tens-of-millions of dollars.
In the first week Musk has already shown that his Twitter will erratically push out poorly thought out policy changes on a whim. Definitely not giving "reliable" vibes.
This is what happened with GitHub after the MS acquisition announcement as well. Right after the announcement there was a HN post about repo creation/imports being up 1000% or something, but now we can tell that not too much has changed (and GitLab was free hosted as well; you have to run your own mastodon instance). Until mastodon itself brings some killer feature that makes it de-facto better than Twitter, or Twitter actively starts promoting hate speech to people who otherwise are only interested in the art / 'art' parts of the platform, then it'll still be relevant even if it's bleeding a lot more money than it used to.
The killer feature is the fact that it is actually a nice place to visit and this is partly by design. The stream of negativity that pervades Twitter is not present to the same degree.
Cards on the table, I don’t think federated Twitter will be a thing. Or at least it’s not a replacement for Twitter, in the forms I’ve seen it so far.
However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while.
And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.
I don't have a twitter account (requires a mobile number that I won't give them), so I am a bit at a disadvantage here. But am I right to assume that twitter will only show you tweets from people you follow (or their own re-tweets)?
If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place?
If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?
Wouldn't being the topic du jour exactly the right time to lean into promoting it?
I mean Elon raised a massive PR storm for Twitter and alternatives. Mastodon have been trying to become mainstream since forever. Fowler believes it to be a good thing also, so he uses his media clout (blog readership) to lean in and push this message.
Why is that a problem?
Very few people knew this was even an option before last week as there was next to zero mention of it in the corp media they see. Now every big media outlet is suddenly explaining it.
People also tend to only act when on the precipice. This does not bade well for other problems around the corner.
> it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon
Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans...
What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"...
Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.
>He is tearing down moderation
How? Indeed, he hasn't changed anything about moderation (except applying to to everyone universally)
>crapping on verification
By expanding it to anyone willing to pay instead of it being some exclusive club where people had to literally bribe twitter employees tens of thousands for the coveted blue check? Yup - he's totally going backwards!
> and injecting itself on electoral politics.
lol - Twitters whole reason to exist for the last six years was to be the amplifier for one particular political ideology. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't an injection into electoral politics?!? How rich!
> After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.
No one wants to do this. The HN type crowd always is willing (or says its willing) to do more work to get more privacy/freedom/etc... Almost everyone else will take convenience and cost over those things.
That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.
"Thing Elon built-or-owns, without Elon" turns out to be an entire market segment.
Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else.
FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.
Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone.
In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever.
The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run.
The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are.
Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.
It's actually infuriating to read. If it's harder than "App downloaded, account made" then you've already lost. Anything more complex than that is a complete non-starter.
Lost what, exactly ? Contrary to the capitalistic world of Twitter, where bigger faster is always better, the fediverse is not about that. If you don't want to adapt and are just trying to recreate Twitter, it's a complete non-starter.
If bigger/faster/better isn't the goal of the fediverse, then let's stop talking about it right now. All this incoming hype is about Elon and Twitter. Let's agree to stop talking about it. And especiallyt the fediverse needs to step up and say, "We're not a twitter replacement" instead of all this "Welcome aboard! You're in control! Democratize information!" snake oil that they're fueling.
Everyone in the fediverse community says "we're not a twitter replacement". It's a space for taking back control of communication. You don't join the fediverse, you are a part of it and contribute to build it.
I don't know where you got that snake oil but it doesn't reflect the pulse that's been there for years.
Lost the ability to actually reach people. Lost the ability to actually talk with people in your communities. Lost the ability for fucking anybody who isn't a wizard to know how to even read something. I mean Jesus, bulletin boards are easier than this.
How did you lose anything ? The fediverse is one way to communicate. IRC, email, BBS, gopher are all ways plebiscited by fediverse enthusiasts to also communicate because there is no one tool that can do everything. If mastodon is not for you, use something else; no one blames you
You need to take a step back, and look at what the average Joe is actually using. Don't assume that because your programmer friends use these obscure protocols for everyday communication that everyone is.
So average Joe can keep using whatever they're using, fine ! There is no obligation for them to migrate, and there is no reason underpaid overworked volunteers should make it easy for Joe to switch, especially if Joe is not open to change.
A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.
The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.
Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.
A person typically have multiple interests. Associating yourself with a single interest is usually a bad idea as sooner or later your would want to talk about something else.
It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.
I’d like to see us get back to using domain names for identity. An influencer celeb could have their own domain and their entire website would be “followed” to provide “updates”
All of their content could be self-hosted: videos, music, ebooks, etc. It’s a rails server, so in theory all of that stuff could be baked in.
My hardline 1TB per month up/down data cap says no to that entire idea. Can't selfhost when 1 person requesting a lot means you are out hundreds of dollars.
But I do wish selfhosting was just easy. It shouldn't be this hard.
Yes, I'm sure someone like Selena Gomez is going to get her team to self hosting from her EC2 instance /s
The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.
In this dream, I imagine people like Selena Gomez would pay for a Mastodon account to be hosted by a 3rd party. She would gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for her Twitter account if that was the only way for her to keep it, and not even notice the cost. There will be plenty of Mastodon providers willing to offer five 9s for far less than that.
Lololol. Good lord. Tell me you don't work in product without saying you don't work in product.
She gives zero fucks about Five 9's. Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck, but no more beyond that. She only cares about the number of people she reaches with one tweet/toot/whatever, and simply being faster/self-hosted/data owned/reliable/federated has nothing to do with that.
Virality is a big part of social media. The fact that a lot of people wanting to see something I made punishes me with hundreds of dollars worth of overage fees means that it's just bad to use it. You are punished for "succeeding".
It's not about the average user, but when said average user gets their 15 minutes.
As I said, if the protocol itself can't handle this scenario, it's doomed to have low adoption. Unless of course ISPs get pressured into lifting datacaps. Maybe a "viral" clause for exactly these sorts of situations? I think there are multiple potential solutions.
What's a tunneling service? Do I need to use that before I can make a Mastodon account? What app is that on - wait, there are "instances", what the hell is that? Screw it, this is too complicated - I'm going back to twitter.
I completely agree. Which is why tunneling should be built-in to having a domain name. It should be easier than a phone number. You buy a domain from a domain seller and pay them $5/mo to provide tunneling. All the user needs to understand is:
* I install the app
* App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com
Tailscale is awesome. One of my two favorite companies alongside fly.io. But these are tools built for sysadmins and developers. Selfhosting needs tools built for the masses.
Just today I paid for a domain name in name.com. As part of the package, they sold me a hosted & managed WordPress installation for $60 USD a year. I was positively impressed (last time I setup a WP server I paid $5 a month for DigitalOcean, which makes it $60 for something I have to manage).
Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" server maybe. At the end of the day, most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in one of the 4-6 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCS, Oracle, ...).
Now if only there was a popular registrar with a streamlined interface that wasn't constantly trying to up sell you.
Personally I would prefer to see registrars limit themselves to providing domain names. But for that to work seamlessly they all need to support an open DNS protocol that makes it easy for users to delegate subdomains to 3rd-party apps and services. Something like DomainConnect[0] but with better support for selfhosting[1].
But what about step 0: have a working Linux installation with root privileges, and understand all the security implications of operating said installation.
sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages.
Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together.
this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.
2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair.
3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot.
I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
$8 re-upped for each instance of rapidly-burned account will likely discourage low-return spam, at least. That's more-or-less the principle Metafilter's based on, and it's worked for a few decades.
Interesting that Mastodon's [Back] button triggers a javascript:back event, so it takes me back to this forum. I don't know if in 2022 that is the expected behaviour haha.
Those of you with experience running a Mastodon/ActivityPub server and sales chops, now's the time to start cold calling all your local news outlets and offering to take their money.
Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim.
But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not.
Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake.
It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government.
Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.
That's right, and self-hosting on a trusted domain is indeed the recommended form of indicating that an identity is trustable in the Mastodon docs.
Note, however, that Mastodon has a sort-of identity-ish verification system, in that a website link in your profile will be shown with a green check if the website links back to your profile with a `rel=me` attribute.
Sound ripe for confusion and we see this today with domain names and phishing. Are they @john.smith@cnn.com or @john.smith@cnnn.news or @john.smith@cnn.newss.com or @john.smith@cnn.news.hackers.ru?
That’s what the instance name (hosted on their domain) provides.
I can put an @microsoft.come email in my profile, but it’s meaningless because it’s not verified.
But if MS has their own instance, then your handle(?) proves you have an account on that instance. And presumably only employees and company accounts would be allowed to have such user accounts.
Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service.
Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away.
Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.
the article is from 2022 but it may as well be from 2012. Back about a decade ago there was a huge push in companies toward "employee engagement" and social media was seen as the next big thing. about a bakers dozen companies (trello, atlassian, the usual scumbags) showed up to pitch their version of a sterile, enforced, monitored and legally blessed version of "twitter" for the office. GenZ ignored it, GenX abhorred it, and boomers in the C level posted platitudes and broad, poetic directional sentiments about corporate leadership stuff (or they had their secretaries do it for them.)
check your company intranet. chances are probably great you can find your own 'twitter' clone struggling in an overcommitted vmware instance or chugging along on a second generation Intel pizza box somewhere in a forgotten closet. These things never got patched because the implementation came from the vendor (along with free merch), so theres no local knowledge on how to fix them if they ever break. If you look hard enough, you might even find the add-on "blogging" platform your company got sold when they complained discount twitter for the office wasnt engaging anyone.
I believe for internal communication, Twitter style social networks are a net bad.
At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing.
I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior.
I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication.
Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.
Maybe Mastodon already handles many of the following concerns. However I can imagine any organization would go through a series of questions before they start running their own server:
1. How much does it cost?
2. Who does it benefit?
3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment?
4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that?
5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract?
6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick.
7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network?
Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.
Mastodon back in 2019 had a grand opportunity to set themselves up for success; they made the wrong decision. If they had made the correct decision in 2019; they could have in 2020 doubled down on the correct decision during the hunter biden laptop conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Mastodon will forever remain nothing because of this decision.
Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them.
You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it?
(I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)
I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents.
There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from.
One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?
Hardly everyone. Just a vocal minority. The vast majority of whom will be back on Twitter and paying the $8.
Don't believe me? Let's just come back in six months and check.
Because a rich man recently bought Twitter, because he felt some people were managing to avoid what he says. Some people think that it would be nice to find somewhere else to hang out
Yeah, those people don't actually try to avoid what the rich man says - they wouldn't have anything to be upset about otherwise. I mean, join Mastodon and see what's trending on Fediverse - it's the constant "rich man did this", "rich man did that", non stop, ad nauseam, for months now.
No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
One enormous consequence of how social media globalization works is that the attention span of the whole world becomes centralised. We can only talk about one thing or a few things at a time. Those become the hyper focus of the whole internet. In every forum those topics seep in. Trying to resist "the current thing" becomes very exhausting. It's very hard to even talk about local issues when there are a few big issues that draws everyone's attention. I feel like this is one of the most dramatic changes for the last two decennia.
I see your point. At the same time, - imho - it is exciting to see how we might witness the beginning of an eruption in the established social media landscape.
Musk has been running around being the Internet's favorite clown for the last ~10 days and is causing massive disruption. Mastodon is the twitter competitor, and as a federated product has a bunch of independent uncoordinated cheerleaders.
And because it's federated, it will never work in any of the ways they are pissed off at Elon for changing in Twitter. You just can't make stuff like this up - it's amazing to watch!
What's hilarious is they are mad *their* walled garden collapsed.
Fleeing to a federated service isn't going to help them build a new walled garden - watching them figure that out has been very entertaining, to say the least.
Exactly. Same way how people can subscribe to a company's Twitter account. Except that the company owns the content, server, and can define their own rules.
“open source communities” are mostly good for topic oriented communities. otherwise, i believe commercial motivations are great for maximizing participation.
in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be.
until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.
This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.
Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate.
What operating your own server does provide is:
1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: <https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions.
2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding.
3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like.
4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well.
Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.
It is very funny watching people here not think about how federation works and then, instead of considering they might be missing something, go on a diatribe about how the way they imagined things work in their head doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine not knowing how federation works! Just... be humble enough not to immediately issue strongly-worded judgements about things you don't understand.
Ok, but how large does the organization need to be for that to make sense, or how do you determine that?
I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.
I don't think there's any need to hide from this. For a while, all the major social networks were run by people who all felt politically much the same way. That has now faded, and it will probably never come back. So people who also felt that way politically feel the need to take greater actions to take control of their social media presence.
While I do not align with these people politically, I applaud their desires and encourage them to continue taking action to own smaller spaces instead of us all trying to fight over the monolithic centralized large spaces. As I've said several times on HN now, I am not particularly convinced in the long term that massive centralized communities are practical because the intersection of all community social norms is essentially the null set, or at the very least, much smaller than anyone wants to be confined to. The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
Perhaps, philosophically speaking of course, this is not such a bad thing? Maybe societal change should be slow and deliberate.
> The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
This is a good point that I have not yet considered directly, just through one-off rantings about how everything tech for the longest time was Valley-centered. I can't help but think that a shift away is a good thing long term.
Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.
It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.
My experience is that for large enough definitions of big they definitely do. I'd be shocked if any company with a market cap of >$100B didn't for instance (there are 120 of those), or any country with a GDP > $200B (there are 51 of those). As you start shrinking to more reasonable definitions of big I'm sure you'll start collecting some outliers who don't, but I bet you have to get reasonably small ($1B market cap as a wild guess?) before the majority don't
I count "administering VMs allocated on someone else's hardware" here, since it counts for running mastodon - the real giants probably almost all run some of their own hardware, but that probably drops off much faster.
Yes, as others mentioned, there will be hosting providers doing this for companies. The big upside is that you truly own the content and define your rules. I assume the costs for running a larger Mastodon instance are trivial compared to how much it costs to run ads on Twitter.
> No organization wants to do this, unfortunately. Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money […]
2000 active users for $89 per month[1]. That's probably less than you would spend on toilet paper for 2000 employees. I don't think money would be the biggest reason why an organization or company wouldn't commit to the Fediverse.
Mastodon is also a DigitalOcean 1-click app[2] if you're willing to spend more time.
If the version info on that DO link is correct, it's 2 and a bit years out of date. I'm sure it has support for updating everything internally, but I have to wonder if that's the best way to do this.
> This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks.
Whoops!
In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing.
EDIT:
Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.
You just used the words "HTTP gateway" while trying to explain how to just view a profile. This is an absolute non-starter if Mastodon is going to compete with Facebook or Twitter with nontechnical users. Do you not see how comically user-hostile this is?
I'm pitching my explanation to the presumably technical audience of HN readers.
This is a world in which people are familiar with webmail (email access through an HTTP gateway), and of both Web- and App-based interfaces to services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, and Reddit.
I'm reasonably comfortable in the thought that whether or not the Great Unwashed Masses think in terms of "HTTP Gateway" or Browser vs. App, they'll work through this particular Sysiphian obstacle without a great deal of effort.
Why is Mastodon still hoping that the Great Unwashed Masses will come up with an explanation for the technical guts of their platform? It's been six years and articles still fall over themselves trying to explain what it is, and usually land on a variant of "it's just like Twitter, but more complicated."
What I'm getting at is that Mastodon has a serious UX and communication problem, because they're not able to pitch the platform in a way that laypeople would care. Regular people don't care about the merits of decentralization. What matters is the experience, and Mastodon seems to be trying really hard to look as much like Twitter as possible. But that's a death sentence: Twitter is always going to be the best at being Twitter.
Novel social networks fail to gain traction for all number of issues, of which UI/UX is only one small part. Founding cohort and compelling case is the most critical issue, and tipping points may occur precipitously. The instances of Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit, or of MySpace and Facebook come to mind.
I'm not saying that Mastodon doesn't have significant UI/UX issues. I've written on several of these at length on Mastodon. I've addressed at least one in this thread. But its multi-instance aspect really doesn't strike me as a weakness. Anything but.
You clearly feel strongly and differently. I doubt we'll progress on this point here and now.
It's not just the multi-instance aspect, the problem is that Mastodon is trying to look like Twitter. Twitter will always win at the Twitter experience. There's no reason to switch away for normal people.
In each of the instances I'd listed above, a reason emerged. Sometimes it was pull, but quite often (Usenet -> Web forums, Digg -> Reddit, MySpace -> Facebook), push played a major component: the extant option was increasingly less appealing to users (or providers, see my "Why Usenet Died" analysis for my take on some of the factors: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...>).
The compelling reasons presently are being provided by Twitter and its present owner, Elon Musk. Nothing's changed in Mastodon's offerings over the past several weeks, but much has changed regarding its attractiveness. Social networks are notoriously tippy, and what matters far more than specific featuresets of either the origin or destination systems. If major users transition, many others will follow. If and when that does occur, this can happen with stunning swiftness.
UI/UX are not at present a blocking feature, though as we've both noted, opportunities for improvement exist.
I've seen instances with > 3x increase in traffic as noted in this thread:
It's "email me at gmail.com". The article is about replacing a company's usage of Facebook and Twitter with Mastodon. They then link to their Mastodon instance, as if that's where we can find all sorts of external communication, the kind they'd usually have on Facebook. Nope.
As a nontechnical user, I am immediately confused and closed the page without learning anything. The idea that a company could "reach millions of users" with Mastodon is ridiculous.
I can reach millions of users, billions potentially, with WordPress. My WordPress is also compatible with Mastodon since I installed the ActivityPub plugin.
I understand the federated social web has a technobabble aspect to it. I am sorry you aren't with it but that's honestly not my problem.
And that's exactly why Mastodon will never reach mass adoption. That's my only point: Mastodon is for techies. It is not and will never be a viable competitor to centralized social media. The idea that "companies should run their own Mastodon instances" as a way to replace Facebook is absurd.
not asking for that though. The only thing I'd like to see is for content management systems to adopt the protocol for federation since it's a W3C recommendation. smart media and institutional players will do this
You're on the wrong post then, because I've been responding to the article which is arguing that companies should switch to Mastodon over traditional social media. This isn't a thread about Mastodon in general.
it's a shorthand to say "Mastodon" since no one really knows about the stuff under the hood (ActivityPub and the federated social web)
Yes everyone (especially those taking public money) should build AP into their existing web infra like their content management systems.
it's a complete failure of policy that all of these public status communications are made into centralized services with hostile ownership. for this, I mean your local police department and fire department, library and mayor and all of those groups.
On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
Mastodon is federated, so users of their instance are able to interact with the wider set of Mastodon instances, much like people with @google.com emails can interact with people with @microsoft.com emails, despite both instances being separately controlled and not open to people outside their respective companies. Not having an account on an instance, in other words, is not the same as it not being accessible.
Has anyone ever watched a single person try to understand what you just said?
"I have a mastodon account. Why can't I view their mastodon posts? Mastodon is broken".
End of story. Platform is done. The fact that people are trying to say this is good enough absolutely infuriates me, and is makes me wonder if people actually know the technical level of the average user, not the programmers they work with.
I must be missing something, all I'm seeing on Mastodon is people talking about Mastodon and Musk and Twitter. Its even more insufferable than the twitter discourse right now.
The Disney company should heed this device and call their server(s) Mousetodon. I think they'd kill it. Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. They could even have different servers for different sets of fanbases to focus on - Marvel, Star Wars, etc.
people have asked for this for years. Would be great if it happens, but it s actually suspicious that suddenly everyone wants people to do that and that this narrative is pushed by the media.
> it's clearly doing so through manipulated voting
No, people really want Mastodon and decentralization to succeed, and people have really been whipped into a frenzy about Elon enough to be terrified about the future and hopeful about Mastodon as an alternative. No voting manipulation necessary.
If you read the other articles they've written about Mastodon lately, they make it clear that it's not Elon Musk owning Twitter, but Mastodon increasing in popularity, that motivated them to write about Mastodon.
This post is as neutral of a discussion of Mastodon as it could get. I don't see how this post could be read as relating to identity politics or diversity/inclusion.
They're also not serious about it. Decentralization is a "disinformation specialist's" nightmare, because people might be able to say things to other people that couldn't be edited or deleted by third parties.
That being said, I'd be overjoyed if the Fediverse took off over this. There's just not a chance in hell, because it's a worst case scenario for the three-letter agencies and the administration that are pushing this outrage. Just the observation of how aggressive they've become over Musk's ownership, a guy who's completely in thrall to government insider cash, tells you that they wouldn't tolerate a competitive, mainstream Mastodon for a second.
This is just trashing the company as an indication that they can destroy the company. A company that Musk vastly overpaid for, so now is stuck with the obligation to make profitable. Making Twitter profitable was probably always impossible. An intense government push could easily destroy it. That's why he's explicitly aligning with Republicans, who can't attack Musk without alienating their base.
