[HN Gopher] Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
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Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
Author : app4soft
Score : 288 points
Date : 2022-11-06 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| audessuscest wrote:
| For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data
| and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the
| instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than
| twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it
| won't be the case.
| rem7 wrote:
| How's that different from trusting Twitter? You can export your
| data everyday and back it up if you want. Move to another
| server and restore.
| primeradical wrote:
| 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.
| wheats wrote:
| >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
| platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even
| be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly
| enough about it but still be on the same platform as other
| users you follow.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| > 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?
| _djo_ wrote:
| The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of
| each of your followers informing them of your new handle,
| which in theory then gets updated seamlessly.
|
| It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be
| solid now.
| abraham wrote:
| Moving accounts brings your followers with you.
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
| primeradical wrote:
| 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.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| IME, none of that actually matters at a practical level.
|
| I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply
| listing the number of users on an instance. Users will
| almost always pick the instance with the highest user
| count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.
|
| Instead, we should push users to find an instance that
| matches their interests, and then show them the federated
| timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from
| Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.
|
| But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from
| the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to
| handle it, and now new users are more confused and
| mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.
|
| My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller
| instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local
| timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people,
| then dive into the federated feed
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| As long as "your data" doesn't include your history, as far
| as I understand? You can leave your home server as long as
| you're willing to leave everything you ever wrote.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Those decisions should not be taken at server level but at
| the level of the user. The way Mastodon is organised it is up
| to the server administrator to decide whether you get to
| interact with users on other servers. If the administrator
| has a bee up his bonnet on some specific subject he'll block
| any server which doesn't fit his idea of wrong and right with
| regard to that subject. This quickly leads to islands of
| server-groups which do not communicate with each other and as
| such increases the polarisation of the (small-n) _netscape_.
| Those on the "progressive" island won't hear much from the
| "conservative" island and vice-versa.
|
| I've seen several comparisons between Mastodon and email
| servers where server administrators also have the power to
| block communication with other servers but those comparisons
| do not hold since I have yet to find a mail server
| administrator who blocks communication with certain other
| servers on ideological grounds. Mail servers are blocked
| because they are sources of spam, not because they host users
| with different opinions. Mail content itself is not moderated
| other than through spam filters which (for now?) do not
| censor on ideological grounds, "Tweets" and "Toots" are.
|
| A better solution would be to have users select their own
| moderators just like they can choose their own content
| filtering (e.g. _uBlock Origin_ ) rule sets but I do not see
| how something like that can be implemented given the way
| Mastodon works.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| You're looking at this from the wrong angle.
|
| You _do_ have control here. You _do_ select your moderator,
| and you _do_ have the power to change that.
|
| You select which server your account lives on. If you
| disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this
| is probably not the right server for you. You can simply
| select another server.
|
| You also have the option to run your own server. It's not
| hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places
| you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know
| several people running their own servers, and a few of them
| just have one account.
|
| Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild
| ride with content moderation over the years, and this has
| led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost
| their accounts and their followers forever with no
| recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared
| by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep
| all your followers.
|
| The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full
| control if you really want to. However, most of us don't
| want to deal with running a server, so you just have to
| trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that
| matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place
| to be
| the_third_wave wrote:
| What happens with you "followers" when you change
| servers? Do they follow along automagically or do they
| have to undertake action to re-connect to
| @you@new.server?
|
| As to running your own server - something I have been
| looking in to because I support the decentralisation of
| the 'net - I am under the impression that _Pleroma_ is a
| lot easier on the hardware than Mastodon. Does you
| concur?
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| Anyone following your old account will automatically
| follow the new account. The only thing that does not
| transfer is your post history, for mostly technical
| reasons.
|
| I don't know anything about pleroma, sorry. I do know
| that mastodon uses a ton of resources when you get a lot
| of users, but for <5 you can use anything including a
| raspberry pi
| phpisthebest wrote:
| This will not happen is the Admin of the server you are
| one chooses to block the server you want to move to....
|
| Mastodon has long become a political project ever sense
| their very public dispute with Gab... They ceased to be a
| neutral project and clearly showed the limitations of the
| federation space when it comes to putting users in
| control, as that control is largely symbolic and just
| like centralized system unless you run your own server,
| and you do not run afoul of the project dev team so you
| do not get put on a default deny list then you are not in
| control of your data
| convery wrote:
| 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..
| LightG wrote:
| I'll take it as a stopgap until we figure out what is the next
| step.
|
| Musk can shove his $8 up his big, fat... fail whale.
| bawolff wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: musk is a mastodon plant.
|
| It makes about as much sense as anything else that is happening.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Which parts of what he's doing are the necessary prerequisites?
| bArray wrote:
| BBC title correction according to their own article: " _Some_
| Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it? ". It's
| certainly not even remotely close to all.
|
| > The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with
| over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
|
| Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I
| have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely
| smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some
| attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is
| incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
|
| Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a
| collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example,
| rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node
| Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those
| who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this -
| so a handful of people.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)#Forks
| keithnz wrote:
| missing a 0 on the number of users.... also this bot tracks
| users on mastodon
| https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
| toofy wrote:
| there are six million users now, not six hundred thousand.
| poszlem wrote:
| hossbeast wrote:
| What does it tell you?
| marvin wrote:
| 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.
| abzolv wrote:
| 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.
| losteric wrote:
| > The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable.
|
| Intentionally by design, or just a "MVP"/MLP limitation?
| speedgoose wrote:
| The current architecture is not designed to be horizontally
| scalable. You need one big primary database node. That works
| well if you are willing to optimise a lot, see the one
| example: stackoverflow. But it requires a lot of efforts and
| cannot scale that much.
|
| One could probably create a new implementation that scale
| though.
| sseagull wrote:
| Neither could twitter at the beginning:
|
| https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
| haunter wrote:
| Yeah but Mastodon is 6 years old at this point. Is it still
| the beginning?
|
| 6 years old Twitter already had ~200m users in 2012
| abzolv wrote:
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18153
| the_third_wave wrote:
| If federation works as intended this should not be a problem
| since it _should_ (...) not matter whether someone uses
| server_X.org or server_Y.net. As to whether this works in
| practice I have no real idea. I have self-hosted a number of
| Peertube instances which also support activitypub and am on-
| and-off experimenting with a Pixelfed instance ( "Instagram
| goes activitypub") but since these are all small-scale
| experiments they neither prove nor dispell the utility of
| activitypub-as-a-protocol.
| abzolv wrote:
| 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.
| petepete wrote:
| 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?
| itslennysfault wrote:
| As a VERY technical user. I STILL have these same problems.
|
| I've tried to join Mastodon at least a dozen times in the
| past few years, and every time I get stuck at step one
| (which server should I choose). Every server has a vibe of
| its own and joining one feels like an endorsement of it,
| and because the server name is part of your handle that
| endorsement follows you all over the fediverse.
|
| If I feel this confused. I can't imagine what a non-
| technical user would feel. It's a fatal flaw and I don't
| know how they overcome it.
|
| That said, I finally joined today at https://c.im
|
| I chose it because it's short and that means I get a short
| @c.im handle. We'll see how this plays out (most likely
| with me not even using it tbh)
| robswc wrote:
| Exactly. Think of how many products succeed just because
| they're "easier" than the alternatives.
|
| You could probably be up and tweeting in just a few
| minutes. You could be posting or commenting on reddit
| (provided the sub) in just a few minutes.
|
| I remember being interested in Mastodon as a technology a
| few years back. It has _always_ been confusing for a
| significant # of people. A decent % posts about it
| shouldn't be "how do I sign up, how do I follow people, how
| do I subscribe, which do I join, etc." That's all the
| Mastodon reddit was a few years back.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/top/?sort=top&t=week
|
| Seems like minus all the posts about current events, it's
| still largely lots of confused users. Which sucks, because
| the idea seems pretty good in theory. My only qualm
| (besides what's already been mentioned) is what's to stop
| instances from colluding like reddit with it's "powermods"
| ? Which can honestly be worse in a lot of cases.
| raytube wrote:
| I have no clue which previous server I signed up to. And
| looking through themed servers I found one with an
| interest, but it's hardly my only interest and was met with
| welcome text saying post something interesting.
| esskay wrote:
| The worst part of those questions is the responses they
| get. "Pick a server to sign up to, request an invite and
| wait, but if you want to follow someone in another server
| you need to go to this tool to work out what server they
| are on, and then copy and paste that into the search box".
|
| It's a very, very shit setup, and it absolutely will not
| take off.
| mgerdts wrote:
| One idea is for public libraries to host instances. Public
| employees responsible for the administration are already
| bound by privacy laws that would make them more trustworthy
| than some rando that starts an instance.
|
| If done on a branch by branch basis, this could be a good way
| to have an online local network. Maybe this would be an open
| Nextdoor as well.
|
| Local account access could be limited by library card
| eligibility, which combined with terms of service could avoid
| abuse by far away troublemakers and limit the noise from
| local ones.
|
| While eligibility may depend on having a library card, public
| anonymity could still exist. Just as libraries keep my
| borrowing history private, they could also shield my real
| identity.
|
| This idea is inspired by the Twitter space I talk about at
|
| https://fosstodon.org/@mgerdts/109294570901271083
| easytiger wrote:
| You don't get the dopamine hit talking to yourself. So it won't
| work. Critical mass required.
| seydor wrote:
| Even if mastodon takes off, it will be like any other protocol on
| the internet: A centralized free service will appear , like Gmail
| did, which most people will be there . Twitter will probably
| convert its service to activityPub then. Slightly better than
| what we have today, but it wont be immune.
|
| Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook
| made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users went
| to friendster for sure ... Social networks have network lock-in.
| The more mad your users are, the more they talk about it, on the
| service, which ironically is good for the service.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| I didn't believe your point about Gmail, expecting many
| companies to still host their own mail servers or use other
| services, so I went looking for some data. Found [1], which
| says that Gmail has 34% market share and Microsoft Exchange
| 33%. GoDaddy is third with 15% and all others are < 2.5%.
| Contrary to my expectations, this does confirm that Google and
| Microsoft are quite close to a duopoly; I'd expected there to
| be many more providers still.
|
| Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a
| huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to
| your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my
| Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter,
| Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt
| an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement,
| preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different
| UIs, having instances with slightly different features
| competing.
|
| (Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a
| major redesign? Change can happen ;-) )
|
| [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
| saurik wrote:
| While it sucks that Gmail dominates e-mail, it is still
| important and useful that they don't control all of it and that
| essentially everyone continues to interoperate with the
| protocol enough that I can still run my own server even if most
| people don't. You don't have to have a fully distributed
| protocol with no large players to gain powerful benefits from
| decentralization.
| teeray wrote:
| Twitter users jumping to Mastadon is just the sequel to Facebook
| users jumping to Diaspora.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche
| Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to
| me:
|
| - the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
|
| - the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
|
| - and the completely empty personal feed
|
| Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started
| recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after
| following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from
| Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of
| Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's
| network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but
| I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to
| spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The
| post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very
| familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord,
| Telegram...etc).
|
| And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind
| when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's
| leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news
| with people in your network and not with whoever has the most
| attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more
| meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships.
| It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your
| locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're
| not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I
| personally think there'll always be place for something like it
| but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're
| supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
| jayflux wrote:
| A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought
| WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months,
| but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe
| it's different this time? But the cycle feels the same
| pjc50 wrote:
| Did whatsapp change significantly?
|
| Twitter has a "culture" in a way that whatsapp doesn't really.
| That's a lot more ephemeral and subject to disruption.
| raytube wrote:
| It's where the people are. I don't use Facebook in the main,
| but there is a local neighborhood group that I feel I have to
| subscribe to.
|
| You don't always get to pick the venue.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Signal is gradually gaining adoption in the circles that I am
| in. Few years ago? Unusable.
|
| Now, many of the people I meet are fine starting a signal chat
| instead of SMS.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yep. I have tons of people on signal today, and when I
| started it was just 1 or 2. About half came after the
| whatsapp exodus, and then it's been a steady trickle.
|
| To be clear, it's still not enough to start a group chat with
| random people because of course that's a problem in 2022.
| ronnier wrote:
| I mainly use only signal now. I feel very uncomfortable using
| other messaging platforms that keep the text sitting in a
| database that is either plain text or encrypted with keys
| they have. I mean private messaging apps, not things like
| twitter or HN.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| They just don't.
| gaoshan wrote:
| Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon
| could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will
| never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very
| specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new
| project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale
| change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues
| while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing
| platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz
| amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a
| tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most
| of the problems they try to solve.
|
| They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization.
| Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of
| servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds.
| As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these
| issues.
|
| Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time
| and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was
| powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon
| may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a
| necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success
| elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be
| ignored.
|
| I want a world where people have actual ownership over their
| computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not
| get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The
| press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech
| companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
|
| To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm
| optimistic it's not impossible.
| https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us
| that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it
|
| sure, if you ignore the very only communication method that
| _everyone_ has - the email.
|
| a myriad others came and went, and none that exist today will
| be relevant in 50 years, but email will
| fossuser wrote:
| Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496458
|
| Email is an example of a federated system failure.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| a failure that is infinitely more successful than any
| centralized solution.
|
| and it will outlive gmail
| josh2600 wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time at the edge of decentralized and
| useful tech. You're right that most decentralized systems don't
| accomplish the goals they set out to achieve.
|
| A few key things: decentralized means a network of at least 3
| nodes where no operator controls more than 1. Anything beyond
| that is vanity or more censorship resistance depending on your
| vantage point.
|
| What we actually want is governance with checks and balances. I
| would argue that the problem with the US has been the
| centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches,
| particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system
| with three branches of governance is quite effective when there
| is a balance of power.
|
| Now to how emulate that in software is another quandary. I
| think ethereum for all of its faults is doing a decent job at
| decentralized governance.
|
| I think we're still in the very early days of decentralized
| finance. A lot of lessons will be learned (and relearned from
| the past) as we move forward.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > I would argue that the problem with the US has been the
| centralization of power in the executive and judicial
| branches, particularly the executive. A functioning
| parliamentary system with three branches of governance is
| quite effective when there is a balance of power.
|
| On the contrary, I'd argue that the power has towards the
| executive and legislative branches. The judicial branch
| exists to curb the excesses of the other two through the
| invocation of law that was already written. The other two
| either write whatever the hell they want and vote on it or
| invoke their powers by fiat (i.e. executive orders).
| sydney6 wrote:
| Why are so many people calling Elon Musk by his first name,
| like he's their buddy or neighbor? This reminds me when Steve
| Jobs had passed away, many people were walking the streets with
| candles and cards in memoriam of "Steve". How come?
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Probably because it's a unique enough name to not introduce
| ambiguity.
|
| Nobody can just say Steve or Bill without confusing people
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Plus Musk is kind of a weird word.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Celebrities induce parasocial relationships. None of those
| come close to the response to the death of Diana.
| sydney6 wrote:
| Thank's for your response.. what an immensely interesting
| [1] topic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
| narag wrote:
| That's a measure of fame.
|
| When nobody knows you, they use the complete name, Elon Musk.
|
| When you're famous, they drop the given name, you're Musk.
|
| When you're ultrafamous, they only use the given name, now
| you're Elon.
| mmplxx wrote:
| And when you're God, they cannot utter your name.
| PetitSasquatch wrote:
| It seems to me like there is a possible, albeit compromised,
| middle ground between highly centralised and the (in reality)
| partially centralised Mastodon model where users flock to
| popular monoliths: strictly per-user instances.
|
| Given the right tooling etc etc, expediting user's migration to
| their own instances, of something like a Mastodon node, could
| be an achieveable route to greater decentralisation without
| getting muddled down in things like blockchain etc.. And
| executed correctly the model could be more communicable than
| what it presently appears to be.
|
| From what I can see though, Mastodon isn't currently the
| technology stack to achieve, perhaps it could get there.
|
| No solution is going to be perfect, but surely an emphasis on
| data sovereignty would reduce the volume of arguments over what
| a given platform should be.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I want a world where people have actual ownership over their
| computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not
| get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it.
|
| Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30
| years.
|
| The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because
| it has tiered _decentralized_ controls - sending server, relays
| (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each
| have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.
|
| Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an
| easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of
| what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-
| Twitters.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _email has been working great for the past 30 years_
|
| When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are
| forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders
| (like people running private mail servers)...
|
| ...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their
| personal accounts...
|
| ...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation
| working great.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Still you can pick any server you want, any client you
| want, move your data freely if you are not happy with
| provider. And there's no corporation that can say that
| tomorrow you are going to pay $5/month more or you can kiss
| your contacts goodbye (sure you can loose your address if
| you don't have own domain, but you still can access the
| network).
|
| I will gladly take it over closed protocol, even if it has
| reaction gifs built in.
| fossuser wrote:
| Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496458
|
| Email is an example of a federated system failure.
| sangnoir wrote:
| That's very strange definition of failure: many non-
| homogenous systems have Pareto distributions. That in
| itself is not indicative of failure.
|
| 30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email
| provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now
| GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of
| the resounding success of email federation, those domains
| still exist and can still send/receive emails universally.
| If email had hypothetically been non-federated and
| proprietary to AOL, it would be dead today (or as close to
| it as gopher)
| fossuser wrote:
| You can't run your own node and majority of users are on
| one system - that's failure to me.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I do run my own mail server on my own domain - so thank
| you for affirming that email is not a failure.
| serverholic wrote:
| Crypto is trying to solve this in a different way. Namely
| projects like lens protocol.
|
| The idea is that the blockchain is a shared, decentralized
| database and you store simple messages on the blockchain and
| larger files on something like ipfs. This forms a social graph
| that a frontend ui can then import and provide a view into (a
| lens if you will).
|
| It's nice because users just need one account (a wallet) and
| they have access to the whole social graph if they want, or
| they can configure their apps to only show certain things. The
| downside is that it's all public and once you lose your keys
| you're locked out of your account. Also, you can't really
| prevent anyone from posting things but you can choose which
| types of posts you allow on your feed.
|
| It's a different set of tradeoffs that's interesting to
| explore.
| djur wrote:
| I don't know if he's going to succeed or fail (or even what
| "success" and "failure" are in this case), but I think it'd be
| better for the world if he failed. Twitter isn't necessary and
| can be replaced, but it would be good for Musk to be mired in
| legal problems for a while and hopefully lose a lot of money.
| Reducing the power and influence of both Musk and Twitter seems
| like a clear win-win in the long run. I feel bad for all of the
| people at Twitter being trampled over in the process, though.
| Reventlov wrote:
| You mean, federated systems like the web or email won't succeed
| ?
| fossuser wrote:
| Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people
| are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even
| run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.
|
| The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure.
| The majority of users are centralized on handful of
| megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this
| pretty awful.
|
| We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying
| system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard,
| terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0].
| It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first
| principles.
|
| [0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-
| progra...
| Timshel wrote:
| Well a handful is still way better than only one. If
| tomorrow someone want to leave Gmail they have quite the
| list of alternatives and can forward their mail to their
| new address. Compared to leaving Twitter or Facebook this
| is so much better.
|
| It's like if Twitter was an ActivityPub instance even if it
| had 99.9% marked share at least you could leave without
| leaving everything behind
| shafyy wrote:
| > _people are centralized on a handful of providers_
|
| Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google
| knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real
| downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real
| network effects for one company to take advantage of,
| unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like
| WhatsApp.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on
| a vps a few years ago and didn't have much issues with spam
| lists. Only gave up because I couldn't be bothered updating
| the thing.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too
| much work in the long run.
|
| They work great when they're the _ONLY_ option in town,
| but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as
| they did with email.
|
| Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally
| run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb,
| but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a
| single company department might have 10+ machines that
| could receive email (email addresses would look like
| name@machine.department.company.com).
|
| Then it devolved to one per department, and then one per
| company, and now one per massive IT provider.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Security became big as well. Mail servers used to get
| hacked constantly and you'd have your private data leaked
| and your server turned in to a spam gun.
|
| These days to host anything securely you need a team of
| the top minds in that domain working full time on it.
| Just makes no sense to run your own mail server when for
| less money you could let someone else do it and they will
| do it much better.
|
| This is just a sign of the industry maturing imo. You
| could relate it to construction. Used to have people
| building their own mud and stick huts but now everything
| requires planning, regulation, codes, licensed workers,
| etc.
| nathias wrote:
| email is one to one, and works well with that model, but
| twitter is many-to-many and loses a lot with federation
| karmajunkie wrote:
| So all the newsletters I'm on are getting sent out to
| subscribers one by one? Man, seems really inefficient. If
| only there were a way to specify many individuals who
| wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only
| once...
| pjc50 wrote:
| > If only there were a way to specify many individuals
| who wanted to receive the same email so they could send
| it only once...
|
| Getting an email with a really large number of recipients
| to be actually delivered is difficult enough that there
| are entire companies e.g. Mailchimp devoted to making it
| work. You can't just bung a million addresses into BCC
| and hope.
| Angostura wrote:
| > Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of
| servers with a worse experience.
|
| I don't understand this point. I'm on a tiny server, but read
| the federated feed most of the time. What's the problem?
| fossuser wrote:
| Most users won't run their own server, they'll be on large
| centralized ones with all of the same problems that entails.
| unity1001 wrote:
| rvz wrote:
| This. They're right you know.
|
| > I want a world where people have actual ownership over their
| computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not
| get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it.
| The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see
| tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
|
| This is the media capitalising at the maximum over the emotions
| of the tech crowd to move to a platform that is worse than
| Twitter, especially in UX and is essentially a solution that is
| creating more problems than it is trying to solve.
|
| It really is not early days anymore with this, and the hype
| around Mastodon is manufactured by outrage due to 'Elon Musk'
| being the new villain of the month. If you have to explain what
| Mastodon is, which server you have to choose and how to find
| which people you followed on Twitter are on Mastodon due to its
| poor discoverability, then it tells us that it is another
| pointless hurdle for users to bear with, resulting in a worse
| experience.
|
| Mastodon clearly is a solution that is creating more problems
| for users and the media is clearly parroting over the hype and
| emotion to pretend that it is an alternative or a threat to
| Twitter.
| slater wrote:
| How is my favorite Mastodon-hater doing, you must've had a
| bad last few days? ;)
|
| (i kid, i kid...)
| rvz wrote:
| I'm actually laughing at you and the entire Twitter chaos
| on this 'migration' made up of the same techies overhyping
| with the media taking advantage of the current outrage
| pretending that Mastodon is a viable 'alternative' when it
| remotely isn't.
|
| Given that it already takes much explaining how to use it,
| 'choosing and instance', struggling to solve it's poor
| discoverability since a minute amount of Twitter users out
| of 200M+ have tried to move themselves, it means that you
| are already losing.
|
| It is not 'early days' anymore. After 6 years of
| 'exoduses', Mastodon doesn't cut it as an 'alternative' and
| especially with the exact unchallenged reasons I've stated.
| It is not about getting manipulated by the current hype by
| the media, it is always about the retention afterwards that
| counts. Twitter is here to stay despite the 'current
| outrage' that the media is riding on.
|
| Sorry to burst your (techie) bubble as hundreds of millions
| of non-technical people are still using Twitter and won't
| delete their accounts over something worse.
| nathias wrote:
| > It's the worst of both worlds.
|
| Yea, I've been saying the same for some time. I really want for
| decentralized solutions to proliferate, but federation is a
| terrible model.
| INTPenis wrote:
| >we have thirty years of failure to prove it
|
| There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and
| ActivityPub.
|
| When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one
| ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each
| other using the IP protocol.
|
| I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in
| social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or
| whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having
| just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping
| platform is not a healthy system.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| mastodon's ux is terrible, but urbit's ux is like 100x worse
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't disagree, but the design of urbit is such that
| there's a path to it being good - that's not true of any
| other system built on the current stack (imo) because they
| don't fix the underlying incentive failures that lead to
| centralization in the first place.
| miked85 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure no one (including myself) even understands
| what urbit is.
| xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote:
| It's very simple, this summary explains everything:
| https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1184984759123922945
|
| Kidding aside, I think it's unlikely that a deliberately
| obfuscated project will conquer the world.
| bembo wrote:
| omg that has to be the worst explanation of a piece of
| software that I've seen in a long while
| colin_jack wrote:
| > As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of
| these issues.
|
| For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is
| confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn't work. It
| feels like it'll need to improve very quiclkly if it's going to
| capture any significant amount of Twitter users.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of
| people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now
| having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic,
| and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even
| bigger bump.
|
| I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more
| difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression
| I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I
| encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.
| colin_jack wrote:
| > The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx
| of people from Twitter
|
| Yeah definitely, feels like they should have seen this
| coming though. They have an opportunity that won't come
| around again, and poor performance and confusing UX seem
| like pretty serious problems.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "They" describes a non-profit, low-resourced set of
| volunteers. Seeing it coming and being able to do
| something about it aren't the same thing.
| colin_jack wrote:
| I dunno, on performance they could just have limited
| number of registrations to what they can handle. Better
| that than having potential users getting a bad impression
| because everything is too slow.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Quite a few of the larger public servers have done
| exactly that.
| toofy wrote:
| maybe there are different signup processes on different
| servers or something?
|
| for me it was enter an email address, username, and password?
| bragr wrote:
| >don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve
|
| I mean it does somewhat solve the problem of Musk running
| twitter into the ground. For most people, I imagine mastodon is
| a lateral move, not a step up.
| code_runner wrote:
| I'm always surprised when there are still people acting like
| Elon isn't just BEGGING to be hated.
|
| I'm still of the opinion he _is not doing the work_ and his
| success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart)
| engineers. That's a smart thing to do, good call on his part,
| but it's almost like he doesn't know that's how his companies
| work.
|
| Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something
| but acting like the media/everyday people hate him _for no
| reason_ is just dishonest.
| darawk wrote:
| How many rich people and fund managers around the world have
| been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for
| the past several decades?
|
| How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing
| money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it
| well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap
| for the past two decades.
| BryantD wrote:
| Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how
| it works.
|
| You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a
| prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge.
| 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.
|
| Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess
| pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one
| prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256
| people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of
| them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.
|
| When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the
| next prediction.
|
| A track record of success is not sufficient evidence,
| especially when cash has been cheap for the past two
| decades and especially when even the first random success
| (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.
| darawk wrote:
| I'm aware of this scheme. But I don't think you
| understand why it works. Track records are absolutely
| evidence of skill, if you understand the distribution
| from which they're drawn. Elon's track record is very,
| very far outside the null hypothesis of that
| distribution.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I think you clicked the wrong link, it sounds like you
| wanted to answer some crypto-currency speculation thread.
| luckylion wrote:
| So, what are the 1024 companies Musk poured lots of money
| in to get 2 or 3 massive hits since it's all just a game
| of numbers and chance?
| slg wrote:
| It might not be 1024, but he probably has more failures
| than successes: Solar City, Neuralink, Boring Company,
| Hyperloop (he decided not to turn this into a company,
| but he wasted his and his other companies' resources on
| this so I think it is fair to consider it a Musk
| failure).
| darawk wrote:
| Solar City isn't a failure, it's part of Tesla now. Still
| selling panels, as far as I know.
|
| Boring company is also not yet a failure, and has
| recently built several tunnels. Neuralink is an early
| stage research company and is still humming along. It may
| fail some day, but it certainly hasn't failed yet. As for
| Hyperloop, he specifically said he wasn't going to build
| it, and several companies are still working on it,
| including in China:
|
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-maglev-vactrain-
| hyperloo...
|
| None of these things are "failures". They may become
| failures one day. It'd be crazy if some of them didn't.
| But you can't count a research project as a failure just
| because it doesn't have a product yet.
| code_runner wrote:
| I responded to another with something similar...
|
| Throwing money at people and saying "I want these charts to
| be customizable" vs "let's land a rocket booster, it's ok
| if a few blow up, we can test it live" will get VERY
| different levels of passion/expertise
| georgeg23 wrote:
| The mastermind behind SpaceX is not Elon. It's this guy:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
|
| He gave Elon the ideas, initial team, govt connections,
| contracts, etc.. Elon was the company jester.
|
| Rocket landing work was taken from the DC-X
| baby wrote:
| There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere,
| which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much
| credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard
| worker, and deserves credit
| andy_ppp wrote:
| For someone who claims to work extremely hard he seems to
| spend a lot of time antagonising people on Twitter.
| pishpash wrote:
| Why do you assume the hard work to Twitter time ratio
| isn't the same as other people, but scaled up?
| mjr00 wrote:
| It's absolutely a _part_ of his job, though.
|
| One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal
| brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part
| because he's a household name. Everything he does, from
| naming his child X AE A-12 to producing a house track, is
| to proliferate the public perception that he is an
| eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da
| Vincis and Franklins of old.
|
| It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I
| both started different companies on the same day, who do
| you think is going to attract funding and top talent more
| quickly?
| toss1 wrote:
| If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing
| his reputation inside of a week.
|
| Musk can be great when he does his homework and first
| principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it
| here.
|
| Having advertisers take a huge step back because they
| seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week
| maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).
|
| Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle
| of the call to sell next year's baseline because you
| aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply
| arrogant incompetence [0].
|
| Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your
| advertisers [1] -- your primary customers -- is
| unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost
| it.
|
| Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous
| claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the
| revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any
| exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY
| they are actually pausing by one of the people in the
| meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with
| the day before...
|
| I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good
| for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time
| that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the
| business model and the key elements, and just thrashing
| about blaming everyone else, when literally he is
| entirely to blame for the chaos.
|
| Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5]
| that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it
| fired yesterday to return!
|
| If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely
| good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to
| hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard
| to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually
| a good argument that his initial intent was to sink
| Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to
| maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then
| he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even
| have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we
| are)
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/1588718759098851328
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921
|
| [4] https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588622182066057216
|
| [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808
| mjr00 wrote:
| I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But
| Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-
| culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant
| neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't _quite_ alt-
| right). It 's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a
| good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term
| it hasn't been.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Yes he needs to curry favors with Republicans to get the
| big DoD contracts for:
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
| googlryas wrote:
| Do you think he's crafting his tweets with hours of
| deliberation? Honest question, how much time do you think
| he spends trying to antagonize people on Twitter per
| week?
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| To me he sounds like a pedophile who can't dive but to
| each their own I guess.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Why there has to be "one mastermind guy"?
|
| It seems safe to say that you need to dovetail at least
| dozens of people to have successful rocket launching,
| well, startup?
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Tom Mueller (recruited by Mike Griffin) also deserves
| credit. SpaceX hasn't built a reliable rocket engine
| since Tom left.
|
| But Mike probably was #1 reason for SpaceX success.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| It's hard to argue that SpaceX wouldn't happen without
| Elon's mom.
| googlryas wrote:
| Why was Elon selected to become the richest person in the
| world and not one of the any thousands of other
| billionaires out there?
| fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote:
| The criticisms are getting more and more comical. Michael
| is a friend of Elon and trusted Elon with many of his
| ideas and contacts. I'm sure Musk would say as much. Do
| you think Michael was sharing these ideas and contacts
| with just anyone? Why do you think he specifically chose
| to work with Elon?
| trident5000 wrote:
| "Elon hires people he doesnt do all the work!"
|
| Yes thats why you hire people...to not do all the work.
| Im pretty sure Elon is aware of this.
| devmor wrote:
| There's nothing comical about it. They went to two
| different Russian firms to partner with before it was
| even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept
| running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and
| they lost all confidence in the project.
| googlryas wrote:
| What was he running his mouth about? Crazy stuff like
| landing boosters back at the pad, or on barges in the
| middle of the Atlantic?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| That just shows confidence isn't always a predictor of
| success. They made a bad call, quite obviously.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Mike saw Elon was good at recruiting Silicon Valley
| talent and selling the whole "save humanity by going to
| Mars" story (but even that was Mike's idea with Orbital).
| darawk wrote:
| Even if we were to accept that as true as stated, which I
| don't, that doesn't explain Paypal and Tesla. Even if you
| think this Michael Griffin guy did everything - why did
| Elon bet on him? Why didn't anyone else? Tons of people
| had the money to do it at the same time. None of them
| did.
| kiba wrote:
| Nobody did everything. We all build upon the work of
| giants, Elon Musk and Michael Griffin included.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Musk talks about his employees and how critical they
| were/are constantly. This whole notion that "Musk didnt
| do it all" is such a clown argument because theres no
| other form of attack from people who simply dont like him
| and his politics.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Its almost like Elon hired him knowing hes smart or
| something...
| georgeg23 wrote:
| ....and Griffin gave him ~$2B of taxpayer money. (DARPA
| and COTS contracts before SpaceX flew a single rocket and
| CRS for Falcon 9). All discussed in the link above.
| trident5000 wrote:
| Why tax payer money? Where did that part come from.
| voxl wrote:
| They typically just purchase the company instead. See:
| Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple.
|
| Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in
| marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed
| his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen,
| especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e.
| horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme
| stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing.
|
| Let's not even get into his market manipulation.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Elon internaly calls it "merchandizing" -- a Space Balls
| joke.
| darawk wrote:
| > Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been
| in marketing.
|
| He has obviously been highly successful at marketing. But
| his "real success" has been in delivering products like
| useful electric cars and reusable rockets that didn't
| previously exist. His marketing skills help with that,
| but all the marketing in the world isn't going to sell a
| product that doesn't exist (except in crypto).
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I think those aren't incompatible views.
|
| Undeniably Elon's success is his tremendous wealth, the
| basis of which are two very valuable companies that the
| cofounded and has as CEO marketed brilliantly, if not
| always honestly.
|
| He obviously knows a lot about what people to work with.
|
| It is highly unlikely he knows how to build or design
| almost anything Spacex or Tesla makes. He knows a lot
| about everything they make of course, and can get more
| detailed briefings and information on it that anyone, but
| he didn't make it.
|
| So the wealth and the successful companies are his
| success sure, but his greatest personal accomplishments
| are obviously his marketing skills.
| darawk wrote:
| I don't know how you're measuring "greatest" but I
| certainly consider his greatest accomplishments to be
| putting together, betting on, and operating the companies
| that produced these products. Of course he doesn't know
| how to build a Tesla batter or a SpaceX rocket himself -
| probably no one person does.
|
| These were very difficult industries, industries that
| were extremely contrarian to bet on when he did. Making
| the financial bet _alone_ would be a great accomplishment
| for any normal person. Peter Thiel is a famous investor
| for making far less contrarian and far less successful
| bets without operating anything except Paypal.
|
| Musk's bets were far more concentrated, and he chose the
| personnel, operated the companies, made the strategic
| decisions, and yes, also marketed them brilliantly. But
| he only got to flex those marketing muscles because he
| spent a decade assembling, managing, and financing the
| teams that built the product in the first place.
| [deleted]
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I'm still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his
| success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart)
| engineers. "
|
| To me it seems, his success comes from being an engineer
| himself and wanting to get shit done and kick people until
| shit gets done in a working way. And yes that includes
| throwing money at smart engineers, but to do this, you have
| to be smart and have domain knowledge to do so.
|
| The problem started, when he got too much success and lost
| touch with the ground of reality.
|
| The twitter chat logs are quite interesting.
|
| https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#3
|
| In general they show that it was indeed a bit more than a
| high idea, to which it was reduced around many places.
|
| Still, a funny quote from Elon:
|
| "Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone
| should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve
| technical/product design problems."
|
| I think he means it. But of course it is BS, when he is in
| fact the boss of so many people and making them burn out for
| productivity in various ways.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You sound very conflicted. I can see like at least two
| places where you directly contradict yourself. You have to
| learn what people say and what people do are very
| different. Elon Musk is a bullshitter and narcissist. It's
| time to stop listening and believing anything he has to
| say. Otherwise they'll keep dragging you in and you'll keep
| finding reasons to give them another chance.
| blfr wrote:
| _his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart)
| engineers_
|
| That's even more damning for his detractors since they could
| have been doing the same but instead sneer from the
| sidelines.
| trident5000 wrote:
| A certain % of the population are clinical narcissists,
| which is a massive amount nominally online. And narcissists
| cant stand when other people are successful. I'm convinced
| thats who these people are.
| fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote:
| > and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and
| smart) engineers
|
| Doing that with this level of success in these domains is
| extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the
| investors are far more important than the workers.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Eh. I dislike Elon, BUT being able to efficiently allocate
| resources and identify an opportunity and/or valuable
| employee, who is more than just talk is a valuable skill
| that surprisingly few people have.
| ahallock wrote:
| Yeah, people have different roles and talents. The face
| of the company does get most of the praise and fame, but
| that's true of nearly _every_ organization I can think
| of.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Ok, but how is it _dishonest_? That seems really out of whack
| with the rest of your post and kind of ranty.
| code_runner wrote:
| Acting like Elon hasn't given people legit reasons to
| dislike him? Anybody is allowed to overlook the flaws he
| has but you shouldn't ignore them outright.
|
| I'd actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for
| a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the
| last handful of years.
| arise wrote:
| Just to extend this, there are a large number of plausibly
| legitimate reasons people might hate Musk. Maybe you're stuck
| in Tesla service hell, or maybe you retired to Boca Chica and
| now have to deal with rocket noise and road closures. Maybe
| you're an environmentalist who doesn't like to see a launch
| facilities next to a wildlife preserve. Maybe you're a Tesla
| employee who was injured due to company negligence. Maybe
| you're a Neuralink researcher who is embarrassed over Musk's
| absurdly fantastical claims about what your technology can
| do. Maybe you founded a visionary electric car company only
| to see it sabatoged and taken over by Musk and have him
| launch your vehicle into space. Maybe you're a stressed out
| worker at any of Musk's companies who resents his demands for
| a work/life imbalance. Maybe you're a market trader who lost
| money due to Musk's fraudulent "funding secured" tweet. Maybe
| you're uncomfortable with the constant stream of vaporware,
| dumb ideas, and bogus dates issued by a false messiah preying
| on the technological optimism of your fellow nerds. Or maybe
| you're just an American who is tired of seeing bullshit
| artists wag the dog, behave illegal and unethically, and
| never be held to account for their actions.
|
| There are many good things one might say about Musk, but
| don't pretend there aren't any bad things.
| HillRat wrote:
| Musk's skills are pretty domain-specific and not, I think,
| transferable. He really excels at:
|
| 1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down
| to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
|
| 2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market
| or government sources to fund development;
|
| 3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining
| close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems
| to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the
| core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
|
| 4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more
| risk-conscious competitors.
|
| In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations
| through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's
| also _terrible_ at _complex_ challenges, where the path isn
| 't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick
| the process, or where cutting corners is going to be
| disfavored by the market or by regulators.
|
| Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-
| understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react
| unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to
| make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to
| slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder),
| but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and
| playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and
| advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an
| ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity,
| which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired
| by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a
| tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and
| customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very
| narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-
| profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in
| debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and
| there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
|
| Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he
| looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was
| reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-
| right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to
| be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship
| with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of
| Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter
| as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by
| people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much
| more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames,
| whatever, and with Musk catering to _his_ followers (who he
| seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they
| are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So
| unless he 's willing to act more like a normal social media
| mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create
| undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the
| personality volume on public communications, and suck up to
| the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I
| don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
| comboy wrote:
| > his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart)
| engineers
|
| This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where
| people can understand what he is talking about. There are
| many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro
| regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical
| knowledge.
|
| Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart
| engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good
| ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
|
| I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to
| hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were
| dismissing achievements of people who give others good
| reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
|
| Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if
| they are doing some great things. There are many people who
| smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on
| some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write
| these comments here.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
| intothemild wrote:
| Did you just compare Musk to Ghandi and Ford?
| [deleted]
| Salgat wrote:
| He doesn't have deep knowledge, he a broad high level
| understanding of the technologies and processes used at his
| company. In the interview you can see how he's aware of
| what the major components are supposed to do, but he'd be
| completely useless if you told him to do the engineering
| design and analysis behind it. Which is perfectly fine,
| that's how it's supposed to be as a CEO.
| kiba wrote:
| He's definitely the 'chief engineer' of his companies in that
| he made engineering decisions, but to pretend that somehow
| means he does ALL the engineering work and grunt works is a
| very silly notion.
|
| But yes, there's indeed the thousand of engineers and
| technicians doing the work. He even credits them for making
| his dream possible!
|
| I don't know why people think he's not doing the work. Have
| they actually read interviews and books? The books I read
| does not paint him in a very flattering light people-wise.
|
| It's also possible to be simultaneously an egoistic asshole,
| genius, having actual skills, being a money man and visionary
| leader, People act as if a person who's a jackass can't have
| positive traits or vice versa.
| torginus wrote:
| If that's all he is doing - paying smart people and expecting
| them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing
| the same?
| p1necone wrote:
| It might have something to do with the paying bit.
| code_runner wrote:
| My theory is that getting smart people to make twitter vs
| landing reusable rocket boosters... will yield VERY
| different levels of passion/interest.
|
| Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff
| and have a great work/life balance. I don't want to (and
| don't have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.
|
| I guess... not everyone's problem domains are interesting
| enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don't like
| him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these
| tough problems. Just admit FSD isn't a year away!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I don't agree with them, but this counter argument doesn't
| quite work. In a system with x% chance of success, we'd
| expect most people to fail for small x. But some few will
| still succeed multiple times.
|
| Throw in that your odds get better the more you're
| successful, and it's classic survivorship bias.
| code_runner wrote:
| I think it's not binary one way or the other.
|
| Companies don't have to be profitable to be successful. A
| charismatic leader + lofty goals (FSD, rockets, flame
| throwers) and you'll get a ton of money even if you never
| turn a profit.
|
| Let's not forget the tunnels I'm Vegas btw. They aren't
| all winners.
| serf wrote:
| > paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why
| isn't literally everyone else doing the same?
|
| is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of
| those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?
|
| Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the
| responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts
| to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business
| connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
| fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote:
| > I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to
| execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business
| connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
|
| There are lots of people that have those things and are
| still not a tiny fraction as successful. Most people
| could be given all of those things and they'd quickly
| waste them all in a spectacular fashion. Often the people
| that are the loudest on this issue don't even have their
| own absolutely trivial finances in order.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Because it is hard to trust those you hand your money to
| and not get in the way by checking in too often. Also, not
| every passionate engineer _should_ be trusted that much.
| Being able to spot those that are passionate about what you
| want done, while simultaneously being both competent and
| trustworthy is a skill that will make you very wealthy, and
| almost no one has it consistently. A success or three may
| show that he is one of those people. Or that he is
| survivorship bias waiting for a reality check. I don 't
| know how to tell, or I would be quite wealthy as well.
| bsder wrote:
| Aerospace had a lot of overqualified, underutilized
| engineers that were spectacularly easy to tap into with a
| little bit of extra money and a _very_ interesting project.
|
| That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of
| overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without
| throwing _LOTS_ of money around. On top of that, Twitter
| mostly isn 't that interesting.
| cavisne wrote:
| He could probably make it interesting though.
|
| At the moment there _is_ a magic clump of such people,
| large language model experts from big tech who have left
| because they got sick of not being able to apply the
| technology.
|
| They are currently floating around in various startups,
| but we are entering a tough market for VC funding.
| Twitter can offer hardware, data and a culture of
| shipping.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Because success at that scale eventually requires you to
| exploit some percentage of your employees and most people
| are not ok with that.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| I would LOVE if there was a way to federate FB, instagram,
| twitter, etc...
|
| You post and read on your preferred platform but can see posts
| from your friends from other platforms, or even their own
| implementation on their own server!
| neetdeth wrote:
| You're describing a federation of platforms, and this _can_
| work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a
| brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned
| against it.
|
| The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a
| federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques,
| where your ability to communicate with someone else is
| determined by connectivity in the clique graph.
|
| This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have
| become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in
| the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to)
| address the mass market.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is all-or-nothing thinking that's endemic to Silicon
| Valley's subsidies-as-a-service business model.
|
| Mastodon does not have to monopolize microblogging the way
| Twitter has, because it isn't competing with Twitter's cursed
| ad-based revenue model. Similarly, the tiny niches that do
| migrate are likely more valuable to have than the hordes of
| Twitter users who never post anything, and just juice the
| algorithm by liking and retweeting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other
| insanely hard domains
|
| People also dismiss his failures in hard domains, like The
| Boring Company.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Boring Company hasn't succeeded yet, but that's quite
| different from failure.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| If he didn't fail sometimes in hard domains then they
| wouldn't be hard.
|
| He's intentionally choosing to do things that have a
| relatively high likelihood of failure.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| He's in the arena. And that's what people respect.
|
| But has he failed at Boring?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I am glad _someone_ is trying. I don 't see the likes of
| Sundar Pichai doing anything revolutionary.
| eftychis wrote:
| Why do you think/know Jack was powerless to fix things?
| fossuser wrote:
| He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have
| total voting power, the board (which barely even used
| Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd
| want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad.
| Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company
| (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5
| which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying
| to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon
| taking power and being able to actually make the necessary
| changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too.
|
| Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access
| and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that
| stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot
| about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's
| generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model.
|
| If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out
| during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see
| these things for yourself.
|
| That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff
| is publicly verifiable.
| expensive_news wrote:
| He's kind of said it himself on multiple occasions.
|
| "Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my
| biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad
| model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first
| step."
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/jack/status/1518772754782187520
| unity1001 wrote:
| He will likely come back.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - it wouldn't surprise me if Elon eventually puts
| Jack back in as CEO.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing
| is a necessary prerequisite.
|
| Everything he's done so far reads like he's deliberately trying
| to destroy the company. The only reason I don't _really_ think
| that 's his intention is that I don't see how he could hope to
| benefit from it. But it doesn't make sense.
| fossuser wrote:
| The Twitter status quo was one of stagnation (took them ten
| years to ship edit to a handful of people) - they're a good
| example of how you can basically do everything wrong, but if
| you have product market fit it's hard to fail.
|
| He's trying to pivot them into a focused company. I think his
| actions make sense in that context.
| toofy wrote:
| i have a suspicion that much of what he's doing is just chest
| thumping for his new fan base, "look at how i do whatever i
| want. i behave how i want. they can't stop me, i'm The
| Strongman!"
|
| just red meat for that particular crowd who worship
| strongmen. tho if he's even a fraction of the irrationality
| that he's portraying, i completely agree, twitters in
| trouble.
| vidarh wrote:
| The obvious counter to the notion that the issues with Mastodon
| can't be fixed is that nothing would prevent a carbon-copy of
| Twitter (or Twitter itself, for that matter) to federate. It's
| _not about Mastodon_ , but about ActivityPub.
|
| And sure, most users will end up centralised on a handful of
| servers, and that is not a problem as long as they _can_ move
| when a specific server does not meet their needs. The biggest
| importance is a safety valve.
|
| I don't know which parts of the UI you think can't be fixed,
| but I don't agree. Better search is needed, but can be
| externalised (nothing stops someone from federating with the
| main instances and signing up to a few relays and offering more
| comprehensive search). A better experience when looking up
| external users timelines is largely down to Mastodon's
| developers having very specific ideas about how to do things.
| The logic for following or boosting/liking toots when you're on
| a different instance's timeline is awkward but can be improved
| with an optional intermediary (falling back to the awkward
| request for your address for those who insist on opting out of
| an intermediary providing a mapping).
|
| The upside with Mastodon is that it's not a single thing. It's
| the server, and the web UI, and you can replace either or both.
| E.g. you can run Pleroma with the Mastodon web UI, or it's own,
| and there are additional web UI's. Or you can (and people do,
| and I'm doing so to) build your own, so we'll see a number of
| choices of platforms that will look _very_ differently.
|
| Personally I hope Elon fails, because it will make things
| easier, but I think the long term belongs to ActivityPub over
| Twitter in any case for the simple reason that the presence of
| ActivityPub means that the threshold to stand up a _viable_
| social network has dropped massively. On one hand you have the
| software you can set up in less than a day (been there, done
| that), but far more importantly, sign up to a relay and within
| hours you have an instance that looks lively, even though most
| toots are via federation. Where there before was a massive
| chicken and egg scenario, there 's now an increasingly vibrant
| starting point for people to experiment with their own visions
| for what social media should be, and each one of them will add
| to the network effects of ActivityPub.
|
| Mastodon may well fail, but social networks has a history of
| reaching tipping points that very abruptly changes things
| dramatically. In both directions. But the federated networks
| are far less vulnerable to people moving elsewhere.
|
| As for the failures of federation, e-mail and mailing lists is
| the obvious counter. As is the web. Social media is a
| newfangled baby in comparison to the successful federated
| services.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| One could argue that the centralization process is already in
| place. Only servers that are deemed 'acceptable' are
| recommended ( I think the criteria for acceptability no hate
| speech, no transphobia, no homophobia ). It is interesting to
| the point that Guardian in its article trying to describe
| mastodon suggested it is left leaning. I chuckled. I mean, I
| suppose it is, but the whole point of an individual instance is
| just that..
|
| I agree with your point. I think people are generally missing
| forest for the trees.
| drdec wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a mastodon server for technically-minded
| folks?
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's always the NNTP newsgroups. We use them in the D
| community as the basis for our discussion groups. We're very
| happy with them.
|
| A modern interface has been put over them:
|
| https://forum.dlang.org/
|
| but still, it's NNTP and any NNTP newsreader can access them.
| esskay wrote:
| If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a
| replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted
| nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that
| its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones
| throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to
| follow someone.
| locallost wrote:
| Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More
| and more people are posting that they're trying it out without
| leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too.
| Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know.
| But they got the ball rolling a little bit.
| robbiemitchell wrote:
| > 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 benefits. A company laser
| focused on signups, like Twitter was at one point, would aim a
| growth team at this and remove all unnecessary signup steps to
| reduce friction. Steps like... first enter email, then auto-
| suggest a username, then suggest some interests (i.e., people) to
| follow, then (and only then) allow for the editing and selection
| of your username.
|
| > he had over 6,000 new joiners in 24 hours and had to pause
| registration
|
| You don't turn off signups when things get too hot. You allow
| signup and then throttle the experience. Reach back out when
| things cool down and get people re-engaged. (This is difficult,
| but better than nothing.)
|
| In any case, if Mastodon is a bit like email (as another comment
| suggested), what will make it "just work" is an upgraded
| experience to make it easy to sign up. Yes, you will be "picking
| your server" by selecting your upgraded experience -- such as
| AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. -- but then they will also need to
| monetize it or track your usage for other reasons.
|
| In fact, if it gets any traction, perhaps Google will spin up a
| Mastodon service as a companion to Gmail.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > 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.
| cbeach wrote:
| mnd999 wrote:
| I spun up my own instance today (just for me). It's not super
| hard but equally it's not straightforward. Admittedly I could
| just have signed up on an existing instance but this felt like a
| better way to understand the platform and what it offers.
|
| I've been off social media for some time so I figure I'll give it
| a few weeks and see how it goes.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Today's SMBC is a riot. Quite apropos: https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/internet-5
| hongtona wrote:
| Hello
| fazfq wrote:
| [deleted]
| PointA2B wrote:
| Sources familiar with the matter confirm it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a
| supporter of a Mastodon node:
|
| _" So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and
| every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In
| that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have
| had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before
| joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from
| inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking
| outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware,
| etc."_
|
| Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node.
|
| Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week,
| and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere
| around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about
| 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours.
| There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two
| weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post
| after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last
| looked a couple hours ago.)
|
| It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting
| with their feet. In large part because they were _already
| annoyed_ by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already
| open to trying something new. It 's within the last month that
| Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even
| took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start
| stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement
| "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the
| drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could
| never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I
| only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of
| fresh air.
|
| It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace
| Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what
| it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and
| pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be
| worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate
| elsewhere.
|
| In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon.
|
| This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front
| page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one
| gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and
| defensive, and _" it will never amount to anything"_. Meanwhile,
| the growth continues...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > 300,000 users in the last week
|
| Let's speak in a month or two, see how many remain active, and
| then see whether this is an overreaction, and whether the
| experience design of Mastodon can really acommodate them?
| drstewart wrote:
| Yep. Look at how Signal displaced Whatsapp (if anyone remembers
| this app that no longer exist) when users flooded over to it
| due to Musk-related controversies!
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/7/22218989/signal-new-signup...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Tell me you didn't read my comment without telling me you
| didn't read my comment.
|
| Where did I say anything about Mastodon displacing Twitter?
|
| But keep on with your snark. Really adding something to the
| conversation.
| robryan wrote:
| Google plus had 90 million users sign up in the first 6 months.
| nikanj wrote:
| I still remember when everyone abandoned Facebook for Ello. And
| then everyone abandoned Facebook again for Diaspora.
| [deleted]
| nojito wrote:
| Not sure why this growth is relevant. Think back to people
| moving off of Github to alternatives.
| thorncorona wrote:
| You say this but people have tried this with voat.co against
| Reddit
|
| The only people who end up sticking are the ones banned from
| Twitter.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Unlikely, considering Mastodon already went through this with
| Gab (and later Trump's Truth Social ?) joining it a few years
| ago.
|
| From what I've seen, it's mostly people sick and tired of
| Twitter's drama that decided to leave by themselves (whether
| today or in the last 6 years), while the people that were so
| toxic that Twitter banned them end up in mostly disconnected
| parts of Mastodon...
| JW_00000 wrote:
| But on the other hand, this also happened with reddit when
| Digg launched v4...
|
| (Although I agree with the general criticism that Mastodon is
| far from easy to use for the average non-techie.)
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > It's not an overreaction or hysteria
|
| But it's literally the definition of that......
| [deleted]
| alsodumb wrote:
| Reminds me of the spike in Signal users in India when WhatsApp
| required all users to accept new terms.
|
| Literally everyone I know used Signal for like, five days?
| concordDance wrote:
| 300k users a week? If that rate keeps up for a few years
| Twitter could be in real trouble...
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| xianshou wrote:
| This may be the only time this phrase has ever been warranted,
| but...crypto solves this?
|
| I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized
| at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if
| you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc
| etc...
| Guthur wrote:
| This makes no sense and I call BS by a media that is plainly
| controlled by the state.
|
| Why would anyone who actually used Twitter, an obviously curated
| social media, want to move to a more free platform because Elon
| bought Twitter and wanted to ostensibly make it more open.
|
| There is an obvious attempt to destroy Twitter, for whatever
| reason, with big advertisers pulling out and the government mouth
| piece, the BBC, is now encouraging users to leave.
| preordained wrote:
| I love how people act like Twitter was good before...
| [deleted]
| TheCleric wrote:
| It's the year of the linux desktop Mastodon instance.
| stevens37 wrote:
| No. I went back to twitter. The direction is promising.
| jrnichols wrote:
| I think a lot of instances are about to experience their own
| version of the Eternal September.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I agree. It's going to be the worst thing that happened to some
| of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have
| fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the
| entire thing doesn't fall over.
| bombcar wrote:
| The smart instances have closed the doors hard (or invite-
| only) to try to mitigate the destruction.
|
| The waves will pass, but some servers will have suffered
| fatal damage from it.
| jrnichols wrote:
| the fediverse has also been a safe haven for some otherwise
| marginalized communities too, and I am concerned that a flood
| of other users that are not familiar with the culture could
| overwhelm things and change the vibe significantly.
|
| Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate
| money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go,
| advertisers always follow, sadly.
|
| We'll see how long this new surge lasts. I have 2 accounts on
| different instances and watched a 3rd that I used a lot
| vanish along with the instance itself when it became flooded
| with very illegal content.
| Kye wrote:
| I'm not sure I would call it a safe haven. The same
| infighting that plagues marginalized communities on Twitter
| is there on Mastodon. I've had to block entire instances of
| people I otherwise agree with because they spent all their
| time making callouts, many quite questionable.
| jmann99999 wrote:
| 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 friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough
| reach.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got
| into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my
| desires better.
|
| So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.
| sigmar wrote:
| What specifically do you mean by "mostly just doesn't work"?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping
| up with the new traffic.
| gpm wrote:
| I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user)
| instance I've been on has been closed to new user
| registration except by invite (from any existing user)
| the whole time this twitter thing has been happening.
|
| Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going
| to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
| Jnr wrote:
| I wonder if Mastodon can even scale because of the
| federation.
|
| When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large
| federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it
| had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case
| with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.
| lambdaba wrote:
| I couldn't finish sign-up because the servers seem
| overwhelmed (confirmation email)
|
| But I'm wondering how something like Mastodon could scale
| to people having millions of followers.
| oynqr wrote:
| Pleroma does what Mastodon't.
| chx wrote:
| "neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice.
| It's just where the people who've always been stirring up
| shit go."
| bojan wrote:
| Same here, and even better, I'm not sure if I'm not able to
| do what I want because I don't understand how it should be
| done, or because the site is broken due to the sudden spike
| in traffic it is experiencing.
| raytube wrote:
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| News outlets all canned their comments sections - I see
| absolutely no reason why they'd want to bring back something
| even _worse_.
| raytube wrote:
| Did they? Alive and kicking in the UK.
| bombcar wrote:
| The vast majority of US comment sections went to Disqus
| and then Facebook comments and then shuttered altogether.
|
| Some smaller ones remain, but it's mostly gone.
| TheCleric wrote:
| And the ones that are left tend to be either filled with
| spam or content I'd describe as "YIKES".
|
| If I own a media company the last thing I'm doing is
| investing in the IT and moderation infrastructure it
| takes to run a Mastodon instance.
| ISL wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| LtWorf wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only
| see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people
| writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for
| Buzzfeed.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Mute? They copy paste into printed newspaper.
| godelski wrote:
| > Why can't it get enough reach?
|
| > What if each news outlet ran their own server?
|
| I think you answered your own question.
| colordrops wrote:
| Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Most companies don't run their own email servers, either.
| qabqabaca wrote:
| Nobody uses email to discover new email addresses,
| outreach is direct. Discoverability is a massive part of
| social media platforms and is hindered by the isolated
| pod structure that Mastodon supports
| raytube wrote:
| Discoverability and onboarding and authentication is
| hard.
|
| I remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in
| an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know'
| suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross
| referencing.
|
| I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My
| follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless
| as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to
| grow the list.
|
| Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and
| retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in
| Mastodon.
|
| Are we talking timeline/search promotion?
|
| I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did
| add people if you recognised them.
|
| Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested
| by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need
| some nudging.
|
| If I read an article and the author had an easy
| lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Email is run just like this and it has plenty of
| reach._
|
| The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A
| measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium.
| It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like
| "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".
|
| Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-
| many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably
| be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit
| subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter
| tweets acting as global "billboards".
|
| E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets
| on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a
| mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the
| same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about
| "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was _referencing a
| Twitter post_.)
|
| Another example related to HN... the creator of this
| site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010
| (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million
| followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him
| exposure that his existing email address (and his web
| blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site
| ycombinator.com) -- does not.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| There's probably a good test for competing products that one
| could apply. Between my daughter, me, my mother, and my
| grandmother, how many of us can or will want to switch to the
| competing product? If it's too hard for at least two
| generations, you're probably not going to meet success
| because you've already lost a large chunk of your potential
| user base before we even begin discussing if the users want
| your service in the first place.
| CM30 wrote:
| You could also probably ask how many of those people used
| Twitter to begin with? In my own experience, most of my
| friends and family don't use Twitter at all, especially if
| they don't have a business or creative hobby to promote
| online
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That's an unfair comparison though. What about someone that
| never used either of them ? Like someone that just hit 13
| (or whatever the minimum legal age is). (See also :
| TikTok.)
| colordrops wrote:
| Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-
| like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the
| similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough
| adoption.
| mysterydip wrote:
| > 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.
| alexfoo wrote:
| Not unlike how email was until Hotmail, for example, came
| along.
| nimbius wrote:
| >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
| moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious
| corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of
| caution.
|
| 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.
|
| If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and
| spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new
| social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
| papito wrote:
| 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.
| toofy wrote:
| > And he doesn't even take it that well.
|
| no, he really doesn't. he very publicly blocked the ceo of
| an advertising company when they attempted to--
| professionally and politely--explain to elon what some of
| their concerns were.
|
| it's unreal how he's so loudly demonstrating his
| instability and then complaining that people are saying
| he's unstable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Not everything people discuss involves a victim.
| concordDance wrote:
| Money can't buy social acceptance. And once you get beyond
| the amount needed to live comfortably the latter becomes
| much more valuable.
| Aleksdev wrote:
| Your post comes off as extremely negative towards Musk. I'm
| going to get downvoted for saying this but let's be honest
| for a minute.
|
| There were multiple videos titled something like "a day in
| the life of a twitter employee" were they employees at
| twitter documented how they drank alcohol and "chilled" on
| the roof after a few meetings. This doesn't seem like work to
| me.
|
| Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter
| Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don't think
| they were doing a great job.
| drstewart wrote:
| >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
|
| So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social
| media companies) exist is because literally every other
| company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize"
| they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more
| popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't
| have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for
| displacing Twitter?
|
| That's the take you're going with?
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one
| single person that realizes this one easy trick for
| displacing Twitter?
|
| Why would they when there were a handful of users there?
|
| But now there's a whole bunch of people looking for that
| one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the
| marbles.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.)
| therouwboat wrote:
| Are they going to ban paying customers? Thats like throwing
| money away.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| 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.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Laying off half the workforce will probably save more
| electricity than whatever schemes the climate team ever
| dreamed up.
|
| Just saying...
| _djo_ wrote:
| The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met
| with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and
| after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi.
| It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of
| MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted
| to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about
| it.
|
| The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways
| to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to
| users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple
| algorithm choices.
|
| Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as
| Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in
| marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less
| interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many
| of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block
| scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other
| payment methods to pay for access the same way they
| currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even
| cheaper for them.
|
| Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people,
| especially in the developing world, and would result in
| them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague
| statement about the price being adjusted for different
| regions but nothing further has emerged on that.
|
| [0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-
| brand...
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=
| 20&t...
| addajones wrote:
| 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.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| 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.
| addajones wrote:
| You're correct 100%. I just think the entire idea of
| building a userbase for free isn't so great.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| An AI ethics team is 100% a core team for a business like
| twitter. Facebook has already proven that such a team is
| necessary [1] to prevent atrocities from occurring. Being
| able to identify biases in the content selections by "the
| algorithm" (read: a bundle of fancy heuristics) is a core
| part of their job. Their job is to identify ways bad actors
| are abusing their content propagation algorithms and ways
| to mitigate these abuses.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-
| facebo...
| noahtallen wrote:
| How the hell is AI Ethics irrelevant to a company that uses
| AI to determine what tweets people are shown?
| sigmar wrote:
| The ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why
| can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the
| mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than
| the various other social media sites that don't require
| subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll
| massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be
| overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on
| his own feed/replies/notifications.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It works financially but not ethically. Tracking users to
| maximize ad revenue is something advertisers demand and
| it's frowned on more and more. In the EU it's now illegal
| to do so without the user's consent. So.think it's smart
| to look at subscription business models and much more
| ethical too. At least you can give the user a choice now.
| briantakita wrote:
| > Why can't it work for twitter?
|
| Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on
| why it didn't work for Twitter?
|
| > Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care
| about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
|
| Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one
| thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous
| spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the
| noise overall so one can curate the list of those who
| they follow.
| sigmar wrote:
| I'm not describing Elon's content as spam. I'm saying he
| receives more spam than most people, particularly because
| he likes to respond to ppl that @ him and is very into
| crypto.
| youngtaff wrote:
| He's burning money because he loaded the company with a
| billion dollars of debt
|
| Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Twitter took the debt. Twitter did not have to take the
| debt. Twitter made that choice before agreeing to Elon.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Nope. This was taken on as part of Musk's acquisition
| which is structured as a leveraged buyout and saddled
| Twitter with nearly $13 billion in additional debt.
|
| Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over
| was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's
| somewhere around $1 billion.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > $8/mo is nothing.
|
| Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this
| is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not
| clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the
| site culture.
| chmars wrote:
| Do you have a source for those 'silly teams'?
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| nemo44x wrote:
| He more or less yanked out the commissars. The hall
| monitors and other busy bodies. Good riddance.
| manmal wrote:
| > hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured
| out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost
| nothing
|
| I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike
| instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad
| of them eventually.
| Timshel wrote:
| That would be kind of awesome I think :).
| bombcar wrote:
| It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over
| various instances themselves that were infighting.
|
| But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily
| legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want
| @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly
| things.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it
| like any other corporate resource, integrated into their
| ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what
| their employees could do on it.
|
| Ya know, like their email servers.
| bombcar wrote:
| I mean, company blogs still exist, as empty and as dead
| as they've always been.
| addajones wrote:
| 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?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| > 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| To add to that first point there's rumors they're asking
| people to come back. Maybe confirmed by now?
| ploika wrote:
| It's not just about the USA. Twitter has to follow the law
| wherever it operates. The way the company went about
| announcing redundancies in the Dublin office could well
| fall foul of Irish employment law (IANAL etc), and people
| have legitimate cause for annoyance if Musk feels he's rich
| and powerful enough to get away with doing it anyway.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| People really like twitter. They're concerned about the new
| guy coming in and making rash decisions with shaky
| justification. Millions of people have to deal with the
| implications of his decision. Just because it's his legal
| right doesn't mean people have to be happy about what he's
| doing. And it's yet another reminder that we'd rather be on
| platforms where users have some amount of power, but
| network effects and billions in investment favor platforms
| where that's not the case.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Never understood why people are so concerned about him
| cutting jobs?
|
| There can be many different perspectives on it.
|
| A possible perspective is someone who uses twitter. If Elon
| cut jobs too hastily that might risk the stability, safety,
| or moderation of the platform. That is a valid concern for
| users.
|
| If you are an advertiser for a big brand you are concerned
| about what content your advertisement appears next to.
| Brands don't want to see their names plastered next to
| things which are too controversial, or frowned uppon. This
| is called "brand safety". They might worry that a deep cut
| in twitter's headcount will mean that twitter can't
| quarantee that they can maintain the required level of
| moderation for this.
|
| There is then the perspective of a regular everyday person
| who is not a twitter user in any way. They are interested
| in a safe society. If the changes at twitter lead to an
| under moderated free-for-all that can give power to all
| kind of dangerous individuals. Radicalisation is a real
| thing. Free rethoric against groups of people can lead to
| more radical rethoric. And more radical speech can lead to
| violence.
|
| > It's his right to restructure it and try to make it
| generate profit as he'd wish.
|
| Of course! That is without dispute. One can be concerned
| about how something is managed even if the owners of said
| something has every right to manage the think the way they
| want it.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| 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.
| fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote:
| > I've never understood the complete lack of empathy
|
| A lot of Twitter employees have spent years being about
| as obnoxious as they possibly can be to anyone with even
| slightly different views. I've seen a Twitter employee
| practically in tears calling someone a fascist because
| they insisted on putting semi-colons after statements in
| JavaScript.
|
| > Because there is something distasteful about a man that
| rich firing loads of people.
|
| I don't think it's distasteful at all. Twitter isn't a
| charity and it needs to fix its finances. Even the
| previous CEOs recognized that there's a ton of Twitter
| employees that do basically no relevant work.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > "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?!
| kemayo wrote:
| Is this the moment to snarkily bring up "corporations are
| people, my friend"? :D
| parineum wrote:
| "Corporations are people" is the plural of "a corporation
| is people". It has nothing to do with assigning person
| hood to a corporate entity. "Corporations are people" is
| in reference to the 1st amendment free speech rights that
| the _people_ who make up a corporation still maintain
| when they are acting as a group.
|
| Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians
| without understanding the context.
| Karunamon wrote:
| It is somewhat telling that those who used to dismiss all
| complaints about Twitter's moderation practices with a
| variation of the "private companies can do whatever they
| want" canard, are not really repeating that one anymore,
| or worse, seem to have abandoned that principle outright
| and are now complaining that the owner is, indeed, doing
| whatever he wants.
|
| Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of
| its acquisition. It has had 2 profitable years in its
| entire life. Corporations are not charities and it
| absolutely beggars belief that people seem to think
| radical changes were not both necessary and inevitable.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of
| its acquisition.
|
| Do you have a source for that? They lost $221M in 2021[1]
| which is ~$600k/day (and that was after a $800M lawsuit
| settlement which would have put them at ~$580M profit for
| 2021.)
|
| [1] https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-posts-
| loss-2021-stock-1301280...
| Karunamon wrote:
| Twitter hasn't even been acquired for a month yet, how
| are numbers from nearly 2 years ago even relevant?
|
| Straight from the horse's mouth:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588671155766194176
| [deleted]
| dislikedtom2 wrote:
| System is broken and hating or getting rid of the winner
| does not help since there is a line of people ready to
| take his spot and that spot is only open for people who
| are not afraid of a fight. Don't hate the player, hate
| the game as they say.
| mmplxx wrote:
| > He's basically a modern day king
|
| In what way? I mean, besides him being very powerful.
| Other than that, his behavior here seems perfectly
| capitalistic to me.
| expensive_news wrote:
| Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it's been
| public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took
| over. If jobs don't generate money they can't exist in
| the free market, and the real shock is that the previous
| board of directors didn't initiate layoffs sooner.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Twitter's net loss in 2021 was $221 million, far from $4
| million a day, and there's nothing to indicate that had
| changed before he bought it. The figure he quoted is made
| up predominantly of the $1 billion in annual interest
| payments Twitter now has thanks to Musk's leveraged buy
| out.
|
| There was no imminent need for Twitter do anything. It
| still had a healthy enough cash pile and leeway and time
| to layoff 10% of the workforce or so to return to pre-
| COVID staffing levels.
| jurassic wrote:
| Exactly. He's running it into the ground financially by
| saddling a low margin business with high-interest debt
| and also tanking revenue by spooking advertisers. 5D
| chess.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| From when twitter went public(2013), the deficit
| decreased every year and eventually the company ran a
| measurable profit in 2018 and 2019. It ran red in 2020
| but since then has been making a profit most quarters.
| This seems to indicate that while they weren't running on
| great margins, they were above board even if just barely.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-
| incom...
|
| And the $4 million/day is from the debt incurred by
| Elon's purchase.
| kemayo wrote:
| I've seen it claimed that the $4M/day figure is mostly
| because of the debt servicing cost that Musk's
| acquisition added to the company's books.
|
| The new debts apparently add over $1 billion / year in
| interest payments alone.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/elon-musk-
| twit...
|
| (Being able to do this as part of a buyout sounds
| ridiculous, I know. And yet.)
| bluesign wrote:
| > I've never understood the complete lack of empathy
| displayed by so many people on HN.
|
| I don't think this is empathy related to be honest ( as
| your statement is "a man that rich firing loads of
| people." )
|
| It is either wrong to fire those people, or not. If it is
| not wrong to fire those people, it shouldn't matter who
| did it.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| > Why does it matter how much he's worth?
|
| Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to
| evil. It's a very juvenile way to think, and I suspect most
| people don't even know why they dislike Elon (or any other
| billionare - Elon is just an example). After people read so
| many sensationalized articles online, they adopt the
| author's sanctimonious opinions/views as their own.
|
| It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a
| man they've never met. Even if Elon posts snarky shit
| online, who doesn't? If everyone's life was put under a
| microscope, they would likely be under the same media
| firestorm as Elon, or even worse.
|
| EDIT: Instead of replying to me and engaging in discussion
| (maybe I could learn something), I get downvoted. Stay
| classy, HN.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Stay classy, HN.
|
| I could ask the same about your comment please.
|
| > Because some people think that wealth somehow equates
| to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think
|
| You set up a strawman and knock it down. There are many
| legitimate reason why someone might object to Musk or his
| wealth. Thinking that "wealth somehow equates evil" is
| indeed juvenile, yet somehow you assume people hold that
| thought and work from that assumption.
|
| > I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike
| Elon
|
| Oh great. The sheepish masses. They don't even have a
| coherent thought!
|
| Except this is your fantasy again. There are many
| legitimate reasons to dislike him. Why don't you ask
| people, instead of labeling them empty headed media-
| driven zombies? This is hardly a way to "engage in
| discussion".
|
| > It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for
| a man they've never met.
|
| He kinda put himself in front of others. That is his
| brand. It has benefits and drawbacks. I don't know why
| you think one has to meet someone to judge their
| character. If he does contemptible things through online
| discussion why can't someone hold him in contempt?
|
| > If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they
| would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon,
| or even worse.
|
| I doubt it is truly everyone. Many many individuals live
| a public life without kicking of a firestorm with the
| same regularity he does.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Money equals power. One billionaire equals too much power
| in single set of hands. Some of us don't like power
| concentrated in too few hands. it is a simple argument.
| notimetorelax wrote:
| I recently started reading history and it speaks a lot
| about land ownership and how peasants would get indebted to
| barons for working on it. On the surface that made a lot of
| sense, and yet this was not the type of society we wanted.
|
| Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even
| buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So
| people mentioning someone's net worth states their class
| and this is important for the context. As for Musk being
| entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some
| of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that
| this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the
| peasants didn't earlier.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/b
| ill-g...
| parineum wrote:
| > Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some
| even buy out land
|
| I'm pretty sure you missed the important point of that
| history you've been reading. The bad part is the
| indentured servitude, not the land ownership.
|
| > On the surface that made a lot of sense
|
| To whom?
|
| > So people mentioning someone's net worth states their
| class and this is important for the context. As for Musk
| being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that,
| although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society
| may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept.
| Same as the peasants didn't earlier.
|
| There are a plethora of companies that behave in this
| exact way that millions of people continue to patronize
| in a much more substantial manner than they do Twitter
| (Food, vehicles, electronics, etc.).
|
| Musk's behavior is not new, unique or shocking. These
| people are overplaying their outrage over his behavior
| because they don't like the man and Twitter is their safe
| space. It has absolutely nothing to do with his actual
| business practices.
| __alexs wrote:
| > The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land
| ownership.
|
| I guess you're not familiar with the Inclosure Acts? (To
| name but one of the grossly amoral uses of land ownership
| in the past few centuries.)
| parineum wrote:
| Using land amorally isn't the same thing as owning land
| unless you think land ownership is amoral.
| __alexs wrote:
| I'll take that as a yes then.
|
| OP was not claiming all land ownership was bad. Just that
| rich people have commonly used land ownership to harm
| others. There is a long and rich history of this.
| parineum wrote:
| > creating legal property rights to land previously held
| in common.
|
| That's not a use of land ownership, that's an amoral
| redistribution (theft) of land.
|
| They took ownership from one party to another. The
| amorality was the transfer, not the ownership. Unless you
| think both parties are equally amoral for owning the land
| in the beginning and the end of the process.
|
| The argument you're making would be like saying it was
| amoral for plantation owners to own the land they held
| because they had slaves. The problem is the slaves (and
| all the evils that came with it), not the plantation.
| esskay wrote:
| The reality is the average user could not give a crap who
| owns twitter, or what they do. They arent there for the
| owner, they're there because its a functioning social
| network.
| ambrozk wrote:
| > 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.
| sosull wrote:
| 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.
| rco8786 wrote:
| That's a super weird take. Google and Meta absolutely
| dominate on users also.
| sosull wrote:
| Yes, you're correct. I was wrong. Apologies.
| nimchimpsky wrote:
| frereubu wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford
| don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there
| aren't many people there, but because of the content that
| their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to
| concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is
| that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the
| content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising
| may be presented alongside that. It may also be that if
| those extremists are allowed back then many people will
| start to desert Twitter, and it will be even less
| attractive. But I think both things - number of users _and_
| the content - are being taken into account.
| Thorentis wrote:
| I really don't think companies care what their ads appear
| alongside. They care about a Twitter user posting an
| outrage tweet with a screenshot of an ad for a Burger
| appearing next to the N word. As if we aren't mature
| enough yet to separate ad space and user generated
| content.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > I really don't think companies care what their ads
| appear alongside.
|
| It's always funny to see people on HN confidently assert
| absolute horseshit based on no experience.
|
| As someone who's worked in ad-supported publishing, they
| absolutely do. A lot of time and energy goes into trying
| to ensure ads never appear alongside content that the
| purchaser doesn't want, and failure usually results in
| running ads for free, at a minimum.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The ads pay for the content that appears next to them to
| appear in the first place. There can be no separation at
| ad funded companies.
| frereubu wrote:
| Companies _do_ care what their ads appear alongside,
| _because_ of the outrage tweets and because, en masse,
| people / the media _aren 't_ mature enough to separate
| ad space and user-generated content.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| No a very loud, very vocal, minority of users that have
| an extreme authoritarian world view and will create the
| appearance of wide scale social outrage where there is
| none will scare marketers..
|
| Of course if they had any real data on the impact of
| their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads
| are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad
| for a large national fast food place, or a car company
| and said "hey I need to go buy from them"
|
| Now marketing for lesser known things, things I may not
| have even known existed well that is effective. But a
| Burger king add no....
| slg wrote:
| >I really don't think companies care what their ads
| appear alongside. They care about a Twitter user posting
| an outrage tweet with a screenshot of an ad for a Burger
| appearing next to the N word.
|
| I don't understand what distinction you are making here?
| Aren't those the same things?
| phpisthebest wrote:
| As a Life long F150 owner (having owned 5 of one from
| each of the last 5 generations including my current
| one... all V8's as well, Ecoboost V6 is a terrible engine
| and does not belong in a truck ;) ), and a person that
| lives in a Red State, and a person that Knows alot of
| other F150 owners..
|
| I can assure you the people screeching about twitters new
| ownership are not Fords Customer base. Ford's bread and
| butter is the F150, a class of vehicle that the
| twitterverse that is leaving on mass would like to
| eliminate from production
|
| Ford marketing dept is extremely tone deaf listing to
| that crowd
| mplewis wrote:
| You have a very skewed view of who's buying the F150 and
| who they're selling the Lightning to.
| qeternity wrote:
| Ford cares what non-Parler users think. That's it. And
| because there are many, many more non-Parler users than
| Parler users, they've done extremely basic cost benefit
| analysis.
|
| There's also an interesting prisoner's dilemma to
| advertising, which cuts both ways. If your competitors
| advertise, then you need to as well. And if they don't,
| then you don't either.
| __alexs wrote:
| Google ad revenue is considerably more than Meta and
| Twitter combined.
| squidbeak wrote:
| 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.
| smcl wrote:
| 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...
| jurassic wrote:
| The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed
| up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck
| the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to
| buy it.
| moomin wrote:
| I wish any of my projects had been so unsuccessful as to
| sell for $44 billion.
|
| And if you think my opinion isn't worth anything, consider
| the richest man in the world just spent $200 on it.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Too much friction._
|
| Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has
| so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?
| metadat wrote:
| All you need to do is pick an instance and register an
| account on said instance. The friction is pretty low, in the
| same ballpark as friction encountered creating an account on
| any website.
|
| It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an
| hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently
| under heavy load due to new users.
| Laremere wrote:
| I really felt that there was an overreaction and we needed time
| to see what changes actually happened under Musk. Lots of very
| confident and different guesses about what was going on.
|
| Then Musk started to say he'd name and shame advertisers who
| have lowered/removed their spend on the platform. I don't know
| what the bar for advertisers deciding a platform is too risky
| to advertise on, but that has to cross it. There are a lot of
| different sites to advertise on, so it only really takes being
| riskier than the rest to lower/remove the amount you're willing
| to spend on the platform.
|
| But maybe that take is just as bad as the rest. Perhaps Twitter
| sometime soon finds a crowd that will pay enough to sustain it,
| and the crowds that fled from it slowly come back after
| becoming frustrated with overly technical alternatives.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Mastodon is great but it isn 't a replacement for Twitter. Too
| much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough
| reach._
|
| You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's
| for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the
| time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And
| that's more than enough.
|
| What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that
| _they aren 't trying to be big_. They're trying to stay small
| but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever
| be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful.
|
| Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe.
| Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they
| don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People
| quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far
| greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever
| be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking
| Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)
| parineum wrote:
| > You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't.
|
| Someone should tell the journalists.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ever been to the replies section of a journalist's post?
| andylynch wrote:
| I don't know about that; for instance a number of lawyers I
| follow are now on Mastodon and enjoying figuring it out. The
| biggest problems seem to be that some popular servers are
| disabling signups for a bit, and secondly finding out who else
| is there too (but Debirdify helps with that)
| grammers wrote:
| >It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of
| our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An
| intelligent employee brought up that an average business person
| would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it.
|
| Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt
| really important emails.
|
| >Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too
| much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough
| reach.
|
| I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent
| replacement, much more civil as well.
| rapind wrote:
| > much more civil as well.
|
| Unfortunately that's about to change.
| rchaud wrote:
| I don't see how.
|
| Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons:
|
| a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance
|
| b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX
| choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued
| to a screen like bad news
|
| c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that
| was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post
| from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of
| your follows).
|
| Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters
| allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there
| is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users
| and shoving ads at them.
| collegeburner wrote:
| i'm pretty sure they know this, but i'm pretty sure they're
| intentionally trying to "make it a thing"/fake support for it
| because there's a lot of hate towards musk. i don't like him
| much but i do like the fact that all these types of blue check
| journalists are pissed about it.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It is not for you, or a fair news organization, to decide what
| is an "overreaction".
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Plus, there is no real reason to.
|
| All this hysteria is based on lies that have been spread over
| the past days.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most
| high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it
| provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and
| propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they
| can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of
| federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of
| barrier or complexity in the way of them reaching their audience
| as an antifeature.
|
| I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to
| bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from
| the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's
| not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people
| building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even
| comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let
| alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the
| fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the
| core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very
| successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter.
|
| EDIT: speling
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| Mastodon isn't trying to replace Twitter.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| yes .... good point - which makes it all the more unlikely to
| succeed in meeting people's expectations.
| [deleted]
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Surprising that mastodon has only half a million users?! Way
| below what I expected after so many years.
|
| I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming:
| Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch
| getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness.
| Pretty sweet.
| keithnz wrote:
| think they missed a zero, more like 6 million...
| https://bolha.us/@gutocarvalho/109298885964017612
| rglover wrote:
| What's most exciting and optimistic to me about all this
| hullabaloo is that people are organically starting to make a move
| back to a more-decentralized web (decentralized in the original,
| 90s internet sense). What's cool is it's happening 100%
| organically and independent of technology. I love the idea of
| different "corners" of the internet becoming more of a thing
| again. We need more diversity of thought, not less, and this move
| (however small) makes it more likely, not less.
| john2x wrote:
| Off-topic, but is there a similar federated alternative to
| Reddit? e.g. each subreddit can be its own server.
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| There's Lemmy[0] which is a reddit clone though it's multiple
| "subreddits" per server is how it's implemented. It's rather
| small currently and the existing crowd's mainly software
| developers and hardcore leftists.
|
| [0]: https://join-lemmy.org/
| [deleted]
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Ah,I forgot the Littr[0] which fits your bill even better.
| Discussed on HN[1] a few months ago.
|
| [0]: https://littr.me/ [1]:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966
| rhollos wrote:
| If you're considering Mastodon, you might want to instead use
| Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/) which provides access to
| Mastodon instances but is less demanding of computing resources,
| and easier to create your own instance (if you choose to go that
| route) as it has fewer dependencies.
| jimmytidey wrote:
| I think there's a fair amount of 'status quo' bias here.
|
| Mastodon isn't going to be a massively federated system that
| recreates every nuance of the Twitter UX.
|
| It could still be a worthwhile alternative to Twitter. It would
| be nice if there were thousands of Mastodon servers, but perhaps
| a handful is ok. Mastodon has a slightly confusing user
| experience, but so was early Twitter - maybe that's ok too.
|
| Whatever the downsides to Mastodon are they should be weighed
| against the benefits of moving away from Twitter, which are
| enormous. Irrespective of whether the Town Square metaphor fits
| exactly, Twitter hosts a massive amount of influential political
| discussion. Demonstrating that many users will stop using a venue
| for political speech if a billionaire gains unfettered control of
| it is an incredibly important precedent to set.
|
| Mastodon doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a bit
| better than Twitter. I think it probably clears that bar easily.
| raytube wrote:
| Is this a good explainer? There is a barrier to most tech. I
| remember joining a server and not going much further a few years
| back.
|
| Seen lots of people saying this is me I think on Mastodon.
| Eumenes wrote:
| From my experience, the only people use Mastodon are super
| integrated into the web/open source communities. There's also a
| strange mix of anime, furry, and weird gamer people.
| baxtr wrote:
| 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| abzolv wrote:
| Kara Swisher said some advertisers had told her, after a
| meeting with Musk last week in NY, that either he came to the
| meeting totally unprepared or he actually had no plan. He
| could not articulate a sensible plan to them.
| abzolv wrote:
| The months you're referring to was spent trying to get out of
| the deal. It was not spent preparing for it to close.
| baxtr wrote:
| Maybe he had access to internals. But do you really believe
| it's comparable to the SJ situation? He was the CEO and could
| talk to all the people in person. He spent most of his time
| understanding. It's seems very different now.
| _djo_ wrote:
| He had no access to internals during that time, and the
| calibre of the 'planning' revealed during discovery in the
| trial was neither deep nor substantial.
|
| There are now reports that some of those laid off are being
| asked to come back, in a belated recognition that it was a
| chaotic and flawed process.
| running101 wrote:
| It's a fad, they'll be back
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Wake me up when people start publishing RSS feeds again and
| I'll accept the claims of federated platform.
| gpm wrote:
| Mastodon publishes RSS feeds, take a username and server and
| make a url that looks like this:
| https://octodon.social/users/fasterthanlime.rss
| bombcar wrote:
| You can import https://twitter.com/elonmusk directly into
| an RSS reader if you want, still.
| etchalon wrote:
| A lot of places never stopped publishing RSS feeds. It's just
| not a lot of people read them anymore.
| radium3d wrote:
| Vaslo wrote:
| Only in the tech world will this be popular. The system is not
| friendly for people want a simple experience.
| chatterhead wrote:
| If you didn't close your Github account when Microsoft bought it
| for $7B then you likely aren't going to close your Twitter cause
| Elon.
| cm2187 wrote:
| or left to Canada when Trump was elected
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am
| amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the
| commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker
| culture, when topics like this come up.
|
| A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit
| for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half
| of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code
| they wrote. _Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what
| do those people do all day anyways"_
|
| Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the
| legal letter of the GPL? _" Don't care, it writes my boiler plate
| code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose"_
|
| A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some
| popularity? _" It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-
| reaction."_
|
| Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into
| in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I
| was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs
| and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the
| Internet went through several of its early growth explosions,
| lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the
| web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture
| and the open source and free software movement grow throughout
| the 90s and into the milennium.
|
| People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of
| that same movement.
|
| When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated
| open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark --
| what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
| baby wrote:
| HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far
| from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product
| culture. It was started by a VC after all.
|
| Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments
| here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is
| frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a
| nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will
| be stress tested.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that
| a company with descent financial backing can't scale a
| Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?
| macjc wrote:
| In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the
| connection between communities and will have worse "free
| speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If
| money could solve everything, google+ would still be a
| thing today.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon
| instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes
| couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech"
| problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean
| that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the
| code upstream to solve many of these issues.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| I think you've got it a little backwards there.
|
| Smaller communities are easier to moderate. Reduced
| interaction with other communities means that any one
| person can only have a limited effect before a remote
| moderator intervenes.
|
| What happens when a toxic community starts causing
| problems in the wider network? Quite simply, they get cut
| off from the network. Every individual user can block an
| entire instance. Each server can also block another
| instance. There is also precedent for ALL servers to
| block one particularly bad instance.
|
| You probably can't prevent toxic communities from
| forming. Since it's an open protocol, you also can't
| prevent certain political parties from setting up their
| "free speech" instance and doing what they do. But you
| can cut them off from everyone else just trying to have a
| good time.
|
| The community structure should tend to gather like-minded
| people together. That would mean some instances becoming
| intensely toxic. Which is what we have seen happen. On
| the other hand the isolated structure makes it easy to
| just ban that entire community with one button.
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not
| scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created
| mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the
| service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with
| the sheer number of users.
|
| AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the
| software such that it scales the way Twitter does.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Hackernews isn't for hackers.
|
| If anything, it's geared towards software engineers, most of
| which aren't anything like "hackers" and can swing fairly
| convervative on many topics.
|
| This place isn't old school slashdot. If anything it's more for
| people that just want to get rich in tech at all costs.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I'm not new here, and.. well ... It's always been a mix of
| both, but that mix seems to have shifted in % and tone in the
| last couple years especially. Maybe reflecting broader
| culture wars issues.
|
| But there used to be a much broader consensus in the industry
| among nerds about responses to this kind of thing.
|
| Empathy to fellow software engineers in our tech industry is
| one thing I would expect re: the twitter layoffs. I worry
| about apathy about license violations for the license that
| literally made Linux (and therefore huge swathes of the
| modern tech infrastructure) possible. Again, not recognizable
| to me is the dismissive sneer about new possibilities in
| social networks and tech.
|
| And yeah, perhaps Mastodon is annoying/frustrating to these
| people precisely because it isn't a monetized money making
| scheme.
|
| FWIW I am one of those "software engineers" you mention and
| did my decade in a FAANG. But I only got that title because
| of the time I spent as a hacker-nerd in my teens.
|
| I'm trying not to paint too much of a straw-man here, but it
| feels like a trend to me, a worrisome one.
| renonn wrote:
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You have to understand a lot of people own Tesla's and Tesla
| stock and they feel attacked personally seeing anything succeed
| that might affect their stock or opinions of Musk. By seeing
| other people be successful that might take away from Musk's
| success, they feel like it will affect their potential to get
| richer.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I do have a pet theory that between GPT-3, various parsers,
| bots, 4chan influx we saw tendencies that eventually took
| slashdot and other forums down. I personally try to keep HN
| spirit alive, but I will admit it has gotten harder lately.
|
| It would be sad news for me, because I see HN as last bastion
| of real conversation online.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| > Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up
| into in the 90s?
|
| The revolution eats its own children. The games industry used
| to be the target of hacker attacks, and cracking games,
| pirating them, was more fun than doing damage, according to the
| self-image of the 80th, 90th, 00th. Who would have guessed that
| such a spirit could also turn against its own community, in a
| community where manipulation and deception took place even in
| the past, as long as it served one's own goals? There has never
| been good and evil. Only feasible and delightful. I regret it,
| however there is only so much we can do.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| fwiw when I say "hacker" I mean the other sense of the term.
| Not cracker/phreak.
|
| But someone who 'hacks' on software. Unix hacker is an old
| but long lasting stereotype.
| creddit wrote:
| > A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking
| credit for other people's work
|
| Thankfully you're here to dramatically increase the quality of
| commentary.
| fossuser wrote:
| Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we
| probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get
| those results.
|
| I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to
| escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to
| have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back.
|
| I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there,
| I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I
| don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.
|
| It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement
| about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want
| more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical
| niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion.
| I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks
| of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean, I'm active on Mastodon this week and I'm boosting it
| because it's having its moment. But I don't disagree with
| many of the criticisms of it. But it doesn't really matter,
| because this is something having a growth moment right now
| and it's overall a positive thing and it's something that can
| actually be built on.
|
| Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is
| reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't
| satisfy the purists.
|
| In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of
| an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out.
| But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old
| wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > I just do not think these federated attempts will get us
| there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years,
| and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined
| to fail.
|
| Email seems pretty successful by any measure...
|
| All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so
| people don't have to care about the underlying technology.
| With all the newfound interest there's probably someone
| working on such a thing and other people looking for
| somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new
| trend.
|
| Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went
| from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents
| were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the
| family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the
| current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison.
|
| IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn't
| seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about
| that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human
| ever.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > it's a disagreement about the focus
|
| So what would you like to focus on instead?
| simongray wrote:
| A lot of people on Hacker News are unfortunately very focused
| on money so they don't see the value of things that aren't.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You and I must be reading different HN's, because I see an
| awful lot of people anti-layoffs, anti-Copilot, and pro-
| Mastodon.
|
| So I wonder if you're actually complaining about diversity of
| thought? Because HN _isn 't_ the "hacker culture" you're
| talking about from the late 80s and 90's. It's got a whole
| bunch of those people, but also a whole bunch of everything
| else.
|
| When people comment, why should they be trying to contribute to
| "hacker culture" at all? Why shouldn't they simply be offering
| their diverse perspectives?
|
| And criticizing Mastodon is a valid perspective to have. If
| people are looking to jump ship from Twitter _now_ , it's
| important to be realistic about whether Mastodon is or isn't
| "ready for business" both from technical and consumer
| perspectives. It's counterproductive to only hype up projects
| and never criticize them.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
|
| This is a board run by an incubator investment firm, so I don't
| really view it as an outpost of hacker culture.
|
| I have been reading here over the past week here about private
| Amway rail cars, underperforming CEOs being replaced, notes
| about Stripe/Twitter layoffs. Most of this is peripheral, or
| even unrelated, to hacker culture, but I don't really read here
| for Hacker culture.
|
| I've seen a lot of hacker culture in the past few months, and a
| lot of innovation, not necessarily here, although there's been
| references to it here. For what I'm interested in a lot of it
| has been based around Github recently, but it varies over time.
|
| I don't see the angels, incubators, VCs, startup founders,
| FAANG business development and product managers, and
| occassional programmers talking here to have much influence on
| hacker culture one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people
| hacking on stuff have read this board, or even commented. Not
| all - I know a lot of very good programmers who never even
| heard of this board.
| seydor wrote:
| Why would hackers be in hn? I thought it is more big-tech
| workers here and their bosses
| pndy wrote:
| > Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up
| into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that
| much?
|
| Demographic shift which did affect the hacker culture. It's not
| that hard to spot the image of an average hacker of today. But
| I'm not gonna go into details - it would be like setting fire
| to a dumpster.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| > _based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote_
|
| You complain about comment quality and then fall for that level
| of fake news? Congratulations, you found the problem.
| make3 wrote:
| classic "they disagree with me so the commentary is biased"
| take
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