[HN Gopher] Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record ...
___________________________________________________________________
Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users
yesterday
Author : mariuz
Score : 171 points
Date : 2022-12-19 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mastodon.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (mastodon.social)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Movetodon lists all my Twitter follows and their corresponding
| mastodon handles but the tool doesn't let me follow them?
| Clicking the mastod name leads to a as 404 and that's it? I was
| hoping to be able to just say "follow all" or at least do it one
| by one. Am I not holding it right.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Most of the mastodon ecosystem is semi functional at best right
| now. They got a small herd of people showing up which means
| pretty much all the existing capacity is full so stuff is
| breaking left and right.
|
| Give it a few months and a fraction of the people still
| interested can probably sign up without issues.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It did for me. I just did "follow all" again. You sure some
| extension isn't interfering?
| alkonaut wrote:
| I don't see any options or "follow all" at all, just a list
| of accounts. This is safari on iOS 15. The only two buttons
| are "Logout" and "Hide followed accounts"
| guerrilla wrote:
| There was a "follow all" and one "follow" button for each
| person for me in Firefox on Desktop/Linux. Try FF or Cr?
| alkonaut wrote:
| Ok I'll just try on desktop when I'm at one. Thanks.
| mempko wrote:
| The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't
| work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying
| the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming
| CompuServe and AOL would dominate.
|
| Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the
| internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on
| open standards like ActivityPub.
|
| History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely
| fragile.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| > Mastodon is like the internet
|
| Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured
| along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result
| won't look much different from the old internet: big
| influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections
| to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| IMO, the most likely result is one or more large, heavily
| connected meshes centered around an ideological middle ground
| of significantly online people (probably divided by
| liberal/conservative ideology), sparsely connected to
| somewhat more fringe instances (maybe a socialist instance
| that doesn't restrict overt calls to violence, but is still
| largely ideologically acceptable to the average liberal), and
| some archipelagos/unfederated instances of even more fringe
| social groups.
|
| And that's a good thing. Individuals get to choose servers
| that align with their views on moderation and morality,
| server moderators only need to deal with occasional
| maliciousness rather than trying to walk a fine line of
| tolerance, and your social group isn't at risk of being
| disrupted by a billionaire moving in and blowing it up.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, arguably that has _already happened_; it's just that
| the Big Two far-right mastodon instances (Gab and Truth
| Social) do not federate. Note that Gab actually used to.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely
| fragile.
|
| but how many people today use Discord et al. compared to IRC? I
| think the centralized-decentralized thing is a cycle, not a
| one-way logical progression.
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| My comment is uninformed, but I _feel_ like centralised
| companies have the R &D resources to create innovation, which
| communities then steal (in a good way) to make the technology
| free (as in freedom) for everyone. That's why there's a
| cycle.
| jscipione wrote:
| notpachet wrote:
| > exposing the greatest human rights violation in American
| history through the Twitter Files scandal
|
| I don't usually reply in these Twitter threads, but cmon...
| surely you can see what a ridiculous hyperbole this is?
|
| American history includes: > Mass enslavement > Incarceration
| of Japanese-Americans during WWII > Hundreds of thousands of
| civilians killed in war > Torture programs > Blacklisting of
| (ostensible) communists during the McCarthy era > Extermination
| and displacement of Native Americans
|
| And that's just to name a few off the top of my head.
| jscipione wrote:
| None of those were a constitutional crisis except mass
| enslavement and the Constitution in that case was on the side
| of the slavers. Joe Biden is the worst President in American
| history no hyperbole. Hacker News mods are clearly on the
| side of censorship.
| 323 wrote:
| It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling.
|
| Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just
| talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if
| 100 mil users want to move?
|
| Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every
| time Justin Bieber tweeted?
| jshen wrote:
| Twitter didn't scale for many years. Remember the fail whale?
| jancsika wrote:
| Have you submitted a bug report? :)
| rglullis wrote:
| > What if 100 mil users want to move?
|
| Then supply and demand will dictate that people will start
| paying for accounts, and that will be a good thing.
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| It's because most of the servers are not nearly on the level of
| setup that a normal large-scale social network would probably
| need...which in turn is also because a lot of them have been
| run by hobbyists and the like, which in turn is also because no
| one ever needed to scale it this high before.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That's a feature, not a bug.
|
| Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small.
|
| Consider running your own for your friends.
| fleddr wrote:
| Serious question: if a community is so small as to be just
| your friends, why not start a Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord
| group? Free, fully managed, content preserved, well
| established.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get
| to control your own community and moderation.
|
| Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting
| company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless
| you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I
| find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting
| company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced
| censorship laws.
| drstewart wrote:
| Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the
| privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating
| their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that
| really understands consumer behavior.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| I was 'web socialized' in the 90's. IRC, web forums, and
| so on. Before that we had BBS. This is nothing new. And
| nothing prevents a major player to enter the fediverse
| btw.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or
| throw some cash your way.
|
| One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can
| experiment with new payment models.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm,
| could you clarify?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Not satire!
|
| You're providing a real service to your friends - a
| mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real
| money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your
| friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them
| to do so.
|
| How you do this is up to you.
|
| I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice
| bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year
| directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8
| folks who play on it with regularity.
|
| For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food,
| either cooking for each other or catching dinner out.
| That works well for my friend group and I perceive this
| as fair.
|
| Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask
| them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services
| (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion,
| whatever).
|
| There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for
| your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of
| why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can
| be run.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is
| it?
|
| The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact
| that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation.
|
| Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if
| anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by
| leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics.
|
| A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive
| sounds like a pretty awful product.
| nerdponx wrote:
| You are aware that an entire generation of Internet
| forums operated (and still operate) this way, right?
|
| Big forums had big hosting costs and required donations
| from members, had issues with spam, had to source
| volunteer moderators from the community, etc., just like
| big Mastodon instances today.
|
| Small forums had few of those issues because the scale
| was smaller. The problem was not that nobody wanted to
| run a small forum: it's actually kind of fun to be a
| forum admin for your friends, and only one person in the
| group actually needs to be the admin. The problem was
| that nobody wanted to be on a small forum because it was
| small.
|
| Now you can have it both ways: a small instance with
| trivial running cost and moderation demands, but all the
| benefits of being on a huge forum with thousands of
| concurrent users.
|
| See also: Discord servers. Administering a Mastodon
| instance that you pay someone to host is not much more
| difficult than administering a Discord server. If people
| found it difficult to moderate a Discord server, why
| would so many friend groups, gamer groups, content
| creators, sub-Reddits, and software projects have their
| own small Discord servers? The answer is that the cost of
| moderating a small group of people is really small
| because small groups are easy to moderate, and the main
| downside of a small group isn't really relevant when the
| small group can follow and interact with anyone in the
| huge federated network.
| darkwater wrote:
| > You are aware that an entire generation of Internet
| forums operated (and still operate) this way, right?
|
| And yet many of them died or, better put, most of the new
| forums were never born nowadays because communities moved
| to centralized, managed solutions (Facebook, Telegram,
| Discord, Slack etc)
| kitsune_ wrote:
| Many of the focused niche discussions around the globe
| still happen in forums (and subreddits).
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I mean you're certainly free to paint it as a feature, but
| Mastodon is getting pushed very heavily by many Mastodon
| users to Twitter users as a backup (see "movetodon.org",
| which starts with "Log in with twitter") so I the scaling
| issues deserve more than the "that's a feature!" I see thrown
| at every person who brings them up
|
| > Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small.
|
| Certainly doesn't vibe with the project owners pushing a set
| of "blessed" servers to every visitor:
| https://joinmastodon.org/servers
|
| I think this is the biggest reason Mastodon will stay a
| fringe platform. No one who enjoys it will accept anything of
| its issues as valid criticism, and if you point out the fact
| that such a mentality will keep it from getting popular, the
| reply will be "good! I don't want it to get big!"
|
| Meanwhile the project itself _very clearly_ wants to get
| popular, and it 's clearly being sponsored with the intent
| that it should become more and more relevant, much to the
| chagrin of those who were using it _before_ it was cool.
|
| It seems like eventually the cool kids who start to shut out
| the new kids to stave off an Eternal September, leaving the
| project in an awkward spot and a steady decline for everyone
| involved as the old guard shifts energy to building taller
| and taller fences around their respective echo chambers. (Now
| what was that about registrations again?)
| EarlKing wrote:
| I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't
| scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for
| anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and
| ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear
| it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work",
| neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem
| only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs
| money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero
| seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't
| going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history
| of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody
| wants to hear that either.
|
| If you're not willing to pay for the services you require...
| you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of
| the Fediverse.
| fleddr wrote:
| I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become
| so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in
| their hands today.
|
| Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways
| incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's
| explore...
|
| They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly
| without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every
| touch point. They preserve your content pretty much forever,
| and this content exponentially grows. They have armies of
| people as well as advanced AI to filter out the most horrible
| of human depravities, so that you don't get to see it.
|
| And for all of this, you don't pay a single penny. Yes,
| you'll get a few ads. You can even block those. An incredible
| amount of value offered, for near-zero costs.
| vlunkr wrote:
| They also have obvious downsides, so I don't think there's
| any harm in attempting to create alternatives.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Terrible take, sacrificing integrity for uptime.
| fleddr wrote:
| Well, this is obviously become I'm a terrible person
| lacking integrity.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| Maybe side effects of scaling are what Mastodon users are
| trying to leave behind.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for
| people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2)
| bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the
| limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements,
| bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to
| over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible
| today.
|
| Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your
| average Tweet/Toot/Whatever and that the interconnects
| between the servers need to transport only those messages for
| which there are subscribers, something that could be
| optimized for (you really only need to transport each message
| once per sender _if_ there are subscribers, not once per
| subscriber).
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to
| ultimately have a much better experience
|
| Big, heavy doubt. This Twitter debacle has generated
| ridiculous, crazy amounts of drama and emoting, the likes I
| haven't seen on the net in ... a while. This kind of
| emoting and drama stirring only works when the pot is
| large. A storm in a small teapot really isn't much. It
| reminds me of the high drama that used to happen on large
| IRC channels run by teens in the early '00s, where you'd
| wake up and some portion of the server got muted or banned
| for some completely opaque but _intensely personal_ reason.
| (I was one of the teens so I 'm not implying like I was
| much better than the rest of them lol.)
|
| I'm in 20-something small Matrix rooms/spaces and Discord
| guilds and none of them are nearly this dramatic. The kind
| of folks that seek engagement on Twitter IMO are in it for
| the high drama that you can only get on a large social
| platform. The folks that stay on the Fediverse are looking
| for something entirely different. I'm hopeful that some
| folks try the Fediverse and realize they didn't need
| Twitter at all (not in some sense of Twitter anger, but
| more that it's good for folks who want to socialize in
| smaller spaces be aware that it's very possible to do that
| on the net right now.)
|
| FWIW If you're trying to build a small community and afraid
| of scaling issues, I still think hopping onto Matrix or
| Discord (preferably in that order) is a better idea.
| Synapse might be heavyweight but it's still lighter than
| running Mastodon, and if your community doesn't want to
| federate, you can run the much lighter Dendrite (or even
| lighter Conduit which is a bit more raw.) There's a large
| ecosystem of clients on all the big platforms for Matrix.
| Discord being a centralized, closed system has all of these
| problems solved as well.
| Zak wrote:
| Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of
| software, it will likely end up that servers intended to
| grow large will run different software than servers
| intended to stay small.
| pwinnski wrote:
| I suspect that key to the future of the fediverse is
| likely to be a more efficient piece of software than
| mastodon.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That could well happen, a bit like the difference between
| say 'gmail' and your own private mail server. The big
| trick will then be to stop it from becoming siloed again.
| jshen wrote:
| Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of
| the trade-off you leave out. Also, "scale" is too vague a
| term in this context. It could mean efficiency or it could
| mean uptime. These are very different, and federated systems
| will have higher "uptime" in the sense that one instance
| crashing won't cause all to crash. However, it will be less
| efficient, but there are huge efficiency gains to be had with
| the current design.
| nathias wrote:
| why would they listen if you don't even differentiate between
| federated and peer to peer solutions? The costs could be made
| thrivial by sharing in a p2p network.
| pwinnski wrote:
| I think there are some differences that are key.
|
| 1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100
| million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit
| a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine.
| Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of
| engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small
| percentage of their twitter audience.
|
| 2. Usenet failed largely because it was overrun with spam.
| While Fediverse moderation is distributed and therefore
| inefficient, it's still done, so spam doesn't seem likely to
| overrun anything. In theory, each server moderator moderates
| their own server, and any servers that don't end up blocked.
|
| 3. At least at this point in time, people seem to be willing
| to pay for their own servers. Many servers are running
| patreon accounts or similar, and most I'm aware of are
| running a surplus of funds. Of course, that might not always
| be true. Smaller server are very cheap to run.
|
| 4. I wouldn't think of torrents as an example, but rather the
| web itself. So so so many individual websites are out there
| being paid for out of pocket, and nobody seems to be worried
| about them all failing at once.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| Regarind 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack
| Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So
| no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any
| messaging service that intends to connect people across the
| world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one.
|
| Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would
| still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Twitter only works _because_ it is centralized. The fediverse
| works less and less well as the number of federated instances
| increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-
| technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of
| moderators you 've never met or ever heard of, with no
| particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have
| total access to your profile and they can do anything they
| want.
|
| On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I
| view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of
| posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from
| other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are
| hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing
| on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.
| Zak wrote:
| It's a push-based protocol. If somebody on your server
| follows the account, its posts will be on your server, but
| they can also be there through boosts, which leads to a
| seemingly random handful being populated.
|
| A mechanism to backfill posts would definitely be a good
| addition.
|
| Edit: for clarity, ActivityPub provides an _outbox_ from
| which another server (or anything else that speaks HTTP)
| can pull posts. Adding a backfill feature to Mastodon would
| not require any changes to the protocol.
| Groxx wrote:
| > _The fediverse works less and less well as the number of
| federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling
| properties._
|
| In some ways, and for some purposes, this is very likely a
| feature. A good amount of the fediverse wants _small
| healthy communities_ , not _Twitter but federated_ (i.e.
| everything going everywhere all the time).
|
| I will absolutely agree that it's sub-par for almost
| anything happening now, which is a problem. But it's
| experiencing unprecedented growth - there will be growing
| pains, just like non-federated things do when they have
| unprecedented growth.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Every instance has its own moderation policies, and the
| user has the option of moving to another instance (and keep
| being able to interact with the fediverse at large) if they
| clash with the mods or don't think they're doing enough.
| Instance maintainers are named and contactable if you have
| issues with them or other users. If you don't trust them
| with your account, move to an instance that you can.
|
| What can you do if you have issues with the moderation team
| at Twitter? Honest question-- I've been off Twitter for
| over a decade and hear about everything there second-hand.
|
| This sword cuts both ways for the fediverse (allowing bad
| actors to just move to another instance, for example) but
| on the whole I find it allows for a more people-centric
| approach to online community.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized
| anonymous set of moderators you 've never met or ever heard
| of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and
| these guys have total access to your profile and they can
| do anything they want._
|
| Didn't you just describe Twitter?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but
| when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of
| service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete,
| enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have
| "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are
| unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service
| provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user
| than Twitter was.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than
| Twitter was.
|
| The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take
| over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though.
|
| Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is
| worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-
| Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would
| argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon
| instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user
| of Mastodon writ large is.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service"
| they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that
| they bind the user and not the service provider._
|
| Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not
| abide by the rules they set, every user has the
| possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team
| actually does its job properly. This is undoable on
| Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general
| statement of
|
| _> The entire model is strictly worse for the user than
| Twitter was._
|
| holds any actual merit.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Agreed. However, if Mastodon instances hosted attached
| media/images over IPFS, in theory it would lead to a
| _significant_ decrease in bandwidth that those instances need
| to transfer themselves, as that media could be distributed
| p2p between users who have loaded it already.
|
| Thankfully, there already is work being done to implement
| this kind of functionality, giving instances the option to
| serve images over IPFS gateways. Further decentralizing
| Mastodon needs to be a very high priority for it to be
| sustainable longer term.
| Zak wrote:
| It will be interesting to see what happens when larger
| commercial services like Tumblr and Flickr enter this space.
| There's a good opportunity for startups to experiment with
| social apps and sites that would have previously struggled to
| build a large enough network to be useful; support
| ActivityPub and you have a network.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| > that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for
| anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and
| ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear
| it.
|
| Fwiw, speak for.. yourself? /shrug
|
| I pay for my instance. So do many. Because it's on Patreon
| and fully funded right now. Yea it's small, around 16k users,
| but we pay because we enjoy it. Also it's ridiculously cheap
| to contribute, which helps.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| But people do pay for it and set up their own instances, or
| pool their resources and support larger instances - and maybe
| that's better than having our attention monetized by opaque
| algorithms 'for free'.
| ls15 wrote:
| > What if 100 mil users want to move?
|
| Some of the new users will have to run new servers.
|
| For example if public officials are moving to Mastodon, I
| expect the state to run their own servers. It was never a good
| idea to allow Twitter to be a platform for (semi-)official
| communication.
| fleddr wrote:
| Which will then need to federate to most other instances,
| causing an unmanagable load?
| shapefrog wrote:
| Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that
| millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions
| of people recieving the tweets of one person?
| fleddr wrote:
| If my understanding of ActivityPub is correct, it's B.
| DiNovi wrote:
| it's not built to scale as a feature. it won't be the twitter
| replacement but some people might stay once they understand the
| benefits of small niche communities
| guerrilla wrote:
| New instances will be (are being) created. Supply will fill
| demand.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat
| Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way
| external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-
| user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems
| scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling,
| add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole
| network is congested, either.
| hejaodbsidndbd wrote:
| This makes the network congestion exponentially worse. It's
| not scalable.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Email mailing groups figured out a way of scaling despite
| the same sort of exponential congestion. If anything,
| Fediverse traffic between larger clusters may eventually
| ossify around some larger pipes, not unlike the Internet
| traffic being handled by backbone operators.
| hejaodbsidndbd wrote:
| georgyo wrote:
| This is a nice thought, but reality is always different.
|
| A really popular person might have many millions of followers
| on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes.
|
| That person then boosts a post from another server and they
| have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will
| start querying that server about that post or image.
|
| You can say that a single user should not have that many
| followers, however the root of the issue is that mastodon
| will have some scaling issues.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > That person then boosts a post from another server and
| they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other
| nodes will start querying that server about that post or
| image.
|
| But that's fixable in several ways - local media cache for
| an instance, the boost including the preview rather than
| each client fetching it for themselves, etc.
|
| The problem* with ActivityPub is that it's been designed
| and developed in a bit of user vacuum and it definitely has
| issues _but_ they can all be worked on. Much like Twitter
| going from Rails to Scala, etc., to fix their issues.
| georgyo wrote:
| There is already a local media cache. My comment doesn't
| suggest that each follower requests stuff from the home
| server, but each instance.
|
| The instances cache pretty aggressively, but you still
| have a thundering herd when a popular person boosts a
| message.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > There is already a local media cache.
|
| I suppose I should have been clearer - apologies. I was
| talking about a cache for previews (which would
| presumably be folded into the local media cache since
| it's already there.)
|
| > you still have a thundering herd when a popular person
| boosts a message
|
| Not if the boost includes the preview - that -should- cut
| it down significantly (and indeed it has been proposed
| but is still being bikeshedded by the Mastodon devs
| because "what if someone sends a fake preview?!?!?!?!")
| madrox wrote:
| Yes, this is a real thing that will happen. However, this
| is no different than a popular website like, say, HN,
| linking to someone's hack project and giving it the hug of
| death. This stuff happens, and if any operational element
| boils down to someone's hobby then you'll see some issues.
| That doesn't mean Mastodon is inherently flawed any more
| than web pages being inherently flawed.
|
| What will happen is the same thing that happened to web
| servers and email servers. Businesses will pop up to run
| your instance for you.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to
| getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If
| anything, it can be treated as a technological problem,
| solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single
| instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by
| (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting
| their own instance as already suggested several times on
| the Fediverse. The Fediverse will eventually establish a
| concrete way for handling that sort of matters.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > a famous enough person hosting their own instance
|
| So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over
| to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete
| this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this
| for them? Given that they own the instance, they would
| also need to provide moderation for it.
|
| I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale
| problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions that
| are viable. That's the thing about a centralized service
| --you have a company that handles all of this so your
| users don't have to.
|
| [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-
| you-want...
| rcarr wrote:
| I do wonder if the next phase of social media is to
| encourage people to use a single user instance similar to
| mastodon.host. It would probably have to offer more than
| just twitter though e.g peertube, pixelfed etc. Start
| with a free tier, have it all running on auto scale and
| then notify people when they start getting popular that
| they need to scale up and start paying for their instance
| if they want to grow their audience. Don't know if it
| would work or not but it's an idea.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > or find a service that does this for them?
|
| Assuming that Mastodon growth continues, such services
| will probably emerge (there are already a couple of
| Mastodon hosting services, but there's probably a market
| for a "so you're a celebrity who wants a single-user
| Mastodon instance" service which has yet to be filled).
|
| > Given that they own the instance, they would also need
| to provide moderation for it.
|
| If it was a single-user instance, that would be fairly
| trivial :)
| nerdawson wrote:
| > The Fediverse will eventually establish a concrete way
| for handling that sort of matters.
|
| They've had years to get this right. This is their moment
| to shine and they're blowing it.
| this_user wrote:
| And who is supposed to do all of that? Without a central
| organisation doing resource planning, scaling, and paying for
| all of that, this is never going to run smoothly. 99.99% of
| users have no interest in running their own instance. Even
| groups or organisation will eventually get to the point where
| running and scaling their instance becomes a full-time job.
| But without any way of monetising that work, or finding
| sponsors, there is not much incentive to do that.
| viraptor wrote:
| I think many people are too used to the centralised model
| and having one org responsible to blame for issues.
|
| You know how we use websites right now? Who's responsible
| for planning, scaling, and paying for all of that? Users
| have no interest in running their own "website instance".
| Right?
|
| And we're already at the point where for big groups running
| your own requires multiple full time jobs.
|
| Even if things don't work smoothly, it's fine. Most
| breakage is instance local and temporary. I've been on
| Twitter with a weekly failwhale and it's been fine too.
| qznc wrote:
| If we take the 99.99% as a hard fact that means 1 admin for
| 10,000 users. Sounds reasonable. Especially, if we consider
| that most of those will never even post anything according
| to Twitter behavior.
|
| With respect to monetisation, I hope the fediverse will
| provide a live sandbox to try all kinds of experiments at
| eye level: Free, ad-supported, fees, one-time fees, pay-
| per-toot, pay-per-followed-instance, whatever. Multiply by
| private, non-profit, and for-profit approaches.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Donating to server admins seems to work for the instances
| whose growth I'm in/directly observing. And then, running
| an instance with a few hundred users is not a resource hog.
| mempko wrote:
| Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is
| scalable.
|
| Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was
| growing. Slow and constantly breaking.
|
| Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes,
| Admins had to scale up, but they did it.
|
| I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.
| numpad0 wrote:
| My primary email _addresses_ are @gmail.com.
| rvz wrote:
| > Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is
| scalable.
|
| I don't see any normal person self-hosting their own email
| service. Even if they did, good luck with handling spam. It
| can only viably scale to hundreds of millions with
| centralization; hence Gmail, Outlook, etc to reduce / limit
| the spam issue.
|
| Mastodon has the same mistakes as the other federated
| alternatives and has already proven to be unable to scale
| more efficiently than Twitter, let alone the ridiculous
| hurdles to begin using it.
|
| We are talking about scaling to hundreds of millions, not ten
| thousand or a shy hundred thousand and it falls over on a
| single moderator's instance.
| radley wrote:
| > I don't see any normal person self-hosting their own
| email service.
|
| But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email
| services popped up.
|
| Just give it a little time.
| ajross wrote:
| The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon
| has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much
| in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a
| feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to
| hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice
| on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during
| newsworthy events.
|
| And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the
| past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no
| weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved
| over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of
| the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's
| really extremely usable.
|
| I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.
| standardUser wrote:
| How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit
| it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn
| off most users before they even get started.
| spaceribs wrote:
| Maybe I could pose this question another way, what does
| Twitter do that Mastodon can't?
| fleddr wrote:
| A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is
| another question.
|
| For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an
| instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being
| closed.
|
| Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently
| debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any
| instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly
| happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all
| media attached to your toots. I think this point is a big
| deal. Your content simply isn't safe on Mastodon.
|
| Mastodon has poor on-boarding. You need to pick an instance
| which a normie doesn't understand. Further, it has no
| (good) algorithms for recommended content, followers,
| finding people you already know. You have to bolt and
| stitch things together. This too is a massive issue in the
| age of Tiktok, where even the effort of lifting a finger is
| too much. I think organically building up your feed is
| actually great, but you have to understand that the HN
| audience is not the same as the masses.
|
| Mastodon has no consistent moderation. Yes, you could argue
| neither has Twitter, but it's still consistent-enough
| compared to Mastodon, where you're at the helm of whichever
| volunteer runs the instance. Not necessarily an issue for
| middle-of-the-road conversations, but still a difference.
|
| Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point:
| Mastodon isn't designed for drama. Twitter is hyper
| optimized for it. It's quite the culture shock for some.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I feel like you give too little credit to the "normies".
| My 92 year-old grandmother figured out how to join plenty
| of forums for her birdwatching and knitting and whatnot
| hobbies (classic phpBB style things). Choosing an
| instance is no more complicated than that, but you get
| the added bonus of being able to interact with the other
| forums, too.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| If you want to give somebody your handle, you say
| "@elonmusk," instead of saying
| "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".
|
| (I didn't think Horseshoe Theory would bring back
| bangpaths, but here we are.)
|
| Personally I believe a big central silo for so-called
| public discussions is a terrible idea, but I do understand
| there is some value to it. However, there will always be a
| problem with this sort of thing because a very large number
| of people are morons and/or scolds, and they seem to have a
| lot of free time.
| mindslight wrote:
| They're not bang paths, but rather the standard user@host
| of email. Imagine the absurdity of arguing "if you want
| to give someone your screenname, you just say SteveCase
| instead of having to say stevecase@example.com"
|
| What I don't get is why all of these services with the
| similar format have to adopt their own quirky address
| formatting, rather than piggybacking on the same format
| as email. I should be able to just tell people that I'm
| "someone@example.org", and have that work for
| email/matrix/mastondon/etc (autodiscovered!) with the
| appropriate hosting setup.
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| On the other hand, your per-server handles can be much
| shorter. For example, @tim@apple.com vs @TimCook. This
| also comes with built-in verification;
| @TimCook@freerobux.com is probably fake.
| xigoi wrote:
| > If you want to give somebody your handle, you say
| "@elonmusk," instead of saying
| "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".
|
| People seem to be using e-mail just fine...
| standardUser wrote:
| Allow users to signup in 3 seconds without "choosing a
| server".
| mempko wrote:
| People seem to sign up to email just fine.
| OctopusLupid wrote:
| I'm a server admin; I think there's merit to this
| thought. There is an initial hump.
|
| We don't want to dump users randomly into a small server
| because the community aspect is much stronger there.
| Thus, we should dump them into a big server -- perhaps a
| randomly selected one, from a list of general-purpose
| trusted servers (ideally democratically selected, but for
| now JoinMastodon.org seems to be fine).
|
| Then, encourage people to move to smaller instances, and
| make it easier to do so. It's currently too hard. I moved
| because I was envious of smaller server's interesting
| public timelines which catered more to my interests.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Last I checked, Twitter required SMS phone number
| verification for all new accounts. That takes a lot
| longer than 3 seconds, not to mention the privacy
| invasion.
| Kye wrote:
| People will still say the same thing at 80 million accounts
| that they say at 8. It's easy to be reflexively pessimistic.
| It's hard to try and see the potential, or even admit the last
| thousand predictions of doom all the way back to when Mastodon
| was one server were wrong.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Yeah, I run a Mastodon server, registrations are open, and it's
| never gone down. What I see mostly are people coming over from
| Twitter and making a go of it. Some bounce, most stay, and some
| vastly prefer it.
|
| Part of the trick is moving over communities. You don't need
| the world and its dog. It's working already. It's replaced
| Twitter for me, and then some.
|
| The pessimism here on HN is bizarre! Isn't this what so many
| people wanted?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| > The pessimism here on HN is bizarre!
|
| This has been my experience on HN in general, though I
| recognize I've been part of the problem. It's really easy to
| dump on things and feel smart.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Remember how pessimistic they were about Reddit? And some
| other successful startups? Someone made a full list of the
| predictions that were completely off once... No idea how to
| find that but it's out there.
| yborg wrote:
| HN has become The Establishment, it skews older, and thus
| is extremely skeptical of any change to the comfortable
| status quo. It's of course supremely ironic in a
| community that (originally) represented the Silicon
| Valley startup culture of Disrupt Everything.
| spaceribs wrote:
| It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had
| scaling up in the first few years of it's life.
| nerdawson wrote:
| Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's
| competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of
| years past.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > It's competing against present day Twitter
|
| Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were
| recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK
| THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth
| over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the
| Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because
| _it 's better than the alternative right now_.
| dchuk wrote:
| I don't understand why someone hasn't just launched a full blown
| clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn't matter to
| basically all of the population.
|
| Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can
| clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over,
| maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
| ISL wrote:
| I don't think anyone has launched it because they can see how
| much difficulty Twitter had turning a profit. There are a
| number of companies that _could_ launch such a thing
| (especially now that hiring former-Twitter employees should be
| as easy as it will ever be), but they also have financial teams
| capable of modeling whether or not it would be profitable.
| CM30 wrote:
| They have. Hive, Post News, Cohost, etc. But most people don't
| care about whether a system is centralised or decentralised, so
| Mastodon seems to be doing best stats wise.
| loeg wrote:
| Post.news is more or less a centralized Twitter clone.
| makeee wrote:
| The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire
| network to move over at once. You're right that most people
| don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about
| not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and
| many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where
| you join the server that best aligns best with your
| interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though,
| so not sure on what will win out.
| Zak wrote:
| The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it,
| not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how
| easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did
| it.
|
| Something like you're describing would have a better chance of
| succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to
| make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely
| to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon.
| There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not
| necessarily a business model).
| conductr wrote:
| Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed
| all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It
| would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it
| would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be
| interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter
| user).
| daliusd wrote:
| I saw that some people I follow moved to post.news that looks
| like twitter clone kind of
| unshavedyak wrote:
| But why switch? Ie what is the reason i'm switching, that some
| new centralized Twitter clone wouldn't also potentially suffer
| from?
| wheats wrote:
| Gettr, Parler, Truth Social, Hive, Tribel, Post, Cohost, etc.
| etc. etc.
|
| Apparently the decentralized stuff does matter because Mastodon
| is by far the largest Twitter clone and that's its defining
| feature.
| [deleted]
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The 80% twitter clone that's "not an advanced concept" is fully
| eclipsed by Mastodon. You're free to host a Mastodon server
| that federates with no one, and there's your clone. The problem
| is the remaining 20%, which Mastodon has covered some of, but
| certainly wouldn't be done "quickly".
| maxsilver wrote:
| > why someone hasn't just launched a full blown clone of
| twitter yet.
|
| They did? Mastodon _is_ basically a full-blown clone of Twitter
| by a competent team.
|
| Yes, it's _also_ open-source and decentralized. But you can
| mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so.
| (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across
| cell carriers, but that mostly doesn 't matter to regular
| folks).
|
| > Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way
| to migrate your connections, boom.
|
| They also did this. When you need to migrate all your tweets
| and connections over, suddenly your really thankful Mastodon
| was quietly-decentralized underneath, and makes doing this
| mostly just a two-click operation.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's a tool to migrate who you follow from twitter to mastodon.
| This isn't about how many new users joined Mastodon (which yes,
| would include bots). Your comment is entirely irrelevant.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Seven.
|
| What's the point of asking an irrelevant question nobody has an
| answer to?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's
| timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back
| to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming
| sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.
| viraptor wrote:
| There are apps which allow you to do that. Can't remember the
| name now, but check the feature sets, it was a popular one.
| aprilnya wrote:
| why not look at actual hashtags (and if you're on mastodon 4+,
| you can even follow them)?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| People aren't great at using them yet. Anyway, the instances
| bring together a bunch of different topics broader than a
| single hashtag would collect, like infosec.exchange and sdf
| for tech stuff.
| jarbus wrote:
| How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of
| email? Hadn't the success of email already shown that it's
| possible to scale decentralized protocols?
| Ciantic wrote:
| It's possible, but there is no advertisements, and most servers
| are run by volunteers.
|
| Right now, with current tech stack, which isn't most efficient
| I heard Leo Laporte who runs TWiT Podcast network and ~5000
| user https://twit.social server it costs him 380 dollars /
| month for fully hosted using https://masto.host server.
|
| Sure it can scale, it's not harder than newsletters, but it
| needs money, I have serious doubts it can scale without
| advertisements.
| progval wrote:
| It doesn't cost that much when properly configured and on
| dedicated hardware. My own instance, oc.todon.fr (running
| since 2017 and with currently ~2500 users), runs on a
| 5EUR/month server (HTTP front-end) and less than a quarter of
| the resources of a 800EUR server at home.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws
| of email? Hadn't the success of email already shown that it's
| possible to scale decentralized protocols?
|
| It's only kinda decentralized now. Email massively re-
| centralized around gmail and a few other providers.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter.
|
| Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the
| $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording
| their bleu check status over others.
|
| That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative
| to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no
| real challenger or contender for the throne.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that
| this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon
| instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark
| in front of your name.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi
| display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an
| instance considering something like that to help pay for
| server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.
| runjake wrote:
| They're just emoji, not actual verification (right now).
|
| You can see what custom emoji are available on an instance by
| visiting https://emojos.in/
|
| Here are hachyderm.io's custom emoji, for example:
| https://emojos.in/hachyderm.io
|
| You can add these shortcodes (eg. :verified:) to your
| Mastodon display name or your profile. If you don't see them
| immediately convert, try F5-ing the page and they should
| render.
| Shank wrote:
| There are already badges that people have. For example, on
| brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0].
|
| [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews
| duskwuff wrote:
| > For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified
| badge
|
| You realize that this is a parody account that posts
| pictures of foxes, not the American cable news channel...
| right?
| phoe-krk wrote:
| These badges are emoji - currently e.g.
| https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf has three of them. That's
| 200% more than you can get on Twitter, and $8 cheaper, too.
|
| Actual verification happens via proving that you control a
| website that links back to your Mastodon profile - see e.g.
| https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-
| websi...
| gpm wrote:
| brands.town is a satire site.
|
| The "verified badge" on mastodon is just a satirical emoji.
|
| Mastodon does have a mechanism for instances vouching for
| their users actually having control of a webpage (using
| rel=me links). Those are the links in green boxes here:
| https://hachyderm.io/@nova (It doesn't cost anything, and
| isn't exclusive to famous people).
|
| I assume the person I'm replying to is aware of all of
| this... but for everyone else...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Gosh damnit, that was my idea!
|
| To put it another way, Twitter is/was a notary/PR firm as
| well as a "microblogging" service. Popular people and brands
| could verify their identity with Twitter, and users could
| trust it.
|
| I think, though the idea is unoriginal, that there is money
| in hosting Mastodon servers _as well as_ hosting a particular
| mastodon service that does brand /personal identification.
| Perhaps even semi-automatically, such as via DNS.
| pkulak wrote:
| It replaced Twitter for me. Pretty much everyone I was
| following on Twitter is on Mastadon now, but also a whole bunch
| more because discoverability is easier for me on Mastadon.
|
| Maybe it will never replace Twitter as the place to follow
| celebrities, politicians and corporations; so you can see what
| their social media teams have thought up in the last hour. But
| for keeping up with personal interests and chatting with other
| like-minded folks? Absolutely. And I'm not gonna miss the use-
| case that falls away. Also not going to miss the ads!
| rcarr wrote:
| I still think substack might end up being the true twitter
| replacement, at least for journalists and academics.
| adamrezich wrote:
| in the past few weeks I've personally found it very amusing to
| see pre-$8 bluechecks on twitter telling their followers that
| they're moving to other (non-mastodon) social media services,
| then you click the link to their new profile there and almost
| without exception find out that they've been "Verified" on that
| platform too. it's like they can't imagine using a social media
| website unless they have some kind of visible Status Signifier
| that the unwashed masses don't get to have. all other
| leadership decisions aside, the $8 bluecheck is the best thing
| anyone could've done to twitter.
| fleddr wrote:
| Not to mention that this "new activity" on Mastodon is people
| on Mastodon talking about how bad Twitter has become.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are
| addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu
| check status over others.
|
| This is not a thing people regularly did? Old-school blue
| checks were never a status symbol, just a way Twitter used to
| denote "real" (meaning from-the-author-stated) and "fake"
| (real-humans-parodying-someone-else) accounts.
|
| The idea that they denoted _status_ was a criticism born from
| misunderstanding and invented by far-right activists who mostly
| were never involved in Twitter socially during the first 10
| years of it 's run, and never really understood Twitter user's
| culture. 99% of people with "blue checks" were not doing some
| holier-than-thou dance or whatever. (It's also why none of
| these people are rushing to pay $8 for this newly-invented
| blue-as-status symbol thing -- it was never about status, these
| people are _already_ often rich and famous or at least
| noteworthy in their field, they don 't need some weirdo micro-
| validation from Twitter.
|
| Only a completely tone-deaf crazy person would pay money for
| Twitter in an attempt to _gain validation_ or status.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Despite it not being their stated purpose, they absolutely
| were a bit of a status symbol, though one that waned as more
| of them were given out of course. People routinely complained
| (both jokingly and seriously) about not being verified. It's
| not that rich and famous people needed the tiny bit of bonus
| (though some of them probably did), but that it was a marker
| of notability for less famous people. It's kind of like
| appearing in a crossword clue.
|
| The thing about putting the badge into Twitter Blue is that
| it makes it _not_ a status symbol: both because it 's just
| generally accessible (so even what little cachet you might
| agree it previously implied is now gone) and because for many
| you might see "enthusiastic about Elon Twitter" as an
| _negative_ signal.
|
| There's a whole separate axis to this where it was clearly
| easier to get verified as a mainstream journalist than for
| many other kinds of professions or claims to fame
| (understandable both just under the basic "verification"
| goals and for presumably being pretty easy to actually verify
| as such things go). Much "anti-blue-check" sentiment is just
| the same familiar fights over the media, simply filtered
| through Twitter's systems.
| [deleted]
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, it depends what you mean by 'replace'. Mastodon is
| already filling many of the functions that twitter filled for
| millions of people. Will it be a like-for-like replacement for
| Twitter? Of course not; I don't think anyone's saying that. But
| as Twitter crumbles, it's a place for many Twitter users to go
| which will work for many purposes.
|
| > the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are
| addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu
| check status over others.
|
| You're talking about, maybe, on the order of 50,000 people
| there. To a large extent... who cares? Extremely high follower
| count people are important to Twitter's _business model_ (or
| were, when it had one), but arguably not all that important to
| the _average user_.
| endtime wrote:
| I don't use Twitter so maybe this is just wrong, but isn't
| part of the appeal of Twitter that regular users can interact
| with celebrities?
| ncallaway wrote:
| I think it depends on what you mean by _celebrities_.
|
| For me, the appeal of Twitter is being able to interact
| with various communities (such as the legal twitter
| community). There are people who are fairly popular in that
| sphere, that I really like being able to see their thoughts
| on various issues and even ask the occasional question
| (Popehat, Akiva Cohen, Mike Dunford, Greg Doucette), etc.
|
| Are these people celebrities? Kinda, in their niche, yea.
| In the broader sense of the word not really.
|
| But all of those people have moved to Mastodon. So, I think
| that kind of reinforces the point. It's more communities
| within Twitter that move. That move is relatively sticky.
| And there are people within that community that are highly
| connected in that community ("celebrities" within the
| niche), and when they move it tends to solidify the move of
| the community.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, that's another point that I think probably goes in
| Mastodon's favour. Most of the people who could be
| loosely classed as celebrities that I follow either are
| posting to both, or have flat-out moved. But they
| generally are niche "celebrities", not people with
| millions of followers.
| [deleted]
| EamonnMR wrote:
| That was the promise, but realistically huge accounts were
| so swamped that your actual chances of having such an
| interaction turn out to be slim to none. The game was
| dominated by people who would reply to a celeb's every
| post, people shilling for crypto, etc.
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... Eh, I mean that is probably the appeal to _some_ users
| (though note that you can do that on Mastodon too, of
| course). But not all, or, I think, most. Twitter is many
| things to many people (the one I was always surprised by is
| that some people have Twitter accounts which they use for
| making consumer complaints and nothing else)...
|
| I think maybe what you're getting at is the people who are
| celebrities solely _because_ they are big on
| Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/whatever. I would agree that the
| Mastodon model doesn't work particularly well for those. I
| don't see it as an issue for _normal_ celebrities, tho.
|
| But that just seems like _such_ a niche. The majority of
| people, I'm reasonably sure, do not use Twitter primarily
| to follow internet celebrities.
| viraptor wrote:
| Sure. And that's why the highest follower count on Mastodon
| right now belongs to George Takei.
| wittycardio wrote:
| The blue checks were given to public figures and serve a very
| valuable purpose. I'm not sure why people are so mad at the
| "blue checks".
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Holy. Shit.
|
| I need to make an exclusive invite-only Mastodon instance with
| verified accounts, so being @ that server will be a status
| symbol.
|
| Is Bluecheck.com taken?
|
| (except now someone else will do it. Also I'm too lazy to
| actually do this)
| viraptor wrote:
| There are attempts like that for various communities. For
| example https://journa.host/about
|
| I'm sure when bigger celebrities migrate, someone will start
| a service optimised for few huge (in follower count)
| accounts.
| ndm000 wrote:
| I think this is where it's going. Particular Mastodon servers
| will provide certain guarantees to their users and about
| their users. It's easy to envision a white-glove server +
| service that provides user screening, phone support, etc. at
| a price. Over time when certain celebrities join it becomes
| the popular server and sought after as a username
| destination.
| bolasanibk wrote:
| Bluecheck.com redirects to "Rob Jacobson"'s profile on
| linkedin.com. Ge claims to be original inventor of the blue
| checkmark.
| mbauman wrote:
| This view of "the blue checks" as a uniform elite class is
| really fascinating to me -- and I think is partly why Elon
| bought the thing in the first place.
|
| It cuts both ways -- both the overvaluing of the check and the
| denigrating of those who have it.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| 1) sign up for twitter
|
| 2) tweet
|
| 3) no one responds
|
| 4) quit twitter
|
| This problem is magnified with blue check marks.
|
| The engagement problem is obvious. Twitter prioritizes
| influencers over end users and doesn't have the appeal of
| Facebook.
| [deleted]
| mbauman wrote:
| I don't understand. Are you entitled to someone's attention
| and engagement?
| cdelsolar wrote:
| all that I want is a place where I can see other tech people's
| comments on stuff I care about in tech; coding, architecture,
| cool technologies, whatever. People say that the network effect
| makes it impossible to switch over fully but look what happened
| with Freenode -- virtually _everyone_ moved to libera.chat in
| literally like two weeks. Is there an equivalent for Twitter?
| Which Mastodon "node" is the thing I'm looking for?
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| Perhaps https://hachyderm.io
| Vinnl wrote:
| Mastodon is a bit less centralised around nodes, but there
| are a number of tech communities gathered around a couple of
| instances already (although they all interact with each other
| and other instances, so it's not that big of a deal):
| https://hachyderm.io, https://fosstodon.org and
| https://front-end.social are big ones in my circles.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| ...but will it replace it for a significant number of people
| who matter (for whatever arbitrary definition of "people who
| matter")?
|
| Think of the quotation of "The Velvet Underground and Nico only
| sold 10,000 copies, but each person who purchased the record
| went on to form their own band"
| personjerry wrote:
| By this logic, there should've been no new social networks
| after Twitter. I point to Tiktok as a contradiction. There are
| many more factors that your simplification ignores.
| shagie wrote:
| The entirety of twitter is too large to just lift and shift to
| mastodon - absolutely correct. There are also slightly
| different social norms and styles of discovery.
|
| _However_ , communities and professions have already moved and
| will continue to move.
|
| Things like Black Twitter (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter and
| https://blacktwitter.io/about ) or Energy Twitter (
| https://twitter.com/hashtag/energytwitter and
| https://mastodon.energy/explore ) are examples of communities
| that previously existed solely on twitter starting a migration.
|
| This isn't about platforms but rather communities - and these
| things are "sticky". It's hard to get a community to move off a
| platform, but once it does move, it makes it hard to keep the
| remaining people as the pull to the new platform becomes
| stronger and stronger.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Not to mention large parts of academia.
|
| https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I hope Mastodon doesn't "replace" twitter (as in becomes like
| twitter). So far Mastodon is much nicer than twitter so I hope
| Mastodon stays like it is and is something better than twitter
| had become.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Whoever threw too much money at clubhouse at the top valuation
| should have them start an excluseive, private, invitation only
| mastodon server. Like clubhouse was before mere mortals could
| join.
| radley wrote:
| Or just make it open like Gmail and get 100,000x the users.
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