How hard would it be to write a centralized 1-to-many message pipe that replicates Twitters core functionality?
How hard would it be to run such a thing? The moral and legal needs to censor content would probably be a bigger task then the technical implementation?
It's easy to set up your presence and start small, e.g. with a web app which syncs your Mastodon and Twitter accounts. https://moa.party/
EDIT: Odd, I'd like to report a bug in that site. https://imgur.com/EsGyvnT It doesn't seem to load. Or rather, I saw it briefly flash the statistics, once, before it went back to loading. The 0.3 seconds I saw the stats looked impressive though. :)
The only thing in dev console is a warning that seems unrelated: "<ApolloProvider>.provide() is deprecated. Use the 'apolloProvider' option instead with the provider object directly."
Ah, the root cause is that the graphql fetch takes ~32sec: https://imgur.com/q769ozR So, never mind! Just a bit slow.
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Anyway, it claims 400,000 active users in the last month. What counts as an active Mastodon user? It also claims 400 million Mastodon posts (total?) which I suppose are tweets.
Interesting... Twitter has about ~17M tweets per day, iirc. If this growth is legit – a big if – then Mastodon may be gaining more momentum than it seemed.
Actually, twitter gets 431M tweets/day: https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/13320033501922713...
Hmm. I wonder how much exponential growth would be required for Mastodon to catch up to twitter...
I have met many people on the fediverse, and at least two friends of mine have moved thousands of miles due to relationships and opportunities that likely would not have occured if the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc) and its variety of platforms and userbase did not congregate in this manner.
One friend even bummed a plane ride on a tiny general aviation plane by serendipitous happenstance through the fediverse to make the multi-state move out of an abusive living situation.
Unbounded growth is not always good, and many fediverse instances have limited or closed new account registrations to ensure their community doesn't become the next Voat, FreeSpeechExtremist (which I was banned from for fairly benign speech) or /r/TheDonald.
There are quite a number of people using Mastodon and it is quite nice but it does feel a bit echoey all the same. At the same time there is a lot of garbage on twitter that you really couldn’t call “active users” and keep a straight face. As usual e truth is usually somewhere in the middle ...
True, but some of the more avidly pro-Mastodon and anti-Twitter regulars take it upon themselves to be gatekeepers (some nice, some nasty) if you try the dual-platform method. Just noting this for the sake of those who haven't yet done so. Feel free to give it a go, but don't be surprised if you get smacked in the face fairly early in the experience.
I for one would love for there to be a decentralized system that by design makes it impossible to censor any content, and if the content would be stored in a decentralized, encrypted manner it would also be impossible to legally enforce it as it would not even easily be known where it would be stored at all.
Think of perhaps a network that retrieves its content viā an union-routing-esque mechanism where information is published that cannot feasibly be altered any more once put there whose origins and locations would be computationally infeasible to trace and as it's stored in an encrypted fashion the parts of the network that do store it do not even know what they are storing.
Not a particularly new concept, Freenet has been around for over 20 years now. Tor and I2P have more traction in this segment.
And sure enough, I already found a website that says: “Please note that the Freenet network (much like Tor) attracts pedophiles and a large amount of sites contain child pornography. Some sites jokingly add a disclaimer saying This site does not contain child pornography. click here to continue.”
So the end result is that all one finds on it is child pornography, controversial opinions, leaks of government data, and the lot.
I suppose my ideal wish was a platform such as twitter that intermixes legal and illegal content.
I didn't realize it then, but if Hunter Bidens data had been put there they would have been basically impossible to censor and it might have swayed the election.
Like, this isn't a "think of the children" argument that those communities shouldn't be allowed to exist. Of course they should. But don't be surprised when people prefer more centralized and "censored" (policed/moderated) communities. For the vast majority of people, that is a feature, not a bug--and they tend to realize that and boomerang back to Twitter etc. when they try out decentralized/anticensorship-oriented alternatives.
A rather big difference is also the relatively lower level of activity on those alternatives.
American giant corporation with questionable ethics: hard no.
Their approach is somewhat understandable - stopping bots is a hard problem, phone number in theory represents a material cost and a hurdle to someone who wants to rapidly register thousands of new accounts.
But no, I don't have a burner phone. I'm not going to buy a phone and a SIM just as some kind of non-solution to tech companies having a hard-on for invading peoples privacy.
Every twitter clone that tries to compete without first having the approval of the major media outlets will either be publicly ignored, belittled, or outright attacked.
Please note that I explicitly said "centralized". Because decentralized solutions like Mastodon have not resulted in viable alternatives for the average user so far.
Looking at Minds, I already see a big flaw: All posts are under the /newsfeed/ namespace.
So instead of
/username/1234
/newsfeed/1234
There also is no embed functionality. For Twitter type shoutouts it is absolutely vital that they can be embedded around the web.
You proved that point
I've never used Minds and dabbled with Gab when it first came online only to find that it is as noisy and worthless a place to engage as Twitter is, possibly moreso.
fwiw, I thought the same until recently but discovered they are visible with the following format:
Really, it's just that social networks work by having a lot of people, and lots of people are on Twitter because other people are on Twitter (I think there's an audience thing as well).
Though, to your point, I think Twitter has outsized influence for the same reason Google Reader did: loud nerds and journalists were always using it. Though now the politicians using it probably count for a lot too
History is full of conspiracies.
> Really, it's just that social networks work by having a lot of people, and lots of people are on Twitter because other people are on Twitter (I think there's an audience thing as well).
The network effect is real, but it is not the only effect. Twitter and other tech giants now think that their role is to protect the world from information they deem wrong. As well, prominent people in media and politics are urging them to take on that role more expansively. Naturally, therefore, they will oppose competitors whose distinguishing feature is to have less or no censorship.
The media establishment does not look kindly upon those who seek to deconstruct it.
Do you have any examples of anything "they" "deemed wrong" which wasn't factually wrong? And not "alternative facts" bullshit, regular, proven facts.
Now, you place the burden of proof on me, assuming that Twitter is in the right by censoring information and demanding that I prove that their censorship is wrong. But why don't you place the burden of proof on Twitter? Why do you apologize for censorship?
In your other comments, you say that "Only China can stop China," and you say that the U.S. mustn't respond to cyber attacks by China, Russia, and Iran, or those nations might escalate, so we must look the other way when these nations infiltrate and attack us.
One wonders what you're after.
Facebook did not grow this way, even though their relationship with the media is nearly indistinguishable from twitter’s today.
And then in 2008 it ramped up for a multitude of reasons. A politician nobody had heard of somehow managed to mobilise a lot of support via a tech platform many hadn’t heard of, and get to a point where it looked like he had a legitimate shot at becoming US President. By early 2009 it was popular enough that Facebook updated their timeline to try and combat it, everyone was talking about their growth, and Ashton Kutcher was goading CNN into a competition to be the first account on the platform to have 1M followers (he was the first btw).
Old media was late to the game here and had to play catch up to stay relevant. I suspect that was also the tipping point though which changed journalism forever into this clickbait and eyeball driven economy. If anything Twitter inadvertently controlled old media, not the other way.
So don't worry about critical mass. Pick where you want to publish based on what is important to you.
I almost exclusively use FOSS, federated networks to publish my thoughts, the only exception being this site. I engage here pretty often because I like the quality of the discussion and the rule of only contributing if you have something constructive to contribute, but ideally this website wouldn't be a silo.
Critical mass seems important for exposure and personally I don’t think exposure is important unless you are seeking to maximize something that comes from exposure, usually it’s profit.
My comment was mainly to bring attention to what I consider the primary causal factor behind twitter’s critical mass.
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is an interesting way to do it.
RSS with comments can work. Mastodon, Pleroma, misskey, gnusocial all do it. They have the added benefit that a user cannot be censored from the network entirely, only from servers by their admins, and blocked by users.
> ... centralized ...
That was not in the GP’s requirements.
Edit: plus: GP explicitly asked for software.
You can go back and read tech media from the time about all the engineering challenges they ran into and the regular downtimes from trying to scale the thing to a tiny fraction of its current volume.
Turns out to be hard.
However limited their technology choice might have been from a performance standpoint it did give them the adapatability and flexibility to provide the fun and entertaining product that got them off the ground in the first place.
It did inevitably lead to the growing pains we discuss but I doubt anybody expected it to get as big as it did.
WRT the original comment here ... the main limiting factor nowadays is just getting people to use it. The network effect. Mastodon is a thing, and people do use it but it’s a minnow relatively speaking.
The next big challenge I think will be some kind of decentralised twitter based on some kind of blockchain (by which I mean progressive content hashing and consensus) and I don’t mean federated, like mastodon. The mastodon name is ridiculous too .. I’m not going to go into why but if you know you know, and stupid as it is it does matter.