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If I move to Mars and my only contact with Earth is via Twitter over Starlink in Elon’s Hyperverse, then I think I’ll take my chances with the climate catastrophe on Earth. Death would be more merciful.

Off topic, but I heard it said that Earth in the worst case of climate catastrophe would still be far more habitable than Mars. Seems to make sense.

If we could build a "bubbled" city on Mars, we could do it on Earth far more cheaply, it seems.

I'm not sure if that is the same case if a meteor strikes.

A bubbled city on mars will not be immune to climate refugees. It's about how many bubbles we would need, and how many people might not fit.

And it's easier to ignore people on another planet. Empathy does not survive distance, and on Earth even a wall is enough to remove empathy.

It's a bit depressing that Zardoz[1] might suddenly become a relevant piece of social commentary. If we get to the point where we need to choose who gets to be inside or outside of the bubble our ethical codes are going to collapse.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz

Follow up to off-topic. I have also thought the arcologies of Sim City 3000 or the unexplained environment in the Black Mirror episode "15 million merits"[1] are likely in our future.

0: https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

I get it twitter is more like a firehouse of information being streamed at once. getting a message through that were someone would see who isn't a follower would be difficult.

It's hard to tell whether you're being serious....

A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side.

"If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew.

For a single tweet."

(https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

Cool dunk on the GP but it seems obvious that they didn't mean literally send the tweet to Mars as an HTML page with full Javascript bundle.

I don't know if that seems obvious. They were talking about twitter the social media platform... I can't think of a single thing twitter has got going for it outside of the size of the message, and the size of the message isn't a huge advantage considering often times users use image macros rather than text (which completely destroys the space efficiency) and you could easily just have, say, size limited facebook posts or something similar.

Honestly, I stand by my estimation that interplanetary communication will probably primarily be done over email.

I'm not defending the central point-- I agree with you that the primary means of interplanetary communication will be email.

It's just helpful to discussion if we don't assume others are expressing the stupidest possible iteration of the ideas they describe.

The problem with a centralized service like Twitter is that there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to access it through any particular means.

For example, my only means of accessing Twitter are either through the bloated Web UI, which is unusable on most of my devices, or through Nitter, which is read-only and sometimes doesn't work due to Twitter's API limitations.

It's hard to tell whether you're being serious. This site is criticizing the response size of an http request to view one tweet, not the size of the actual tweet.

In the context of interplanetary communication, sending the tweet from a server on mars to a server on earth would be a tiny packet containing a payload no bigger than the char limit, and some metadata. Browsing the website on earth would fetch from the servers on earth, and might still be 100KB, but no one cares about optimizing that bandwidth usage.

Idk if this is that much different from the original telegram at this point though. Sending tiny messages using limited bandwidth between two places. Eventually we'll widen that bandwidth sufficiently, it's just latency that probably won't ever surpass the speed of light. Also the problem of timestamping tweets when relativity is involved.

Yeah, but nothing stops you from serving twitter.com from a CDN on Mars for Mars users, right?

They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.

Unfortunately they'll only have access to the old style disk Netflix and those envelopes will come with a hell of a postage cost on them. /s

More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.

Netflix is served from a Netflix openconnect appliance inside your ISP datacenter, not from the cloud.

They just send one to Mars and it’s good to go.

because Netflix data is measure in GB / week, while Youtube is measure in TB / second.

I assume that the primary conveyance of data would just be a hard drive (or other storage method) actually sent to mars with the mission. Just like the bundle of wikipedia you could order on a CD, curate stuff of particularly high quality and send it with the crew.

For live transmission I think signal issues will cause everything to need to be pre-buffered basically to completion so streaming is not a realistic thing to consider. For instance, twitch is probably just flat out unless we have some pretty insane developments in general data transmission reliability (probably including FTL data transmission which, who knows, might some day be possible through entanglement).

right but the content of the tweet is much smaller than the javascript bundle that twitter.com sends users...

I might be remembering wrong but I think early on (pre 2015?) twitter had the capability to send tweets via SMS texts. I wouldn't know the size comparison, but if they re-added that feature, it feels like an easy way to cut the bloat.

hes talking about just the text. Why on earth would anyone send that whole bundle back and forth. It would live on mars and you just update new tweets(texts).

Reason Twitter's messages were so small was because they were originally sent over SMS. I suppose formats like SMS could be sent that far, but it's more likely that protocols built for that exact purpose would succeed.

> both limitations are considered part of the appeal

I don‘t think so. That‘s why you get people posting screenshots of text, or 50 tweet threads including a link to a thread reader "unroll" service.

Many people want to use Twitter like a blog. But it is terrible for that use case.

It would work fine for those purposes if it weren't for the confusing and unreliable order in which these tweets are rendered, and all the unrelated crap they've put everywhere in between, over top, and all around the actual content.

It's so terrible that it must have been implemented this way on purpose.

But is it worse than any recipe site?

Asking the real questions :)

They do share a great many similarities. Both seem incapable of logically structuring their content, but most of it consists of gibberish and made-up facts anyway.

I would like to see an option to turn off all images by default, and possibly enable them per user followed.

I don't know if Twitter's particular length limit is applicable to interplanetary communication. It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be.

Recently tweet limits were relaxed, but it still remains the normal to communicate "significant dialog" through image macros which are extremely unfriendly on transmission size and threaded discussions (multi-part tweets) tend to mesh very poorly with how the social features of twitter work, where certain chunks of the thread often get different levels of promotion leading to incomplete segments of the conversation being conveyed.

I don't really think twitter has any real advantage over any of the other social networks (outside of the explicitly image focused) except through its arbitrary payload limit which, as I mentioned, is no longer a firm limit and often comes with additional auxiliary payloads (like a linked image) to actually communicate - AFAIK the actual mechanics of how communication is executed isn't particularly well suited for this sort of lossy transmission, at least in any way that isn't matched by other social companies. It's much more likely, IMO, that mars based communication would just use emails since that transmission format already comes with the ability to embed images as needed and works well enough that it's survived decades of existence.

> It was originally dictated by the arbitrarily chosen data packet size for communicating with cell towers which in turn impacted how large SMSes could be.

The current limit was not.

The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen and image macros are still legion on twitter.

The limit was not chosen because it's particularly well aligned for interplanetary communication so I'm still confused as to why twitter is being touted as the best aligned social media platform.

> The current limit was still arbitrarily chosen

Right, it was even more arbitrarily chosen based on stylistic preferences not any communication system constraint.

Is this really a serious take? The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation. The distances with the speed of light disallows anything else.

> The best means of interplanetary communication one way messages and a delayed confirmation.

I mean, yeah - my whole point is that's not far from what twitter is already. Musk is getting a social media platform full of users that's tailor-made for interplanetary latency.

Twitter is RESTful (I think, not web expert) so they are just get requests, but the low latency makes it appear as live communication because you can just keep sending gets and update the client. Over an interplanetary scale with minutes to hours of delay between sending and recieving a signal, it would just be infeasible to create the same experience. It would be much better to just use one way messages, like that of video recordings or sets of texts that are recieved in full, with whatever losses would have to be simply accepted as part of the cost of communicating in space. Confirming receipt and communicating errors to the sender (like that of TCP) would just mean now you have to wait 2x times more to get the next chuck of the message again and hope that that too isn't degraded, so it would be pretty lossy, pretty "slow" level of communication, very much unlike the internet here on earth.

Social media in general would be infeasible on an interplanetary scale.

Nah, social media is plenty feasible and the Twitter UI/abstraction is probably ideal like GP says (although I think the implementation would be different than you're imagining.) They'd just colocate on the other planets and replicate the database. Stuff like that is a solved problem (in the case of TCP, just increase the window size. Although you'd probably want to make sure transaction boundaries and packet boundaries line up to minimize latency/jitter. If they wanted to minimize the latency they'd make large media available as a merkle tree and make blocks available as they arrived correctly a la Bittorent or IPFS (heh.))

The delay this introduced would have a social effect similar to time zones: "Oh the martians are caught up to event <x> and their reaction is <y>" instead of "Oh the Australians are waking up after event <x> happened today and their reaction is <y>."

I think the entire architecture would have to be rewritten. Talking about the protocols involved is getting lost in the weeds.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of the user experience and the physics limitations, and I'm observing that they fit very well together.

The point is that a non technical user sees Twitter, fundamentally, as a place to send one way messages out, and to consume one-way incoming broadcast messages. And, crucially, the exact time of sending or receiving isn't a significant aspect of the UX.

You just log in and see what showed up in the queue over the last n minutes. If you want to say something, just send a message; you don't really care when it's received, because Twitter is fundamentally all about checking your feed whenever you feel like it, and 23 minutes latency is nothing.

The user experience fits the physics limitations. Who cares what the current implementation looks like.

I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of KBs of metadata with each tweet. For comparison, each page on Subreply takes 5 KB of data transfer and server response is around 100ms.

Interplanetary communication is actually an interesting angle though I don't think he's bringing into his portfolio of companies for that angle.

I haven't given much thought to this but managing earth time zones and other planet timezones is going to be a real PITA - obviously these are smaller issues.

I would have to imagine that interplanetary communication wouldn't be as frivolous as the stuff we waste energy on here currently as the deployment costs are much larger.

> I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed transmission are fundamental bottlenecks

In a Vernon Vinge's novel, they used a kind of galaxy-wide Usenet.

This post is sort of an update of "A Fire Upon The Deep" by Vernor Vinge.

>I'm surprised no one has mentioned[...]

Well, it seems you had a notably unique idea. Your comment got presented on the Timcast, and a 20 minute clip containing it has over 90,000 views at the time of writing this comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34

I think a lot of the child comments have very valid criticisms, particularly concerns with bloat and other existing character limitations often being more about managing the user experience than bandwidth constraints. But your comment's a magnified part of the conversation now, so we'll just have to see how the narratives develop and the nuts and bolts of "interplanetary twitter" and the "Elon Musk NeuraStarLink Space Dystopia" actually plays out.

IMO, it's still too early to really expect much of interplanetary anything. I would expect Twitter to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced by something new, and then for that new technology to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced with another new thing which might be ready for integration in interplanetary communication.

Notable too, I think we're seeing here news people sympathetic to the right wing looking for large, active, engaged "intelligentsia" social media alternatives to twitter to quote comments from that use chilling moderation strategies. Ones that aren't completely overrun and saturated by fringe far right content refugees. Hacker news is probably going to get quoted more often by those kinds of sources until its owners/operators feel like taking some Illuminati Deep State money or whatever. That is, if there's any of that money left.

Bleh, missed a correction, "that use chilling moderation strategies less"

This is either peak sarcasm or post-peak hn.