Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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-- Screenshot 1:

[Jack Dorsey] "Yes, a new platform is needed. It can't be a company. This is why I left."

[Jack Dorsey] "https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507777913042571267?s=20..."

[Elon Musk] "Ok"

[Elon Musk] "What should it look like?"

[Jack Dorsey] "I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has happened to twitter."

[Elon Musk] "Super interesting idea"

-- Screenshot 2:

[Jack Dorsey] "I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin."

[Elon Musk] "I'd like to help if I am able to"

[Jack Dorsey] "I wanted to talk with you about it after I was all clear, because you care so much, get it's importance, and could def help in immeasurable ways. Back when we had the activist come in, I tried my hardest to get you on our board, and our board said no. That's about the time l decided I needed to work to leave, as hard as it was for me."

[Elon Musk] "Do you have a moment to talk?"

[Jack Dorsey] "Bout to head out to dinner but can for a minute"

-- Screenshot 3:

[Jack Dorsey] "I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards, but I only had one vote, and 3% of company, and no dual class shares. Hard set up. We can discuss more."

[Elon Musk] "Let's definitely discuss more"

[Elon Musk] "I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that's decentralized"

[Jack Dorsey] "It's likely the best option. I just have doubts. But open"

Plaintext from

https://www.techemails.com/p/elon-musks-twitter-texts

So, they want to create Mastodon?

Mastodon is worse than twitter. You need to either maintain or join a server that is often managed by tyrannical admins that are even more trigger happy on silencing individuals and even other servers. You, your post history and account identity are at the mercy of those server administrators who can basically lock you out.

IMO credentials and identity management must be self hosted mobile and preferably not dependent on server hubs.

I dont use mastodon, I use forums, but you just have to look until you find a good place and dont think you own your "avatar" or posts or anything. I have left few forums when they started to feel wrong and I have no problem with that.

You mean administration is decentralized? Sounds like what they were going for.

> You mean administration is decentralized?

(not OP) Not really. Accounts are linked to one single instance, and if the admin of that instance decides to ban you, the other instances can’t do anything about it. It’s not one decentralized administration but a lot of smaller centralized administrations.

Why would other instances have any say over it? Like what you're describing is the purpose of decentralization. What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do. You're basically describing Reddit at that point.

It's like claiming IRC isn't decentralized because the mods in a channel can kick people out for spam or whatever.

> What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do.

Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down.

Mastodon is like this: instead of sharing all the messages on all instances, you have multiple independant instances that may or may not mirror the messages of other instances. If one server goes down, all the content that wasn’t mirrored is lost and all the user accounts are lost.

Okay, but the end result of your decentralization is exactly what Mastodon is. Which is in order to be truly decentralized instances should have the option to opt into one or more shared administrations. But functionally that ends up being the same thing as what you complain about which is that ultimately administration and/or accounts are localized at certain administration levels. 'Instances' in Mastodon are that administration you want.

If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.

> If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network.

I was thinking of something based on concensus (see also how blockchains work) but I don’t know of any social network that work like this and I don’t know if it’s feasible.

> a lot of smaller centralized administrations

Isn't that how decentralisation works?

> Isn't that how decentralisation works?

If there’s no synchronization between these administrations I fail to see how this has anything to do with decentralisation. It doesn’t remove the centralization, it just reduces its scope.

Turns out twitter's not so bad at managing a few million users after all

Well, „Mastodon with a billion users“ probably. That would be nice.

Probably.

Mastodon is lacking marketing, big names, etc.

Could be that their solution isn't different from Mastodon in a technical way, but still is more successful.

what a horrible name

It's an odd choice, I agree. It just doesn't sound like something that is going to succeed as a social media. This is 100% subjective and exclusively based on a feel.

Edit, PS: I'd be glad to be proven wrong here. It's a great project!

Does anyone else find this conversation awkward / cringe worthy?

"Hey genius billionaire, what's up?"

"Oh hey other genius billionaire..."

"Let's do some shit because you know, the morons on the board didn't get it, I just didn't get my way so I left to do bitcoinz",

"Off to dinner, later bro, let's solve all the problems tomorrow"...

"Cool bro, I'll try buy the company and forfeit at the last minute when I realize I just ran my mouth instead of being serious"

"Sounds like a plan bro laters, nice work saving freedom..."

This is how a lot of people talk, you're just focusing on the billionaire part.

Right, whens the last time you purchased a company for billions of dollars off the cuff ?

I can imagine people having almost exactly the same conversation in hypotheticals.

If you translate it into this yes, but that's not how they talked to each other.

for starters its missing all the meta information that tells you what time they were sent, how much time between replies, what was going on in the real world with both their lives when they were messaging.

to me it looks like two guys spitballing and being open to move onto the next step... ang guess what thats all a billionaire is.

Struck me as sincere

Well they weren't performatively texting. I believe the critique is the comical level of hubris between these two.

Not trying to be arch or reductive. I'm not fond of either of these men. But... haven't they pretty much demonstrated that they do the things that would be considered hubris in others?

Not me

Please note this account also shared other messages between Musk and Agrawal.

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