Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable.
I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
Where did they move?
They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans.
My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
I agree it is difficult in the situation you describe, which is not mastodon.technology's situation.
I'd created both a subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus) and wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) to memorialise at least some of that discussion, as well as the on-platform discussion.
That last is of course now unobtainable, though there were over 700 snapshots of the community homepage saved to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, see:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190401071102/https://plus.goog...>
Because of the mechanics of both G+ and IAWBM, actually navigating to articles from that archive ... mostly does not work.
The G+ community had over 4,000 members (pretty good for late-stage G+). The subreddit ... a hair over 300.
People. Will. Not. Go. Off. Platform. Even. If. That. Completely. Fucks. Them. Over.
It's a really perverse dynamic.
vomits in my mouth a bit
Regarding spam, there is some (seemingly inevitable in any community involving humans). But frankly Mastodon, right from the beginning, focused heavily on Moderation tools. Figuratively speaking, no expense has been spared to make it easy and convenient to block bad actors (or instances) from your account (or your whole instance).
With USENET people expected to see every posts in the newsgroups they were subscribed to, and a lot of people would complain loudly if anything was missing. With a network like this nobody expects to read everything. At the same time receiving everything is easier (still) - if you federate with a couple major endpoints you get most stuff. There will be challenges with this as the network grows but I spent too much time ensuring we got messages from newsgroup X within Y hours (less was unfeasible, as there were still sites exchanging on a schedule via dialup).
With respect to spam, once you accept you're not likely to see everything, things get a lot simpler and you can apply a lot more aggressive filtering.
Personally I'm working on my own ActivityPub implementation, and one of the things I've used on Twitter in the past very effectively via the Twitter API was a simple Bayesian network used to rank things to surface interesting stuff, but lots of room to apply more sophisticated machine learning there too.
Maybe there could be a variant of NNTP which allowed some amount of advertisement posts in between. Then let the maintainers keep the proceeds from those?
Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade.
Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.
That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features.
Citation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-...
It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground.
Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.
One of the challenges of a social network, especially in a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial value being generated at the same time that various sorts of costs, including attacks on the network in both technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value members abandon the network, and those who remain are either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other members.
This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to serve that role becomes increasingly difficult.
What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but basing your statement on a constant cost based on present experience is ... probably flawed.
This is especially true at Facebook's scale.
Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche.
It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.
It was the best social network that existed, and before it shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no others have matched anywhere near the complete feature sets.
Having the biggest social network sucking up personal data to feed the ad network is the reality we are in. Having Google with a larger collection of personal data linking everything to a large social network would have made things worse. Google+ forced real names which made facebook force real names. Google appstore and preinstalled apps you cannot remove force location data. Google obtaining your social graph leads down a dark path.
Still, technically, Google+ was far ahead of their competition.
Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was deleted.
Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy just gone.
Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_...>
That said, Google's stated communications regarding Google+ had and have been questionable from the start. I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size of the active community on the site, which was far below the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of millions of active users touted. In practice, probably closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30 days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100 million who'd been active at some point.
<https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>
But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of salt.
It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack).
The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time.
In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings.
One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).
A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to "die"
It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community.
For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.
I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead
But I do think it is worth pointing out there is nothing wrong with folks doing something to scratch their own itch. It does not have to be hugely popular or have a ton of users. If the sysadmins care enough to keep it running, that it literally all that matters...
I may steal this quote.
He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.
That may not have been what the original poster intended but if that’s the case then they should use less ambiguous language.
That said, network effect declines can happen much faster than people think, and can be hard to see in the numbers social networks usually put out. History is short on this kind of service, so precedent doesn't mean a lot.
I wouldn't put money on Facebook being around and anything like it is now in 10 years. It's barely anything like what it was ten years ago, and it's clearly not meta's priority anymore.
Twitter is tricky because Elon resuming his bid creates a wide range of possibilities, some that include him cannibalizing it out of spite. He's a wildcard here, as evidenced by him putting in the bid in the first place as something that appears to have been little more than corporate trolling. But if he takes it seriously or turns around and sells it to someone who will it could benefit from a coherent vision (even if it's one I would find very unappealing).
Source: I worked for a regionally dominant social network in the early days and watched it evaporate nearly over night.
I presume this Metaverse thing is that. Facebook may stop being the platform that serves every second person on earth a feed of images and text. Or stop being the place where we can communicate for free. Once profitability shifts to VR sets, virtual-asset markets and augmented advertising (or whatever markets emerge, if any)
I don't think it was a deliberate misquote of gp to manipulate readers. Instead, the "anytime soon" was responding to gp's exact statement of : "We'll find out soon enough."
https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...
Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.
And if you are saying the former, then Twitter and Facebook’s longetivity should be the least of your concerns.
I personally couldn’t care less that there’s no Facebook around when I’m living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape due to the “political climate”.
imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge.
before you say "this person can't possibly do this" ... think again.
which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?
there is the mastodon project, but you can fork the code and make your own community if you want more control over your own codebase when it comes to your own mastodon instance
That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.
I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he can do that.
I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.
Wow that's a grim perspective. Somehow I doubt that catering to the consumerism that got us to where we are with climate change is what's going to help us fix it.
There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.
So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't have very strong guarantees to its users about how it will treat them or what content will be allowed.
I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a pain sometimes.
I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.
You've said this, but didn't bother to give a reason. Can't you go to church even when the plurality of people tolerate porn?
so... you never actually used Mastodon? Its users do have the ability to filter content based on keywords, accounts or domains.
Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.
Nah. If you can pick your king, he's not really a king. The intended recipient of your communication decided to join a server that censors your type of message.
The problem is when the federation becomes a trust, and members collude. Like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, for example. The more division, the more federation, the harder it is to collude.
C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting everything".
It's not about the service existing but people being able to extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
where is soon?
And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matters, but the https://joinmastodon.org/covenant where it's supposed to be documented is 404. Looks like it was quietly removed sometime after August of this year.
In any case I'll make a prediction: Mastodon will remain a haven for people too racist and/or porn-obsessed for even Twitter and Reddit to tolerate and adoption will be hampered accordingly.
That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.
I think you and I were on very different servers, and considering I've perused dozens, you must have gotten a really raw deal.
I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and promptly began spamming every sub with their obnoxious behavior which chased off everyone else. They shouldn't be surprised that they have a reputation for being a haven for people too toxic even for Twitter/Reddit.
Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?
None of the instances I've used tolerate the harmful examples such as racists or lolicons, that you've incorrectly lumped together with perfectly cromulent lifestyles, and thanks to that I've barely seen any. And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on. This happens maybe five times a year, if that.
If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly.
> And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on.
Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.
It’s a protocol for independent systems to automatically exchange some information.
It’s not a distributed system of interchangeable instances.
Why not? A person is only banned from one instance, they are free to choose another and federate across any instances they haven’t been banned from. That sure sounds like having both federation and the ability to ban.
These are not public utilities. A person or organization doesn’t have to support someone with opposing views to them. And that’s ok. And that doesn’t break federation, except to specific instances for specific people.
Functioning federation depends entirely on good tools for users to filter and ban people and content.
That's not incompatible. You can go anywhere you want but you can get banned from place if you're an ass there is entirely sensible way for federated network to work.
More than that, it's necessary if you want any resistance to bad actors
Many instances of mastodon on the other hand are happily engaged in real meaningful moderation. The owner is expected to moderate what type of content is allowed on their instance, with the federated aspect ensuring the "free speech".
That's not to say mastodon is without issues. The issues of voat just can't be transferred wholesale.
I'm on mastodon.scholar and the most risque thing anyone has posted was a closeup of Neptune's uncensored moons. I don't disbelieve you, mastodon is part of Earth and unfortunately that means there are racists there, but I don't think your experience is typical.
The difference between the fediverse and most other online places for manyyyyyy fediverse users who use it day to day is that if a bunch of racists show up and start making things shitty then somebody (mods) will ACTUALLY do something about it whereas every other online platform just didnt really care or defend the vulnerable.
Are there large communities of racists on isolated parts of the fediverse? Sure. It is an open source software, even Trump's shitstick social network tried to steal and use mastodon.