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Comment by Timja | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is the only platform I know where you can search for people who share your interests and then connect with them. The whole #buildinpublic community is just insanely great. Everybody is building something. Everybody is having similar issues to talk about. You can make so many great connections and help each other out.

But I feel that with Twitter becoming a private company owned by a single controversial person, Twitter lost a lot of its appeal.

It could be very unfortunate (if Twitter just goes down the drain without a replacement) or it could be the start of something new, if a new way to interact comes up.

If the community moves to another form of communication, I hope it will be something decentralized that can not be taken away from us again.

That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

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Wait and see what happens.

The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.

A replacement could be just a protocol.

If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.

Yeah but who would use a system like that outside of a small hardcore contingent of techies?

The interface could be just like Twitter or Hacker News.

In fact, users could use any service they like.

It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.

It already exists: newsgroups.

The messages would still need to be stored somewhere, right? Is SMTP a decentralized protocol in this sense? You can send a message from any client... however most people still use centralized solutions, not their own mail servers.

In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).

What incentive would Twitter or Hacker News have to support the protocol?

> The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.

Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives?

Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the results? Or both?

Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to honor? What happens if he doesn't?

He could make bad decisions that make the company fail, although frankly the previous leadership was on that path already.

It’s clear from his recent announcements that he understands how much Twitter depends on advertisers.

>>The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed.

>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.

A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.

With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.

In contrast, most fediverse communities are run on donations or by the private funds of an individual. There aren't perverse financial incentives in the same way. This is one advantage of having many, smaller servers.

I don't know I started reusing twitter 2 months ago after years of not really using it.

My main gripe is it looks like it locked me up in a bubble full of accounts with similar interests and ideas. I don't really feel challenged and I am almost totally excluded from other subjects that could theorically interest me.

You might just be relying on the algorithm too much. Search for hashtags, follow people that show up in your feed from retweets or look at your contacts' own list of follows.

If you wait for the algorithm to feed you the content you like you will find the limits of AI.

It isn't like it was a non-profit before run by a board trying to make Twitter awesome for users or some form of cooperative that was owned democratically by its community... it was a "public" company that, by construction, could only blindly optimize for profit of its shareholders--and, even worse: almost always relatively short-term profits, which is why you see a lot of these companies right now trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of everyone instead of just holding out for a year on cash reserves, as otherwise people will (rightfully) sell their stock and wait to re-purchase it if things ever look up again--at the almost explicit expense of its users (who frankly should have bailed as soon as the company went public, as that's the moment you knew the company no longer was even allowed to care about their interests).

> That is the reason why I am not enthusiastic about Mastodon. Mastodon is not decentralized. Unless you run your own instance, you do not own your social graph.

That's needed for practical reasons though. Actually decentralised alternatives like for example Scuttlebutt have this common issue: "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data." (https://scuttlebutt.nz/get-started/) You don't get popularity with non-tech people that way.

With mastodon, the profiles can be migrated. So effectively you can start with some main hub, move to a more interesting instance if you want to in the future, and move to your own instance if that is what you want.

I don't twitter or mastodon. But isn't "people who share your interests and then connect with them" exactly what the different mastodon instances are for? You're kinda supposed to find a server that aligns with your interest.

twitter has a social dynamic where opposing interests feed off of each other so you need in-group + out-group. there are psychosocial elements which mastodon does not have as it's more reddit like IMHO. edit: for clarity

No, federation works great in practice. I personally chose an instance I trusted to stay up and available, not one with any fancy domain or topic.

You can usually browse an instance without having an account, for example: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/explore (user directory) https://mastodon.gamedev.place/public (stream)

And once your instance federates with it (happens automatically, just needs any user to follow any user on the other one), you can search for hashtags.

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