Mastodon's founder has a vision to democratize social media
time.com
time.com
And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs.
I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.
These are things I worry about.
But seriously though, if you start to make it more distributed than it already is it will look even less like Twitter.
They just want to sign up, and get an out-of-the box experience more or less like twitter.
Mastodon is built so that there is no single point of failure, but that means users have no single point of signup. It is like email, or matrix. Host your own on your own domain for a few dollars a month or join a friendly server paying the bill for you.
It is really not that hard, but people are just not used to having choices on the internet anymore.
At some point someone you know picked Twitter and you did too. Maybe find some friends or public figures you like on Mastodon and see what server they are on.
It's more like if someone asked why they need to choose between someone@gmail.com address or someone@outlook.com, but in reality email would work just fine regardless.
EDIT: fixed
You are forced to chose because there is not a central blessed server that acts as a main hub.
In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own.
There are a lot of LGBT servers and special interest servers with strict moderation, and general purpose servers that moderate very little.
It is also a bit like choosing what city to live in... except it is -much- easier to move if you decide you do not like the vibe and wish to live somewhere else. Mastodon has built-in user forwarding to take your follows and followers with you.
How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?
Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.
there's a lot of chicken & egg issues still going on. I think it'll get better as more people put their info on their web pages, though.
I think Mastodon would get more signups if interested people were just pointed at like ten working, non-specialized, non-tiny instances, rather than being confronted with hundreds of weird / non-working options. I realize this feels a bit contrary to the goals of federation, but the current situation seems to be causing a lot of potential users to retreat in annoyance and confusion.
As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.
Many of the mastodon servers I am seeing pause new registration/break down are at a few thousand members, maybe 8k max. I dont know how Mastodon is implemented, but my intuition is that a well written C++, Rust, or even Java service should be able to handle that many users on a single instance.
Mastodon by contrast spreads out this load to servers paid for by users, not by ads.
If you cannot join any servers, pay for a managed hosting provider to spin one up, or host yourself on a vps or a home server.
Most servers will be small, or you can host your own.
It would be cool if someone rewrote it with a Crystal framework. Although there are limitations to this because it's faster than Ruby and similar to Ruby but not completely like Ruby.
It's frustrating to watch. I guess a lot of fediverse people don't actually want twitter normies on board though.
These are the inherent trade offs of a distributed social network.
Of course. I don't understand why you are telling me this.
Frankly, it's impressive that it's scaling as well as it has so far given the tiny size of the team and that all the servers are run on a volunteer basis.
I'd recommend joining smaller instances or like, just running your own. WordPress with the AP plugin is a nice alternative if you just want to feed your own thoughts out into the fedi-sphere.
Should I self host a mastodont instance and point friends and family to it when they want to create a mastodont account ?
Or would that be too much of a burden to manage ?
Or maybe it would be better to register on a specialized instance to already have an interesting local feed ?
You never see everything. There's way too much of it. Everything is going to be a selection. The question is who is going to do the selecting.
There are people right now having tantrums because they want their one-sided censorship back, and indeed, that's what's behind this latest drive to promote mastodon all over the place.
Nothing has actually changed on Twitter except the bluechecks' sense that they're no longer a privileged class.
Tons has changed on Twitter, including the laying off of half the company including substantial numbers in the Trust & Safety team. I'm seeing people who couldn't have cared less about the US's culture wars talking about leaving Twitter and setting up Mastodon accounts because they're expecting the platform to become nastier, more spammy, less reliable, and overall less pleasant to be on. Perhaps they're wrong, but it's wrong to pretend they're all doing it because they're having 'tantrums' and want their 'one-sided censorship back'.
The major concern I've seen regarding the blue checks is that it's going from being a system of verification (this person really is who they claim to be) to one where it just represents having paid a subscription fee without any real identity verification at all.
I have no doubt there is some hysteria going around, but it is entirely unfounded. If anything, you can expect fanatic lefties to false flag abuse to create that impression because that's exactly their style.
Those complaining about not being verified were invariably non-notable internet famous personalities, and I saw many of those complaints from people on the left too. Not everything was political bias, some people just were far less notable than they thought they were.
That you consider this to be about ‘fanatical lefties’ and ‘false flags’ shows you’re way too far down the rabbit hole and you’ve lost all perspective. Step back from the culture war nonsense and maybe spend a bit of time offline to touch grass.
and they aren't taking new signups. Soooo.... no idea.
We're in a weird time right now though. Most people choose an email provider based on word of mouth or what their friends use but not enough people know about Mastodon to make that possible. Maybe Mastodon itself isn't the right answer, but I hope that a federated/distributed system is.
Most blocked instances in Mastodon are typically not being blocked for being malicious instances, but instead because they don't like the kind of tweets that are from there. Email servers are typically much more neutral and block IPs mostly to prevent spam instead of because they disagree with the speech contained in the emails originating from that IP.
Does that make me a sheeple? Yes, it does. Sue me.
There's an interesting problem here - how do you know that your server's software and configuration hasn't been modified in a way that subtly lets these things happen?
I've always wanted a PaaS, operated by a too-big-to-make-exceptions security-hardened company (here's looking at you, Google!), that lets you deploy any image or set of images, but has a centrally managed ingress that ensures that the only access is over HTTPS (so no direct access to any requisitioned databases) and furthermore reports a hash of the image(s) as an HTTP response header with every single response, with no way to change or suppress this
You could then have, say, a Mastodon implementation that also reports all appropriate central configuration (say, blocklists, or disabling the ability of users to port out) at a public endpoint, and, importantly, is trusted to report that accurately, because you could validate what code it's running via the HTTP response. You could audit that security updates are being applied, that nobody is running a fork that gives them access to your DMs, and, if Mastodon gave visibility into this, you could also validate whether administrators all have 2FA enabled and how many of them there are (and hold your server admins to account socially).
Of course, you do have to trust the PaaS provider not to make exceptions to the rules, but no more so than we currently trust any certificate authority.
Does anyone know if anything like this exists right now?
Do we need to pick servers with Bittorrent? no. Just tell it what file you want (magnet link).
Do we need to pick servers with Tox? no. Just tell it what friend you want to talk to (contact ID).
Or to pick a centralized example: do we need to pick a server on Twitter? no. duh.
Then why is there any necesity or excuse ever to have to pick servers for "social" apps? Is this the 80's?!
How do these "decentralized" advocates think they can get away with a "harder to use app with more steps"? Especially when it's not a technical necesity?
The fediverse is built on a very similar type of network: federated servers, similarly to how gmail talks to yahoo and hotmail.
You don't pick a server with Bittorrent because it runs locally, which you can also do with Mastodon or other distributed networks. Though if you want others to be able to reach you, you probably need to set up a domain name and leave your server on. The problem with using a Bittorrent-like setup is that you don't have a persistent identity there.
You don't need to pick a server for Twitter because there is only one. You have no choice. Mastodon and other distributed social networks offer choice. Imagine, if you didn't like how Twitter moderated their content, and you thought you could do that better, you could simply spin up your own Twitter server and still communicate with everybody on Twitter?
But you're right that being forced to make this choice on little information is still an extra step, and not a great one. Maybe there should be a single default choice? Maybe assign one randomly for those who don't know? Because it honestly doesn't matter that much which server you pick. You can still see and follow everything. The only difference is really the moderation/blocking policy. Just pick a big one and you're probably fine.
Or better if I could buy a plug-n-play wall wart that would provide a secure server for friends and family, with some way to filter/receive the rest of the fediverse.
Maybe I’m the oddball but I care way more about twittering with/to friends and family, than following a celeb or journalist.
Child patents are strangely completely ignoring this point for some reason. Some have added an absurd “but what about email” though. I never thought about it. This ought to be DoA for many in today’s world.
please help fund the project to ensure further stability.
In practice it's still a desert.
The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there's not much going on once you do.
It's not seeming like much of a desert, and is just starting to benefit from network effects as some of the more known members of the community announce their moves.
https://mathstodon.xyz/invite/5nKykTB6
If it doesn't work then check back in a day or two, many servers are struggling at the moment but the mathstodon admins are scaling up now.
Or you can join any other instance since any account can follow any other account regardless of instance. The main advantage of mathstodon is LaTeX support.
currently not taking signups:
I’m on fosstodon which has this as the local timeline.
https://fosstodon.org/web/public/local
On many servers I can do the obvious substitution to see that server’s local timeline. I don’t think I’ve seen any servers that link that from their top level page.
This presents me with a log in form.
> Due to the massive influx of users from Twitter, we have had to temporarily close registrations. Please check back later if you wish to join Fosstodon.
Under the covers this sets up the federated follow relationship, but the UX feels the same as following someone on twitter.
There is one slightly more complicated scenario; if for some reason you're exploring a different server and find someone there you want to follow. In that case you still click the follow button but have to provide _your_ username@server string which triggers the necessary back-and-forth to get the follow relationship set up.
How would you do that on Twitter? Follow the hashtags. Why do you insist on limiting it to a server? That's not really how it is supposed to work anyway, it's not those things you mentioned.
Otherwise for someone who posts frequently and has a good following, then it's probably worth it to start posting on Twitter and Mastodon at the same time, that's the only way it happens. Big movers and shakers are either going to stay on Twitter or drag everyone else with them, basically unlikely to happen.
That's not true anymore: I am currently following over 100 academics and scientists who decided to migrate over the past week, they are very active and as a result my timeline is much more interesting and engaging than Twitter.
I have never seen such a big exodus in my 25+ years online, this is historic.
Instance admins can certainly be more decisive and just ban anyone they want without causing a media storm. Not sure if that's what people meant when they asked for a Twitter alternative.
Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work and LaikaStudios has been a great place to see BTS work on their stop-motion projects.
These sites all seem to have some grandiose plan but at the end of the day, the long-standing use case is just a place to build a community, collaborate with like-minded people, and ultimately just take a break from real life for a few moments by scrolling down your feed to consume some content.
This is exactly how Mastodon works.
Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.
That when the goodwill of said company runs out, there is very little incentive for them to maintain the service (other than trying to monetize it).
But you have a choice: so you trust the dude in rural Canada who pays the server bills with his harvest earnings, or you agree with monetization T&C by giving up your privacy to ads corporation, or you pay a hosting company who manages your instance on VPS, or you setup your own instance, or you participate in coop scheme where you share instance with some common interest group, or you find some rich and trusted philanthropist. Otherwise the owner can't sustain the operations and may need to shut down one day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136)
Some dude in rural Canada can run a email server in their spare time and nobody thinks the email system is any worse for it.
> They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Do they not have the same problem with those 3 instances, each with their separate networks and separate user handles?
1. Easier to do ads as overlay on vid clips than 12 character content 2. User base is getting to trained to expect and WANT short vid clip content 3. Ease and reach of story telling via short vid clips 4. Move off of social graph to AI graph 5. Automated moderation but open where you can see what posts were moderated and why pertaining to the rules of the SM platform.
What we are seeing is the move to Social 2.0.
1. Mark Z has the problem of how to turn FB into instagram and AI graph @. Youtube has smaller problem of just adjusting their feed impl to AI graph 3. Twitter has the most work out of the three in that it's their full imp and infrastructure that has to change to get back to revelance.
True P2P has never ever won in the market of over almost 40 years. But people keep rehashing the same way of doing and structuring P2P both tech wise and business wise and losing.
Toot is as much a basic word as tweet, I think you are just reflecting your own bias towards words from products you already know.
I'm pretty confident that you can ask someone for a pad for writing, without thinking at all about hygiene products, but you can't even hear the toot of a horn without thinking of a fart.
masto- : a combining form meaning “breast,” used in the formation of compound words: mastopathy.
It sounds like the sister site of Phallodon.
-Don
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475031 for more details and sources.
p.s. thanks to Dan Luu for putting it all online!
So far it's a case study demonstration of poor and uninspiring leadership.
Outsized attention given to harmless shitposting at Hollywood actors while Iranian terrorists are allowed to post propaganda unchecked despite reports.
Selective application of rules against things like "hacked content" used against certain politicians and organizations with certain political leanings but not others (in one case leading to the censorship of a .gov domain even over direct messages).
Verification badges issued to nobody journalists and sometimes for monetary compensation in contravention of their stated policy.
The existence of shadow banning which was lied about in Congress before leaked screenshots of the backend tools showed that multiple kinds of shadow bans exist.
Manual manipulation of the ostensibly algorithmic trending list.
It is hard for me to even imagine a way in which Twitter's moderation could possibly be any less fair or transparent.
In the meantime I would ask you to remember that HN is not a journal, a debate stage, or an encyclopedia article, instead it is an informal discussion on the internet. As such, participants are allowed to recount things from memory.
How do I know you're not lying?
I think you've been lied to so many times about this that you think it's true. A common tactic with right wing media.
See hunter biden crimes in china, election fraud, etc
Assumption of good faith and an understanding of the obvious fact that not everything that happened on the Internet gets written about by a "credible source" (which often is a synonym for "the media", and given your unwarranted partisan swipe there, likely a synonym for "the media that agrees with me"). At least one of the things I mentioned above, namely fruitless reporting of terrorist content (where I specifically was the person clicking on the report button) while the CEO got involved with a Hollywood star's gripes, is something I was involved in. What source would even possibly exist?
You can either take my word for it as someone that's been here for over 10 years and isn't in the habit of making shit up, or you can not.
It's not that I doubt your honesty, it's an issue of not enough information or context to figure out anything substantial at all.
Examples were provided. If you do not doubt their honesty, then you agree that unfair moderation took place.
I also feel like all these discussions are a distraction from the real issue. The average person doesn’t like using Twitter and never will.
Aren't most people on Twitter exactly to follow those influencers? I don't think most people would ever expect global engagement from any of their tweets.
The real issue here is not average people, but people with something important to say who are not rich, like scientists and activists. They (and their followers) are the ones who might be hurt by the expensive checkmarks.
Also, further down in the chat log there's this:
> [redacted]: Hey Elon -my name is Jake Sherman. I'm a reporter with Punchbowl News in Washington I cover Congress. Wonder if you're game to talk about how Twitter would change for politics if you were at the helm?
What's with the [redacted]? Does Musk give journalists insulting names in his contact list?
Check out the clickable link sources, it's interesting to see how cavalier billionaires are in their private life, the "hard work" consists of mostly just scheming. Not even data-driven in this case, only napkin math:
I remember Jason's mahalo which was supposedly a "human powered" search engine which would out compete flawed algorithmic search of Google. Mahalo eventually became a spam content generator for SEO.
I think he was a tech journalist who failed upwards into becoming a VC. Which reminds me- what is parislemon up to?
> Jason: Day zero
> Jason: Sharpen your blades boys [dagger emoji]
> Jason: 2 day a week Office requirement= 20% voluntary departures
I don't mean to trivialize their achievement, but I thought that was pretty funny.
Free speech is the right to speak, not the right to force everyone to listen. The federation model codifies this.
And then people who are unhappy with the mere existence of other servers hosting speech they dislike will launch coordinated attacks on the upstream infrastructure and revenue streams of those servers, as we've seen time and time and time again. And of course this will just be justified as giant corporations merely engaging in their free expression by ensuring that certain narratives cannot be easily communicated between willing parties via a digital medium.
And if I’m too quick to block servers, my users will leave for less restrictive alternatives. Same if I’m too slow to block bad actors: people being harassed by users on those servers will leave for somewhere more moderated. In short, there’s a feedback loop that tends to optimize a community’s moderation to follow that community’s preferences. What more could you possibly ask for?
You got it backwards. Mastodon was created back in 2016 when Twitter censorship was starting to get way out of hand. Its description was "A decentralized solution to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication."
??? I don't have to imagine. That's exactly what happens when you enter a URL.
I've been thinking that, just like your ISP provides you with an email address (do they all still do that? Mine does), maybe they should also automatically provide you with a social network account.
It's a bit odd how everything today still links back to email, which many consider dated, but we still don't have a good replacement for it. This might be ready for a new universal distributed communication system.
You won’t see censorship of Mastodon until anarchists and communists use it to coordinate protests at scale.
First, the service emerged at a time and place where a text-based network was cutting edge…
Second, Twitter grew up in an environment where it was normal to publicly broadcast whatever it was you had to say…
Third, because Twitter was first, it became ground zero for everyone who was textual and had something to say, even if those folks had diametrically opposing viewpoints on everything from Donald Trump to LeBron James.”
https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-su...
You can't fix people by giving them new software.
http://demo.fedilist.com/instance?q=&ip=&software=mastodon&r...
One reason, so that communities wouldn't get diluted. The other, it's expensive to run this.
> it's expensive to run this
As the hype about Mastodon spiked after Musk bought twitter, I looked at it to see if I could set up an instance, just to experiment. I'm an experienced programmer and systems administrator. After perusing the requirements and installation process, I decided that it was too much work for a little one-person experiment. This is why I ask about who is running instances. Yes, I had a strong hunch it would be all nerds, but I didn't expect it to be require so much sophistication and outlay. One very dedicated person could certainly set up and run an instance, but most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team.
>The costs were already ~$35/month even with reserved instances; back-of-the-envelope is that the new costs would be in the ballpark of ~$50/month.
https://toot.cafe/@nolan/109295574721909717
toot.cafe is #216 (by MAU) in the list above, MAU=315 - there's a data point.
Was that the original Mastodon? That does have a reputation of being faffy to install and resource-hungry. Pleroma is much easier and less resource-hungry. Even I managed to spin up a Pleroma server without any trouble.
> most likely any instance of moderate popularity is going to require a team.
It'll need a team for coverage of moderation, support, perhaps 24/7 ops - but then anything with a lot of users will, surely?
Likely. I didn't investigate alternative implementations.
> It'll need a team for coverage of moderation, support, perhaps 24/7 ops - but then anything with a lot of users will, surely?
I'm under the impression that the claims of Mastodon include "self-moderation" and, because of its supposed decentralization, 24/7 uptime is not needed for any one instance. I have been imagining it like torrents, where no single node matters. Once the initial seeding is complete, the content lives across many instances. If it's not like that, then claims for its decentralization are highly overblown.
That's "the instances moderate themselves", really, not "the users moderate themselves". With large numbers of users, you'll need assigned moderators.
> because of its supposed decentralization, 24/7 uptime is not needed for any one instance
Not sure where you've got that idea - decentralisation just means that I can talk to other instances from mine. But if mine is down, I can't log into another one with my account details and carry on Just Like That.
> If it's not like that, then claims for its decentralization are highly overblown.
If you're understanding "decentralised" to mean "seeded like a torrent", yeah, it'll seem highly overblown but at the same time it'd be very wrong.
Similar to email - for a long time somebody in a university basement had been running those and now it's google, Microsoft and a bunch of smallers or selfhosted where you can pick the offering you like.
It is great.
Lots of fly by night servers, stood up by (probably well meaning) people that have no idea if how hard it is to run and administer a server like that. Point in fact the "Mastodon.technology"(MT) server
If you read the heartfelt post from the MT owners/op on why it had to be shutdown. How much it took of his life to run it, and the choices he made. It doesn't matter that a new "like that" MT server is being stood up as a replacement. The MT server admins post shows the burden of running a server like that. For free (unless Patreon'ed I guess).
Activity Pub is a well designed protocol, but to my eye it has some major warts(). Add in it's decentralized nature and it shows how hard it will be to institute major changes, even if the community supported it.
I'd like to find a nice, professionally run Mastodon server, with clear rules and a believable investment in infrastructure and people. Absent that, I certainly can't see myself advocating for it, it recommending it to others. Shame too.
() Lack of encryption, lack of non-server discovery, lack of consistent, user controled server migration.p
I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber.
We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation.
This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are uncomfortable and that’s ok. It should be.
This presupposes every "belief" and discussion is in good faith. It also presupposes that there's no second order effects from the amplification of "beliefs". A bigot is not interested in learning about whatever it is they're bigoted against. They just want to amplify their message. Trolls and shit posters just want to troll and shit post.
If you eliminate moderation then all you'll get is people using your platform to scream at everyone else. Assuming everyone is interested in actual conversation is childishly naïve.
Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there.
Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.
I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!
He technically does, doesn't he? Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, IIRC.
There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform knows that “unmoderated free speech” is just shitposting.
Also, I don’t see how death threats, n-words and the like would contribute to any discussion.
The press in the US had unmoderated free speech for over a century until the FCC was established, and print publishing still does. That's why the New York Times bought the first Gatling guns: they were inciting violence (specifically, the Civil War) and justifiably feared that rioters would try to lynch them. Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. Freenet still does.
It's not a bullshit idea. Just an unpopular one.
To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet became a hell hole.
Regulation is, IMO, preferable to seeing unsolicited illegal pornography in one’s social media firehouse.
I will argue that no civil society has ever had a truly free press. To my knowledge, there has never been legal press publication of the images Usenet propagated.
Most people think those should be illegal to distribute or intentionally possess. I think that; there is a victim who suffered real harm, which is compounded by distribution of images of their abuse. Perhaps you do not, but you'll probably find that opinion falls under PG's "What You Can't Say".
Because that is literally what happened circa I’m going to say 1992ish on Usenet, and not in overly obscure newsgroups, but also the ordinary default newsgroups.
There is no unmoderated free speech because sick freaks will always do horrible things with their speech if they think they can get away with it.
This is as factual as gravity: unmoderated free speech will never be legal speech.
Further, you don’t want unmoderated free speech. You cannot unsee those photos.
My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.
We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon is bringing ideological equality to the platform. For leftists/liberals, this equality feels like oppression after years of dominance and privilege on Twitter.
Again, we can both play these games. You original presumption:
>My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off.
Remember, one of the major reasons behind Truth Social, Parler, etc. failing to gain user share is the fact that their respective apps were banned from Google/Apple stores.
At the end if the day, both extremes, left and right, need an enemy to point at and rally over. They are different sides of the same coin.
(Note also that you are not much of a (societal) liberal if you don't value freedom of speech. But therefore this isn't so much of a left vs right than a top vs bottom issue...)
I think this represents what's really going on. Firstly, Musk is not a "free speech absolutist". The issue is moderation policies. Every single platform moderates. Even 4chan. Any platform that doesn't, gets overrun by spam. If not spam, then by bots, or trolls, or something else that makes normal conversations impossible. Moderation is about sign-to-noise ratios. Everybody, both left and right, wants a good signal-to-noise ratio, but they disagree about what they consider signal and what they consider noise.
The problem with Musk's takeover is that he sounds like he doesn't have the first clue about how moderation works and what all the concerns are. The things he says about Twitter keep contradicting each other. It undermines a lot of people's faith in his leadership, and therefore the future direction of Twitter.
And that's the attraction of the fediverse: it offers real freedom of speech, and you get more control over moderation. Everybody wins.
> Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance
He already does that. Truth Social is Mastodon. So is Gab. It's just that Truth Social blocks every other instance, and everybody blocks Gab.