Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
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It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it.
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution.
hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.
But the past decades of outsource-and-automate, attaching the brand to new tech companies as they appear, has largely passed; if all the existing spaces have become unproductive sources of eyeballs, you have to change course and come up with a way to make "mcdonalds.social" an attractive hangout instead. The only reason centralized social media got as far as it did before was because the capital markets footed that bill.
This is a rather naive and uninformed take. Here's yesterday's tweet of the day, where a top marketer called Elon Musk on his bullshit conspiracy theory.
And if you think my opinion isn’t worth anything, consider the richest man in the world just spent $200 on it.
So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter?
That's the take you're going with?
Why would they when there were a handful of users there?
But now there’s a whole bunch of people looking for that one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the marbles.
One of the truths of humanity is we don't accept 'extreme' views that we ourselves do not hold. When presented with them we will find ways to censor them from our daily lives. The opposite side of the coin is the people that hold these extreme views very commonly want to share these views with others (I would assume so that others adopt these views, but there could be other motivations). These behaviors are in conflict with each other, and if the extremists are not moderated, the moderate masses will eventually leave.
Why the owner is important is they typically become the 'buck stops here' person for policy on what is extreme and how the site will be moderated. As of so far Musk (already a controversial character to many) has not given much good information to any party involved in the continuation of twitter (users/advertisers/workers) on how this is going to proceed and given quite a fair amount of questionable information and bad signaling.
no, he really doesn’t. he very publicly blocked the ceo of an advertising company when they attempted to—professionally and politely—explain to elon what some of their concerns were.
it’s unreal how he’s so loudly demonstrating his instability and then complaining that people are saying he’s unstable.
There were multiple videos titled something like “a day in the life of a twitter employee” were they employees at twitter documented how they drank alcohol and “chilled” on the roof after a few meetings. This doesn’t seem like work to me.
Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don’t think they were doing a great job.
I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.
There can be many different perspectives on it.
A possible perspective is someone who uses twitter. If Elon cut jobs too hastily that might risk the stability, safety, or moderation of the platform. That is a valid concern for users.
If you are an advertiser for a big brand you are concerned about what content your advertisement appears next to. Brands don’t want to see their names plastered next to things which are too controversial, or frowned uppon. This is called “brand safety”. They might worry that a deep cut in twitter’s headcount will mean that twitter can’t quarantee that they can maintain the required level of moderation for this.
There is then the perspective of a regular everyday person who is not a twitter user in any way. They are interested in a safe society. If the changes at twitter lead to an under moderated free-for-all that can give power to all kind of dangerous individuals. Radicalisation is a real thing. Free rethoric against groups of people can lead to more radical rethoric. And more radical speech can lead to violence.
> It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish.
Of course! That is without dispute. One can be concerned about how something is managed even if the owners of said something has every right to manage the think the way they want it.
Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the peasants didn’t earlier.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-g...
Absent a few questions about whether the layoffs have been done in a way that violates employment laws (which I've seen enough debate about that I imagine we'll have to see how lawsuits turn out), I don't think anyone is saying he doesn't have the right to do this. Rather, criticism focuses on whether it was (a) a good idea, and (b) well-executed.
There's a few major strands of criticism of the layoffs that appeal to me:
1. It was less than a week. You can't possibly have reviewed who you were firing well enough to be confident that you were firing the right people.
2. The departments that were laid off are concerning. Apparently the trust and safety teams were hardest hit, and making the already-bad moderation worse on Twitter doesn't sound great.
"He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think, and I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon (or any other billionare - Elon is just an example). After people read so many sensationalized articles online, they adopt the author's sanctimonious opinions/views as their own.
It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met. Even if Elon posts snarky shit online, who doesn't? If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.
EDIT: Instead of replying to me and engaging in discussion (maybe I could learn something), I get downvoted. Stay classy, HN.
The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money.
He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.
Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices.
Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them.
Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that.
[0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand...
[1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough.
What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful.
Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)
Someone should tell the journalists.
Then Musk started to say he'd name and shame advertisers who have lowered/removed their spend on the platform. I don't know what the bar for advertisers deciding a platform is too risky to advertise on, but that has to cross it. There are a lot of different sites to advertise on, so it only really takes being riskier than the rest to lower/remove the amount you're willing to spend on the platform.
But maybe that take is just as bad as the rest. Perhaps Twitter sometime soon finds a crowd that will pay enough to sustain it, and the crowds that fled from it slowly come back after becoming frustrated with overly technical alternatives.
Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails.
>Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent replacement, much more civil as well.
Unfortunately that’s about to change.
Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons:
a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance
b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued to a screen like bad news
c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of your follows).
Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users and shoving ads at them.
What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?
If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV).
Is the same true for toots?
They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
> What if each news outlet ran their own server?
I think you answered your own question.
I don't think I buy that; it's not _that_ hard. Actually, I've noticed that there are a bunch of journalists (and not just tech journalists) showing up on Mastodon suddenly; this didn't really happen with the previous Twitter exoduses.
> Not enough reach.
That... depends. Not right now, no. But for the journalist use-case (low-latency access to what's happening right now, more or less a better news wire) it could be soon. And that journalism use-case is arguably what made Twitter important in the first place.
To be clear, I don't think that journalists will _abandon_ Twitter in favour of Mastodon. But if I was a journalist I'd be getting established on it now, in case things go wrong with Twitter.
So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.
But I'm wondering how something like Mastodon could scale to people having millions of followers.
It’s definitely not “too hard” for a professional. If someone can’t even do this much, their reporting is not trustable in the first place.
So far that's all I've seen from the twitter users I follow. "which one are you on?" "why is this so complicated?" etc.
Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?
It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently under heavy load due to new users.
All this hysteria is based on lies that have been spread over the past days.
"So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc."
Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node.
Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.)
It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air.
It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere.
In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon.
This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/7/22218989/signal-new-signup...
Where did I say anything about Mastodon displacing Twitter?
But keep on with your snark. Really adding something to the conversation.
Let's speak in a month or two, see how many remain active, and then see whether this is an overreaction, and whether the experience design of Mastodon can really acommodate them?
The momentum is surely there.
I just saw it's about 640k in the last week. That's nice, but Twitter has over 250M daily active users.
Going from a signup to a DAU is a pretty rough game, but even assuming every signup became and stayed active, that's 40 more weeks of non stop momentum and growth at the same pace to meet Twitters numbers.
Sorry, I wouldn't be betting on it.
The only people who end up sticking are the ones banned from Twitter.
(Although I agree with the general criticism that Mastodon is far from easy to use for the average non-techie.)
From what I've seen, it's mostly people sick and tired of Twitter's drama that decided to leave by themselves (whether today or in the last 6 years), while the people that were so toxic that Twitter banned them end up in mostly disconnected parts of Mastodon...
But it's literally the definition of that......
Literally everyone I know used Signal for like, five days?
If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.
Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.
But I think some people are just looking for "the other Twitter." Mastodon is a philosophically different idea to Twitter's centralized moderation.
I think other conversations about the network affect are apt here. Yeah, you can move to a different server all you want but in reality people want to be where other people are and don't actually want to migrate if they can help it. People aggregating in one place is the antithesis of the Mastodon federation.
If Mastodon does really catch on, it'll be a single digit number of high population servers that probably all end up having similar content moderation policy to Twitter to attract the most number of users. There won't be a grand utopia of a flat distribution of uniquely moderated servers.
I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.
Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.
But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.
My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed
I've seen several comparisons between Mastodon and email servers where server administrators also have the power to block communication with other servers but those comparisons do not hold since I have yet to find a mail server administrator who blocks communication with certain other servers on ideological grounds. Mail servers are blocked because they are sources of spam, not because they host users with different opinions. Mail content itself is not moderated other than through spam filters which (for now?) do not censor on ideological grounds, "Tweets" and "Toots" are.
A better solution would be to have users select their own moderators just like they can choose their own content filtering (e.g. uBlock Origin) rule sets but I do not see how something like that can be implemented given the way Mastodon works.
You do have control here. You do select your moderator, and you do have the power to change that.
You select which server your account lives on. If you disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this is probably not the right server for you. You can simply select another server.
You also have the option to run your own server. It's not hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know several people running their own servers, and a few of them just have one account.
Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild ride with content moderation over the years, and this has led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost their accounts and their followers forever with no recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep all your followers.
The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full control if you really want to. However, most of us don't want to deal with running a server, so you just have to trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place to be
As long as "your data" doesn't include your history, as far as I understand? You can leave your home server as long as you're willing to leave everything you ever wrote.
I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?
It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.
Musk can shove his $8 up his big, fat... fail whale.
They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.
I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...
I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work.
Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like the media/everyday people hate him for no reason is just dishonest.
How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
He gave Elon the ideas, initial team, govt connections, contracts, etc.. Elon was the company jester.
Rocket landing work was taken from the DC-X
Throwing money at people and saying “I want these charts to be customizable” vs “let’s land a rocket booster, it’s ok if a few blow up, we can test it live” will get VERY different levels of passion/expertise
You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.
Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.
When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the next prediction.
A track record of success is not sufficient evidence, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades and especially when even the first random success (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.
Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen, especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e. horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing.
Let's not even get into his market manipulation.
This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge.
Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were dismissing achievements of people who give others good reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if they are doing some great things. There are many people who smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write these comments here.
That's even more damning for his detractors since they could have been doing the same but instead sneer from the sidelines.
Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff and have a great work/life balance. I don’t want to (and don’t have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.
I guess… not everyone’s problem domains are interesting enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don’t like him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these tough problems. Just admit FSD isn’t a year away!
is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?
Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without throwing LOTS of money around. On top of that, Twitter mostly isn't that interesting.
Throw in that your odds get better the more you’re successful, and it’s classic survivorship bias.
But yes, there's indeed the thousand of engineers and technicians doing the work. He even credits them for making his dream possible!
I don't know why people think he's not doing the work. Have they actually read interviews and books? The books I read does not paint him in a very flattering light people-wise.
It's also possible to be simultaneously an egoistic asshole, genius, having actual skills, being a money man and visionary leader, People act as if a person who's a jackass can't have positive traits or vice versa.
To me it seems, his success comes from being an engineer himself and wanting to get shit done and kick people until shit gets done in a working way. And yes that includes throwing money at smart engineers, but to do this, you have to be smart and have domain knowledge to do so.
The problem started, when he got too much success and lost touch with the ground of reality.
The twitter chat logs are quite interesting.
https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#3
In general they show that it was indeed a bit more than a high idea, to which it was reduced around many places.
Still, a funny quote from Elon:
"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems."
I think he means it. But of course it is BS, when he is in fact the boss of so many people and making them burn out for productivity in various ways.
There are many good things one might say about Musk, but don't pretend there aren't any bad things.
Doing that with this level of success in these domains is extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the investors are far more important than the workers.
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
I’d actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the last handful of years.
Given the right tooling etc etc, expediting user's migration to their own instances, of something like a Mastodon node, could be an achieveable route to greater decentralisation without getting muddled down in things like blockchain etc.. And executed correctly the model could be more communicable than what it presently appears to be.
From what I can see though, Mastodon isn't currently the technology stack to achieve, perhaps it could get there.
No solution is going to be perfect, but surely an emphasis on data sovereignty would reduce the volume of arguments over what a given platform should be.
Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years.
The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.
Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-Twitters.
When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders (like people running private mail servers)...
...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their personal accounts...
...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation working great.
I will gladly take it over closed protocol, even if it has reaction gifs built in.
Email is an example of a federated system failure.
30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of the resounding success of email federation, those domains still exist and can still send/receive emails universally. If email had hypothetically been non-federated and proprietary to AOL, it would be dead today (or as close to it as gopher)
People also dismiss his failures in hard domains, like The Boring Company.
He’s intentionally choosing to do things that have a relatively high likelihood of failure.
But has he failed at Boring?
sure, if you ignore the very only communication method that everyone has - the email.
a myriad others came and went, and none that exist today will be relevant in 50 years, but email will
Email is an example of a federated system failure.
I mean it does somewhat solve the problem of Musk running twitter into the ground. For most people, I imagine mastodon is a lateral move, not a step up.
I agree with your point. I think people are generally missing forest for the trees.
I don’t understand this point. I’m on a tiny server, but read the federated feed most of the time. What’s the problem?
The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.
We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.
[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
It's like if Twitter was an ActivityPub instance even if it had 99.9% marked share at least you could leave without leaving everything behind
Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.
There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and ActivityPub.
When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each other using the IP protocol.
I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping platform is not a healthy system.
Mastodon does not have to monopolize microblogging the way Twitter has, because it isn't competing with Twitter's cursed ad-based revenue model. Similarly, the tiny niches that do migrate are likely more valuable to have than the hordes of Twitter users who never post anything, and just juice the algorithm by liking and retweeting.
Kidding aside, I think it's unlikely that a deliberately obfuscated project will conquer the world.
A few key things: decentralized means a network of at least 3 nodes where no operator controls more than 1. Anything beyond that is vanity or more censorship resistance depending on your vantage point.
What we actually want is governance with checks and balances. I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.
Now to how emulate that in software is another quandary. I think ethereum for all of its faults is doing a decent job at decentralized governance.
I think we’re still in the very early days of decentralized finance. A lot of lessons will be learned (and relearned from the past) as we move forward.
On the contrary, I'd argue that the power has towards the executive and legislative branches. The judicial branch exists to curb the excesses of the other two through the invocation of law that was already written. The other two either write whatever the hell they want and vote on it or invoke their powers by fiat (i.e. executive orders).
The idea is that the blockchain is a shared, decentralized database and you store simple messages on the blockchain and larger files on something like ipfs. This forms a social graph that a frontend ui can then import and provide a view into (a lens if you will).
It's nice because users just need one account (a wallet) and they have access to the whole social graph if they want, or they can configure their apps to only show certain things. The downside is that it's all public and once you lose your keys you're locked out of your account. Also, you can't really prevent anyone from posting things but you can choose which types of posts you allow on your feed.
It's a different set of tradeoffs that's interesting to explore.
You post and read on your preferred platform but can see posts from your friends from other platforms, or even their own implementation on their own server!
The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph.
This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to) address the mass market.
“Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.”
Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model.
If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself.
That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.
Yea, I've been saying the same for some time. I really want for decentralized solutions to proliferate, but federation is a terrible model.
Nobody can just say Steve or Bill without confusing people
When nobody knows you, they use the complete name, Elon Musk.
When you're famous, they drop the given name, you're Musk.
When you're ultrafamous, they only use the given name, now you're Elon.
And sure, most users will end up centralised on a handful of servers, and that is not a problem as long as they can move when a specific server does not meet their needs. The biggest importance is a safety valve.
I don't know which parts of the UI you think can't be fixed, but I don't agree. Better search is needed, but can be externalised (nothing stops someone from federating with the main instances and signing up to a few relays and offering more comprehensive search). A better experience when looking up external users timelines is largely down to Mastodon's developers having very specific ideas about how to do things. The logic for following or boosting/liking toots when you're on a different instance's timeline is awkward but can be improved with an optional intermediary (falling back to the awkward request for your address for those who insist on opting out of an intermediary providing a mapping).
The upside with Mastodon is that it's not a single thing. It's the server, and the web UI, and you can replace either or both. E.g. you can run Pleroma with the Mastodon web UI, or it's own, and there are additional web UI's. Or you can (and people do, and I'm doing so to) build your own, so we'll see a number of choices of platforms that will look very differently.
Personally I hope Elon fails, because it will make things easier, but I think the long term belongs to ActivityPub over Twitter in any case for the simple reason that the presence of ActivityPub means that the threshold to stand up a viable social network has dropped massively. On one hand you have the software you can set up in less than a day (been there, done that), but far more importantly, sign up to a relay and within hours you have an instance that looks lively, even though most toots are via federation. Where there before was a massive chicken and egg scenario, there's now an increasingly vibrant starting point for people to experiment with their own visions for what social media should be, and each one of them will add to the network effects of ActivityPub.
Mastodon may well fail, but social networks has a history of reaching tipping points that very abruptly changes things dramatically. In both directions. But the federated networks are far less vulnerable to people moving elsewhere.
As for the failures of federation, e-mail and mailing lists is the obvious counter. As is the web. Social media is a newfangled baby in comparison to the successful federated services.
Everything he's done so far reads like he's deliberately trying to destroy the company. The only reason I don't really think that's his intention is that I don't see how he could hope to benefit from it. But it doesn't make sense.
just red meat for that particular crowd who worship strongmen. tho if he’s even a fraction of the irrationality that he’s portraying, i completely agree, twitters in trouble.
He's trying to pivot them into a focused company. I think his actions make sense in that context.
For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.
I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.
for me it was enter an email address, username, and password?
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
This is the media capitalising at the maximum over the emotions of the tech crowd to move to a platform that is worse than Twitter, especially in UX and is essentially a solution that is creating more problems than it is trying to solve.
It really is not early days anymore with this, and the hype around Mastodon is manufactured by outrage due to 'Elon Musk' being the new villain of the month. If you have to explain what Mastodon is, which server you have to choose and how to find which people you followed on Twitter are on Mastodon due to its poor discoverability, then it tells us that it is another pointless hurdle for users to bear with, resulting in a worse experience.
Mastodon clearly is a solution that is creating more problems for users and the media is clearly parroting over the hype and emotion to pretend that it is an alternative or a threat to Twitter.
(i kid, i kid...)
Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go, advertisers always follow, sadly.
We'll see how long this new surge lasts. I have 2 accounts on different instances and watched a 3rd that I used a lot vanish along with the instance itself when it became flooded with very illegal content.
The waves will pass, but some servers will have suffered fatal damage from it.
But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore.
Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on inside Apple thoroughly. Only after he understood the situation (he did product review sessions) and had developed a strategy, only then he executed it quickly. And even then, he knew that results would come eventually but not immediately.
Now, ofc you could argue that the situation is different since Musk is a long-term twitter user himself and knows the platform, at least outside in. Yet, Jobs was an Apple user, too.
I don’t know. We will see how this turns out. Musk has some other companies that are running quite well.
Still, this might be the one which won’t because he rushed it.
He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.
There are now reports that some of those laid off are being asked to come back, in a belated recognition that it was a chaotic and flawed process.
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile.
Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.
Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users went to friendster for sure ... Social networks have network lock-in. The more mad your users are, the more they talk about it, on the service, which ironically is good for the service.
Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement, preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different UIs, having instances with slightly different features competing.
(Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a major redesign? Change can happen ;-) )
However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort).
So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.
I’ve been off social media for some time so I figure I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.
Now, many of the people I meet are fine starting a signal chat instead of SMS.
You don't always get to pick the venue.
Twitter has a "culture" in a way that whatsapp doesn't really. That's a lot more ephemeral and subject to disruption.
Why would anyone who actually used Twitter, an obviously curated social media, want to move to a more free platform because Elon bought Twitter and wanted to ostensibly make it more open.
There is an obvious attempt to destroy Twitter, for whatever reason, with big advertisers pulling out and the government mouth piece, the BBC, is now encouraging users to leave.
> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people.
A modern interface has been put over them:
but still, it's NNTP and any NNTP newsreader can access them.
Mastodon isn't going to be a massively federated system that recreates every nuance of the Twitter UX.
It could still be a worthwhile alternative to Twitter. It would be nice if there were thousands of Mastodon servers, but perhaps a handful is ok. Mastodon has a slightly confusing user experience, but so was early Twitter - maybe that's ok too.
Whatever the downsides to Mastodon are they should be weighed against the benefits of moving away from Twitter, which are enormous. Irrespective of whether the Town Square metaphor fits exactly, Twitter hosts a massive amount of influential political discussion. Demonstrating that many users will stop using a venue for political speech if a billionaire gains unfettered control of it is an incredibly important precedent to set.
Mastodon doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a bit better than Twitter. I think it probably clears that bar easily.
Can't say mastodon will do this but if you asked me last week I would've agreed with you, yet what I'm seeing this week is unprecedented.
[0]: https://littr.me/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31785966
Shouldn't BBC wait just a bit, like a month, before breathlessly telling us how users are jumping to another network?
Do you think stories like this may influence people to leap or jump to Mastedon?
And would you characterize this piece by BBC as "making news" or "reporting news"?
It is 100% making news at the moment, and it is quite obvious that mainstream journalists are a bit uneasy about no longer being the protected cast on Twitter.
https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
Intentionally by design, or just a "MVP"/MLP limitation?
I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter.
EDIT: speling
> probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact
At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum.
> the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want
> They are going there literally to get
> They will not understand
> they will see
You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up.
Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users.
All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.
-- on the one hand, be outraged that Elon bought Twitter, and be upset that he's doing layoffs --
-- and on the other, enjoy schadenfreudistic pleasure that Elon has just been forced to pay $40B for an obvious pile of garbage --
-- all because they love to hate the loud rich guy.
I mean, I do understand, but the two thoughts don't seem logically compatible. Either Twitter is shit, layoffs were overdue, and he's a bagholder; or it's a valuable thing with necessary staff that he's acquired; I don't see how it can be both.
It seems like the anger is misplaced. Who pocketed the $40B? If the whole thing was bullshit all along, and somebody just checkmated Elon into bribing him $40B to end the grift and hang the Potemkin employees out to dry -- who was that person who took the money? Who cashed out, betraying the lower employees? Who did Elon buy Twitter from?
I know that signature is a bit tongue in cheek, but I love seeing this growth of a (then) unknown OSS project to potential household name.
> It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway
> The server you choose becomes part of your user name
> Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in
OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. A company laser focused on signups, like Twitter was at one point, would aim a growth team at this and remove all unnecessary signup steps to reduce friction. Steps like... first enter email, then auto-suggest a username, then suggest some interests (i.e., people) to follow, then (and only then) allow for the editing and selection of your username.
> he had over 6,000 new joiners in 24 hours and had to pause registration
You don't turn off signups when things get too hot. You allow signup and then throttle the experience. Reach back out when things cool down and get people re-engaged. (This is difficult, but better than nothing.)
In any case, if Mastodon is a bit like email (as another comment suggested), what will make it "just work" is an upgraded experience to make it easy to sign up. Yes, you will be "picking your server" by selecting your upgraded experience -- such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. -- but then they will also need to monetize it or track your usage for other reasons.
In fact, if it gets any traction, perhaps Google will spin up a Mastodon service as a companion to Gmail.
It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.
I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming: Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness. Pretty sweet.
It makes about as much sense as anything else that is happening.
Seen lots of people saying this is me I think on Mastodon.
A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote. Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what do those people do all day anyways"
Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the legal letter of the GPL? "Don't care, it writes my boiler plate code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose"
A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some popularity? "It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-reaction."
Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the Internet went through several of its early growth explosions, lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture and the open source and free software movement grow throughout the 90s and into the milennium.
People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of that same movement.
When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark -- what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back.
I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.
It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion. I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.
Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.
If anything, it's geared towards software engineers, most of which aren't anything like "hackers" and can swing fairly convervative on many topics.
This place isn't old school slashdot. If anything it's more for people that just want to get rich in tech at all costs.
So I wonder if you're actually complaining about diversity of thought? Because HN isn't the "hacker culture" you're talking about from the late 80s and 90's. It's got a whole bunch of those people, but also a whole bunch of everything else.
When people comment, why should they be trying to contribute to "hacker culture" at all? Why shouldn't they simply be offering their diverse perspectives?
And criticizing Mastodon is a valid perspective to have. If people are looking to jump ship from Twitter now, it's important to be realistic about whether Mastodon is or isn't "ready for business" both from technical and consumer perspectives. It's counterproductive to only hype up projects and never criticize them.
This is a board run by an incubator investment firm, so I don't really view it as an outpost of hacker culture.
I have been reading here over the past week here about private Amway rail cars, underperforming CEOs being replaced, notes about Stripe/Twitter layoffs. Most of this is peripheral, or even unrelated, to hacker culture, but I don't really read here for Hacker culture.
I've seen a lot of hacker culture in the past few months, and a lot of innovation, not necessarily here, although there's been references to it here. For what I'm interested in a lot of it has been based around Github recently, but it varies over time.
I don't see the angels, incubators, VCs, startup founders, FAANG business development and product managers, and occassional programmers talking here to have much influence on hacker culture one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people hacking on stuff have read this board, or even commented. Not all - I know a lot of very good programmers who never even heard of this board.
The revolution eats its own children. The games industry used to be the target of hacker attacks, and cracking games, pirating them, was more fun than doing damage, according to the self-image of the 80th, 90th, 00th. Who would have guessed that such a spirit could also turn against its own community, in a community where manipulation and deception took place even in the past, as long as it served one's own goals? There has never been good and evil. Only feasible and delightful. I regret it, however there is only so much we can do.
Thankfully you're here to dramatically increase the quality of commentary.
It would be sad news for me, because I see HN as last bastion of real conversation online.
You complain about comment quality and then fall for that level of fake news? Congratulations, you found the problem.
Demographic shift which did affect the hacker culture. It's not that hard to spot the image of an average hacker of today. But I'm not gonna go into details - it would be like setting fire to a dumpster.
I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc etc...
We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.