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.
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.)
See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter?
> Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
Just saying…
Reducing things like underutilized servers could really make a big difference that won't just shift to somewhere else like fired employees would. Especially storage is something that is pretty energy intensive even when not in use very much. Our SAN systems were by far the hottest things in our datacenters even though the amount of compute capacity done on those boxes is negligible.
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...
[0] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
Yes, you can still tweet freely, but it’ll effectively be a shadow ban.
He even repeated it in the Spaces chat hosted by Robin Wheeler earlier today, using the analogy of non-Blue Twitter users’ tweets being like emails going to your spam folder.
Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
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.
Ask yourself that question.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
"He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!
Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians without understanding the context.
Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its acquisition. It has had 2 profitable years in its entire life. Corporations are not charities and it absolutely beggars belief that people seem to think radical changes were not both necessary and inevitable.
Do you have a source for that? They lost $221M in 2021[1] which is ~$600k/day (and that was after a $800M lawsuit settlement which would have put them at ~$580M profit for 2021.)
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/twitter-posts-loss-2021-stock-1301280...
Straight from the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588671155766194176
Or do you think it is even slightly plausible for a company to go from a profit of ~$570M to a loss of ~$1.4B in under a year?
And regardless of the rate of loss, the fact remains that twitter, throughout its entire history, has been a money-losing operation. Even taking the literally 2 years they were in the black, that doesn't wipe out the other unprofitable years. This seems like one hell of a nit to pick.
The new debts apparently add over $1 billion / year in interest payments alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/elon-musk-twit...
(Being able to do this as part of a buyout sounds ridiculous, I know. And yet.)
There was no imminent need for Twitter do anything. It still had a healthy enough cash pile and leeway and time to layoff 10% of the workforce or so to return to pre-COVID staffing levels.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
And the $4 million/day is from the debt incurred by Elon's purchase.
A lot of Twitter employees have spent years being about as obnoxious as they possibly can be to anyone with even slightly different views. I've seen a Twitter employee practically in tears calling someone a fascist because they insisted on putting semi-colons after statements in JavaScript.
> Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people.
I don't think it's distasteful at all. Twitter isn't a charity and it needs to fix its finances. Even the previous CEOs recognized that there's a ton of Twitter employees that do basically no relevant work.
I don't think this is empathy related to be honest ( as your statement is "a man that rich firing loads of people." )
It is either wrong to fire those people, or not. If it is not wrong to fire those people, it shouldn't matter who did it.
In what way? I mean, besides him being very powerful. Other than that, his behavior here seems perfectly capitalistic to me.
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.
I could ask the same about your comment please.
> Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think
You set up a strawman and knock it down. There are many legitimate reason why someone might object to Musk or his wealth. Thinking that “wealth somehow equates evil” is indeed juvenile, yet somehow you assume people hold that thought and work from that assumption.
> I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon
Oh great. The sheepish masses. They don’t even have a coherent thought!
Except this is your fantasy again. There are many legitimate reasons to dislike him. Why don’t you ask people, instead of labeling them empty headed media-driven zombies? This is hardly a way to “engage in discussion”.
> It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met.
He kinda put himself in front of others. That is his brand. It has benefits and drawbacks. I don’t know why you think one has to meet someone to judge their character. If he does contemptible things through online discussion why can’t someone hold him in contempt?
> If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.
I doubt it is truly everyone. Many many individuals live a public life without kicking of a firestorm with the same regularity he does.
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...
I'm pretty sure you missed the important point of that history you've been reading. The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership.
> On the surface that made a lot of sense
To whom?
> 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.
There are a plethora of companies that behave in this exact way that millions of people continue to patronize in a much more substantial manner than they do Twitter (Food, vehicles, electronics, etc.).
Musk's behavior is not new, unique or shocking. These people are overplaying their outrage over his behavior because they don't like the man and Twitter is their safe space. It has absolutely nothing to do with his actual business practices.
I guess you're not familiar with the Inclosure Acts? (To name but one of the grossly amoral uses of land ownership in the past few centuries.)
OP was not claiming all land ownership was bad. Just that rich people have commonly used land ownership to harm others. There is a long and rich history of this.
That's not a use of land ownership, that's an amoral redistribution (theft) of land.
They took ownership from one party to another. The amorality was the transfer, not the ownership. Unless you think both parties are equally amoral for owning the land in the beginning and the end of the process.
The argument you're making would be like saying it was amoral for plantation owners to own the land they held because they had slaves. The problem is the slaves (and all the evils that came with it), not the plantation.
Yes it was. That's why many confederates had their land and property seized, and their slaves freed by the confiscation acts.
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.
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.
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.
Of course if they had any real data on the impact of their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company and said "hey I need to go buy from them"
Now marketing for lesser known things, things I may not have even known existed well that is effective. But a Burger king add no....
The vocal minority has always had the largest impact in all history, that's just how humans work. And even sometimes the vocal minority is correct and the moderate masses say "Oh, yea, you're right megacorp does suck and should probably change".
Simply put there are a number of relatively high view sites that don't have what we would consider reputable advertisers because those advertisers don't agree with the message of the site.
This is why people are sooo upset with the management change at twitter, and why they are going after the advertisers now while they still have at least symbolically control over the structures of power.
For at least 20 years now the far left authoritarians have had total control over the media, and the large internet platforms, this wind is starting to shift to the other direction and we are seeing the inevitable attempt to tear down the system before "the others" gain control over it
I try not to cuss much on HN, but what the fuck are you talking about? If you think Fox News, one of the organizations with the largest audience is far left, you're out of your mind. If you think MSNBC or CBS were anywhere close to 'far left', you are again, out of your mind. Under no definition are those far left.
I think you have a confused idea that a 'open free market' system is building itself, where in reality a bunch of far right fascists are attempting a powergrab.
One slightly right authoritarian news source does not a rule make... I bet you think "republican" means right.... I am a firm believer of the unipary theory of politics
Republicans are no better than democrats. One wants to tell you what to do with your life (including your bedroom) but leave you with your money and guns, the other wants to take your money and guns but will allow you to do pretty much any thing you want (including victimize violently and take an property of others it seems)
Neither are good, both are very much authoritarian
> If you think MSNBC or CBS were anywhere close to 'far left',
If we are cussing.... What the fuck are you talking about... MSNBC not far left? What the hell do you consider far left then... MSNBC is the leftist of left.... Hell At this point they are probably more left than the Young Turks
Ground News marks them as left as well [1]. NPR is "leans left" [2] and Reuters is "Center" [3]
[1] https://ground.news/interest/msnbc [2] https://ground.news/interest/npr [3] https://ground.news/interest/reuters_fa2539
For every Fox news, there are 5++ Left media companies, so yes Fox nows has a large audience because it is consolidated and not spread out between MSNBC, CNN, New Times, Washington Post, and the 100's of other left and left leaning outlets.
It is also very much present in various tech and fashion/style publications - check out Ars Technica and GQ as examples.
Both owned by the corporate mouthpiece Condé Nast Inc., by the way.
Democrat Strategy 2022
Let's see how that works out for them tomorrow...
Almost no one thinks advertising works on them, but that comes from a misunderstanding of what ads are trying to accomplish. Mercedes doesn't expect you to see a Twitter ad then go out and buy a $60k car. They advertise to establish their brand so that when you do decide to buy a car, you have a perception of Mercedes that is at least partially built through the years of advertisements you have seen from them.
I don't understand what distinction you are making here? Aren't those the same things?
It's always funny to see people on HN confidently assert absolute horseshit based on no experience.
As someone who's worked in ad-supported publishing, they absolutely do. A lot of time and energy goes into trying to ensure ads never appear alongside content that the purchaser doesn't want, and failure usually results in running ads for free, at a minimum.
There’s also an interesting prisoner’s dilemma to advertising, which cuts both ways. If your competitors advertise, then you need to as well. And if they don’t, then you don’t either.
I can assure you the people screeching about twitters new ownership are not Fords Customer base. Ford's bread and butter is the F150, a class of vehicle that the twitterverse that is leaving on mass would like to eliminate from production
Ford marketing dept is extremely tone deaf listing to that crowd
The Ford F150 is no niche product. It's the most popular car in all US states except in 5 or 6 states. According to some sources , "the vast majority of these new trucks are [sold] in large and medium-sized cities."
https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/10/pickup-truck-owner-de...
So unless you want to claim that white males living in large urban centers from all corners o the US are not Twitter's demographics, your view is baseless and completely detached from reality.
But be my guest and point out the best source you used to source your claim.
And lastly:
https://marketing.twitter.com/en/success-stories/ford-f150-l...
Hard to explain, isn't it?
That is not my claim at all, my claim is the people that are freaking out about Elon owning twitter, that are freaking out about having a more free speech platform, that are freaking out that conservatives views will not be instantly banned by twitter "trust and safety" are not white males living in or buying trucks in Medium to Large cities in largely fly over country outside of Coastal West, and Coastal North East states which seems to be where most of the people freaking out are based from.
Ford suspending ads on twitter is doing a disservice to ford, to appease people that were never going to buy a F150 in the first place. The twitter users Ford is targeting either does not care, or supports Elon's changes.
>>It's the most popular car in all US states except in 5 or 6 states.
Yes, and what states are those?? All blue states, and specifically Silicon Valley.
>>"the vast majority of these new trucks are [sold] in large and medium-sized cities."
I dont think that is the "gotcha" you think it is... There are plenty of Medium and even large cities in "fly over" country, further most dealers in large and medium sized cities so even if you do not live in one, or plan on using your truck in one, chances are you are traveling to a Large or medium sized city to buy the thing.
I currently live in a Medium sized city, but my truck was bought in a large city (the 3rd largest city in my state) and my previous truck was bought in the state capital even though I lived in a town of 1500 people at the time... The dealer I bought it from was a 4 hour drive away.
I see assertions like this a lot. Please show me the person who has been banned from Twitter for advocating for lower taxes or social benefit cuts. Or even, if you want to stretch the definition of “conservatives views”, gun rights and climate denial.
That would be republican public policy views, not conservative views. They are different things.
Conservative views are less about the economy and more about culture, family, traditional gender roles, faith, etc.
There are all kinds of examples of that being banned espically since TOS is written for a progressive or left world view
Remember the banning of Babylon Bee for satirically misgendering a trans high profile public offical was the catalyst that started Elon talking about buying twitter in the first place
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.
https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/quarte...
And if you think my opinion isn’t worth anything, consider the richest man in the world just spent $200 on it.
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.
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.
But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.
Ya know, like their email servers.
That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.
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.
Because they could just plug it and make it the most popular social media
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.
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.
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 remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know' suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross referencing.
I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to grow the list.
Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in Mastodon.
Are we talking timeline/search promotion?
I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did add people if you recognised them.
Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need some nudging.
If I read an article and the author had an easy lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.
The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".
Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards".
E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.)
Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.
Email on the other hand is a great example of how decentralized things become centralized over time due to the network effect. There's even a weak network effect with email and it still happened.
Same as democracy in the US. Even if for the most part policy is set by centralized interests, just having the populace believe that it's a democracy and they have the agency to change things makes the system function in a fundamentally different way. The ruling class can't just cart blanche do whatever they want like in China, even if they are the ones holding most of the levers.
Except it isn't because centralization-decentralization is not a binary discrete variable but a continuous one. There's a reason the trilemma exists and you score on each axis. No coin is at any extreme.
Some smaller ones remain, but it's mostly gone.
If I own a media company the last thing I'm doing is investing in the IT and moderation infrastructure it takes to run a Mastodon instance.
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.
Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.
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.