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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

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> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now?

It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future.

> Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.

Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform.

You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship.

We'll see what happens in the long run.

Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?

Your brand will have lost 3 years of opportunity to build up its footprint on an alternative - for whatever that's worth.

>Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses.

Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems more likely than it did a week ago, that he has no idea how to actually turn Twitter into a success.

>What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?

Content and followers on Twitter cannot easily and directly be transferred somewhere else. Any personal investment a user makes into Twitter today is at risk of being worthless if Twitter disappears. Whether that matters you or not depends on why you use Twitter. If it is for fun, that isn't a real risk. But plenty of people use Twitter as part of their job and these people really need to start considering if investing in their Twitter account is worth it compared to moving that effort somewhere else.

I don't think it's a false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.

Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.

There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.

What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.

>I guess I set up the false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.

But that is still a false dichotomy because I don't need to know the right answer to recognize boneheaded management. Any independent observer can see that Musk is going back and forth on certain decisions: saying "comedy is now legal on Twitter" then banning parody accounts for mocking him or laying people off then immediately asking them to come back. These are self inflected mistakes that I recognize as objectively bad management without knowing the specifics of how to properly manage Twitter.

>Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.

And none have been a media company let alone a social media company. Building cars, rocket ships, and tunnels are all relatively similar from a management perspective and are very different from running a social media company. Running a social media company requires a much more complex understanding of people and social systems. It isn't as simple as just building a good product. Twitter's technical product was never the primary issue with the company. The problems Twitter faces are all human problems. Musk hasn't shown an ability to fix those type of issues.

>There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.

Those apps are generally worthless at the scale we are talking about. Twitter has 450m monthly users. Mastodon has 1m. Retaining 0.2% of your audience when transferring platforms doesn't provide much value.

>What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.

Yes, the point it that it didn't seem like Twitter failing was a likely situation a year ago. Today it seems like a realistic possibility.

Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned. Parody accounts that may trick people into thinking they are real accounts will be banned. I don't really see the problem with that. If you ever look at any popular tech related Twitter account, you will see a ton of crypto scams in the replies from people purporting to be vitalic or other famous members of the community.

I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.

May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?

I'm not saying that Elon is guaranteed to succeed, I'm saying that it isn't clear that he is bound to fail. Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.

>Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned.

That isn't true[1].

>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.

It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.

>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?

No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.

I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.

>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.

But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.

>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.

Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.

[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/kathy-griffin-twitter-banned...

Yes it is true.

The rules[0] state:

> What is required under this policy?

> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio

In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.

My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...

[1] https://twitter.com/connorratliff/status/1589473721030701058...

Fair enough, but I have never seen that rule enforced before. Plenty of parody accounts don't list that they are a parody in their display name. There are several specifically dedicated to Elon Musk that are just "[adjective] Elon Musk" like "Bored Elon Musk" and "Italian Elon Musk" that have existed on the site for years.

That page also lists permanent suspension as the third punishment that comes after warnings and a temporary suspension. This round of punishments seemed to mostly go straight to permanent suspensions, but that wasn't consistent. Kathy Griffin and Griffin Newman have received permanent suspensions, but Sarah Silverman didn't. Is there a reason for that? Who knows?

Part of the problem with Musk's management is that it is impossible to know what the current rules are at any given moment. Is that page actually Twitter's current policy or not? Who knows?

To date there has been no change in my Twitter experience.

No but changes have been announced. Fundamentally altering what the "blue tick" means alone will give e.g. major brands pause. As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark. If I were Coca-Cola I'd be quite concerned about that.

If they were genuinely concerned about name sniping like that, they could of did the same.

>As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark.

And what are you basing that assumption on? Where did he say that for $8 anything goes? If anything he's been very plain that was NOT going to happen, yet people like you still are willing to assume the worse? Again, based on what specifically?

Two days later this hasn’t aged very well, has it?

As of this week, Twitter will release the new verified/blue where "verified" means "payment for $8/mo authorized". No actual verification of identity [0].

If this wasn't enough, Musk has confirmed the timeline will essentially shadowban non-verified accounts [1].

So anyone can take anyone's else's name as "verified" and the non-verified will not be seen.

Essentially this means if you have the money you can run dozens or thousands of verified accounts that claim to be anyone.

[0] https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1588304086792667136

[1] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...

>Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring.

In what ways? And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?

> In what ways?

Twitter's product has been static for years, barring perhaps the introduction of Twitter Spaces, which has barely made a dent in usage (as far as I can see, anyway). I personally regard this as a negative: I think that they should have been innovating more. But if I were a major brand looking at my advertising commitments I'd probably be fine with it.

> And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?

I don't personally think Mastodon is the answer so I'm probably not well positioned to answer this. But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to. It is under my control and can't be bought out by a memelord playing a prank gone wrong.

>But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to.

You have the same tools to block on Twitter. There is literally no difference.

Of course there is. On Twitter someone could sign up, pretend to be a member of my organization, pay $8 to get a verified checkmark and there's very little I can do about it. If I own my own Mastodon instance I can kick them off (or stop them from signing up in the first place)

Meanwhile before the acquisition, on Twitter, someone could sign up and pretend to be a member of your organization and... there was still very little you could do about it. Verified checkmark is a red herring, because it's not something you could guarantee for yourself or other members of your org. You were better off - and still are - with something like Keybase, or... well just not using Twitter for anything important in the first place.

If twitter fraudulently verified something there is absolutely something you could do - you could sue. And it would be pretty clear cut.

And all you can do on Mastodon is moderate your server - they can still be out there in the greater Mastodon community and there is even less you can do about that than you have recourse with Twitter.

All this sudden pearl clutching sure is amusing.

Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring

It was none of those things and was widely regarded to be the worst-run company in tech not named Theranos or WeWork, including on this very website. It's fine to dislike Musk and it's fine to dislike the moves he's made but this revisionist history has to stop.

Maybe you can explain to me the way in which Twitter was deeply unpredictable before Musk took over because I don't really see it. I agree that it was a badly run company but in a way that meant it didn't really change very much about its product in the last few years. That's what I mean about predictable and boring. If you looked at Twitter as product in 2017 and looked at it in 2022 you wouldn't see a whole lot of difference.

Take your pick between employees acting as agents on behalf of foreign governments[0], suspending POTUS for rules not uniformly applied to other users[1], introducing a fact-checking system with poor community reception[2], changing the core feature of the product (post length)[3], or improperly collecting data and accruing fines such that the US FTC now has the company under tight investigation. All done before Musk ever owned the company.

[0]https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-twitter-employee...

[1]https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22248903/twitter-birdwatc...

[3]https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/twitter-to-expand-into-lon...

[4]https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/twitter-pre-musk-data...

Don't forget the bribes to get a blue checkmark.

Not to forget the TwitterAPIpocalypse of 2012 (?), when Twitter heavily restricted its programming interfaces, which decimated the ecology of companies that were built around it, like Flattr (1.0). I surmise that's not unrelated to Mastodon's release in 2016 ?

For instance :

IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550625

April 2013

It was a good idea two weeks ago as risk mitigation. Now the bad thing risk mitigation was meant to mitigate is happening.

It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.

> People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.

Thanks to Federal insurance programs that were implemented pre-climate crisis, they continue to build there after too, for the most part.

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why.

You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

You weren't worried about it going bankrupt when it was losing millions of dollars a day and running in the red for years on end?

Once again, self proclaimed rational thinkers and scientific and engineering minds can't see their glaring biases. As long as my team is winning all of the problems "aren't so bad", but as soon as it's the other team, everything is a firebrand. Metas preparing to have massive layoffs and yet here we are arguing over someone making obvious and I mean obvious business decisions to cut waste, bloat, and start turning some profitability. We've lamented some of these financial woes about Twitter here for years, and now someone finally has started walking the walk and all of a sudden the world is ending and its time to jump ship?

RocketMan bad.

It was so poorly run that there's a chance Musk could have come in, fucked up pretty badly, and still maybe improved the books.

However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.

> I don't see how it's salvageable.

If Musk is so much of a shrewd, evil business shark it's been portrayed as in the last months, you can imagine he'll find some nasty underhanded way to attach Twitter to an IV with Starlink on the other end, and flood it with money until the blue bird is back on its feet.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why.

Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk. It would be funny to watch, if it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.

Twitter's future wasn't in any way more certain before, nor was the platform any more stable. Adding or removing random features, and screwing third parties over API T&C changes, were pretty much the trademark of Twitter already.

> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months.

Twitter now has a burden of $1 billion in interest payments per year, which it did not several months ago. That's pretty meaningful. Completely apart from anything about Elon, it would be entirely reasonable to expect this additional burden to make the product worse, as debt obligations often do.

It looks like he might try to monetize everything, which would mean that he won't need any help to destroy Twitter entirely. I would hope this would benefit Mastodon, but Mastodon has technical problems, so instead I think it will ultimately benefit Facebook's future internal twitter clone.

> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months.

But things probably will change meaningfully in the near future. You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise.

People trade futures options all the time.

> You’d have to ignore everything the new CEO is saying, in order to believe otherwise.

Thing is, he isn't saying that much. Most of what people are reacting to are people's interpretation of what Musk said, and then further interpretation of those interpretations, etc. That's what strikes me as completely bonkers.

Did you miss the news that he laid off half the company, including the content moderation team? That says plenty.

I did, actually; I caught up already (see another reply in this subthread), but my point still stands: the hysteria has been at current level for at least two weeks now. There's little causal relationship between the firings and all the noise, or sudden interest in Mastodon.

I would be much more afraid of a world where the major public square is privately owned and governed by a single individual with a proven history of public manipulation. Identity politics is just a stupid sideshow, a distraction. A private Twitter?.that's terrible. 100 times Bezos WaPo. It's the ball park of Mordoch publuc manipulation.

You're posting this on a site privately owned and run by an unaccountable billionaire.

> a proven history of public manipulation.

It's better when people say that they don't like Musk, than pretending there's some sort of higher political principle here. People don't have trouble believing that objectors don't like Musk, and disagree with him politically.

The trouble is in the appeal to principles that never come up in their discussions of e.g. the WaPo, which most of the objectors will defend to their last breath, along with Bezos. Like here, when the one of the wealthiest people in the world, owner of the largest retailer, that controls a massive part of internet infrastructure, also owns the second most influential paper, becomes 100x less important than Twitter changing ownership.

Did I defend bezos? I gave him as an example for the same thing I'm calling out musk for.

I'm just saying that Musk owning Twitter is that times 100(a made up number, obviously) because:

1. Twitter somehow became the place where most "journalists" get their news from.

2. Politicians spread their propaganda at

3. Musk has no scruples about public manipulation and abusing his power. He is set on whatever made up vision he has, and he'll do whatever it takes to get there.

Why won't he use his control of where journos and politicos create the public discourse? How is that not just expected? His company, his rules, no?

BTW you turning me calling out Musk as somehow diminishing Bezos damage is hardly in good faith. Same as your godlike mind reading , that I just hate musk and turning to principles is me hiding that fact.

Try to assume I'm speaking in good faith, it leads to much better discussions.

I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs.

Sure, the site itself looks the same, the logo is the same, but there's a ton of turmoil for the people behind the scenes. Not everything is run by computers, there are a lot of humans in the loop for the day-to-day operations of the site. The core product of "post tweet" and everything else which is all automated, sure, but there's tons of stuff that isn't, because it can't be. All that backend stuff has changed, even if you don't see it.

> I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs.

Well, OK, assuming this all pans out to be true[0], that's one hell of a botched firing, which apparently (see [0]) Musk/Twitter is trying to back-track on... but that happened in the last few days. The Internet drama about Musk and Twitter started months ago, and reached its peak before the sale ultimately went through - which means it can't be attributed to this.

Or, in a hypothetical world in which the wellness team still got sacked, but the content moderation didn't, do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying, "In a surprising change of face, Musk did not fire Twitter's content moderators", or rather headlines trying to find nefarious reasons for why the team would've been retained?

I'm not denying the turmoil that's happening in Twitter, and the hard times that befell on its employees (and ex-employees). I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does. It has its own life now.

----

[0] - AFAIK we're still at the level of reporting of "sources familiar with the matter quoting two high-level people involved in the matter" - which ordinarily means journalists quoting random Twitter posts without attribution, but in this case, I don't know how to read that.

Yeah I mean I'm sure the facts will clear after the dust settles, but for now we get hottakes based on real Tweets, fake Tweets, Internet rumors, and lies. Some of them won't age well (including mine).

> Or, in a hypothetical world ... do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying...

Less hysterical? No. As far as headlines, I can totally see both; headlines saying it's a surprise, along with a different newspaper framing it negatively. (I think I heard the shadowban group survived unscathed.)

> I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does.

I'd say it's quite correlated as it's all based off of things Musk has done (eg suspending users impersonating him) or said/tweeted (proclaimed that free speech will reign supreme). Normally I'd say saying things and doing this are two separate matters (talk is, after all, cheap), except that this is a social media site, who's entire purpose is for saying things. For Tesla it's easy to point at the number of Model 3's produced/wk or Autopilot's shortcomings and set aside things Musk has said for what he's done or not done. Twitter, on the other hand, is a place for talk, so when Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, and then proceeds to buy Twitter, people take notice, especially at junctures where it turns out he's not.

There is a lot of stuff about Mastodon flying around, which isn't really related to Musk's speech/actions, and supports your "life of its own" part though.

> by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk

All your other point are good but this one surprises me. I think at this point people can have very rational fear and hatred of this guy. He's a 50 year old man with literally the world view of and politics a 14 year old edgelord on Fortnite but with enough money and following to do real damage with that. The biggest fears people seem to have is that he actually succeeds at his stated intentions for the platform.

> All your other point are good but this one surprises me.

I'll tell you where it comes from. I used to like Musk in early SpaceX / first Falcon landing / Tesla Model S era. Then I disconnected from the news a bit, for a couple of years, and started to pay more attention recently (~last year). I saw constant hatred of Musk on-line. I tried to investigate what he did to make people so upset, and besides a name calling here and there, I found literally nothing.

On the contrary, what I found is smart people who I used to respect retweeting or posting trivially disprovable soundbites like the whole apartheid money thing. I haven't seen an argument that wasn't overblown to ridiculous proportions.

This is not to say Musk didn't turn into villain. I'm not convinced either way, and I'm definitely not trying to claim he's pristine and good. I may have missed some important stories in ~2018-2021. What I am convinced about, though, is the whole anti-Musk crowd literally went high on their own bullshit, and is a perfect illustration how it ends when you have a feedback loop of people one-upping increasingly exaggerated claims.

Similar thing happened to me, but I think a lot of the souring happened due to the weird debacle with Musk calling the diver that saved those stranded kids a pedophile. Still, I don't know how that turned Musk into another culture war badge. Is he an out-of-touch, insensitive, crappy rich person? Seems like it, one of tens of thousands. But his culture war badge status is a bit weird.

> This is an entirely self-induced panic,

> it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.

You're accidentally making the Cultural Studies mistake of seeing the choices of a very small number of individuals at massive corporations that are broadcast to the general public as an expression of the general public themselves. It's not a self-induced panic, it's a media-induced panic that requires a media trust (in the antitrust sense) to sustain.

Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.

Hopefully we at least learn that "build your own social network" was never a reasonable point.

Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.

If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long.

I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.

Mastodon and ActivityPub in general have UX issues. I can't imagine trying to explain to non-technical users why they have to open a pop-up window to another website just to be able to follow someone, or why people keep changing handles, etc etc.

For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.

In the first week Musk has already shown that his Twitter will erratically push out poorly thought out policy changes on a whim. Definitely not giving "reliable" vibes.

It's crazy how well this comment aged.

In an alternate, saner universe we normalized running "apps" backed by email rather than only backed by the Web, and Twitter and Facebook are just special email readers made by companies worth low-tens-of-millions of dollars.

This is what happened with GitHub after the MS acquisition announcement as well. Right after the announcement there was a HN post about repo creation/imports being up 1000% or something, but now we can tell that not too much has changed (and GitLab was free hosted as well; you have to run your own mastodon instance). Until mastodon itself brings some killer feature that makes it de-facto better than Twitter, or Twitter actively starts promoting hate speech to people who otherwise are only interested in the art / 'art' parts of the platform, then it'll still be relevant even if it's bleeding a lot more money than it used to.

The killer feature is the fact that it is actually a nice place to visit and this is partly by design. The stream of negativity that pervades Twitter is not present to the same degree.

Cards on the table, I don’t think federated Twitter will be a thing. Or at least it’s not a replacement for Twitter, in the forms I’ve seen it so far.

However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while.

And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.

I don't have a twitter account (requires a mobile number that I won't give them), so I am a bit at a disadvantage here. But am I right to assume that twitter will only show you tweets from people you follow (or their own re-tweets)?

If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place?

If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?

Wouldn't being the topic du jour exactly the right time to lean into promoting it? I mean Elon raised a massive PR storm for Twitter and alternatives. Mastodon have been trying to become mainstream since forever. Fowler believes it to be a good thing also, so he uses his media clout (blog readership) to lean in and push this message. Why is that a problem?

Very few people knew this was even an option before last week as there was next to zero mention of it in the corp media they see. Now every big media outlet is suddenly explaining it. People also tend to only act when on the precipice. This does not bade well for other problems around the corner.

Lack of an alternative, lack of marketing, laziness? Convenience of others being there, network effects?

They don't seem like good answers, just happen-stance ones.

The idea of decentralising isn't bad IMO, maybe that'll be the next main topic.

> it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon

Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans...

What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"...

Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.

>He is tearing down moderation How? Indeed, he hasn't changed anything about moderation (except applying to to everyone universally) >crapping on verification By expanding it to anyone willing to pay instead of it being some exclusive club where people had to literally bribe twitter employees tens of thousands for the coveted blue check? Yup - he's totally going backwards! > and injecting itself on electoral politics. lol - Twitters whole reason to exist for the last six years was to be the amplifier for one particular political ideology. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't an injection into electoral politics?!? How rich!

Maybe the free speech activists who now run Twitter could charge Mastodon promoters with "tortious interference" for damaging Twitter

We hadn't heard of Mastodon before all the Twitter stuff went down. People simply hadn’t been aware of it

> After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.

No one wants to do this. The HN type crowd always is willing (or says its willing) to do more work to get more privacy/freedom/etc... Almost everyone else will take convenience and cost over those things.

That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.

"Thing Elon built-or-owns, without Elon" turns out to be an entire market segment.

Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else.

FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.

>Thing Elon built

Are we really going to act like Elon built Twitter now?

Ah, fair. I'll edit-correct.

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