The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
- No data mining
- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/web/@raphael/1093815543157191...
Like, especially, a bad actor could run several large instances with no public relationship and so all kinds of correlation.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
For people that use Twitter but care about their public square on the internet being slightly more sustainable and human-scale, Mastodon's model makes a lot of sense. Mastodon provides the tool for building your networks, making it possible for small organizations to run instances basically as utilities. I'm particularly excited for the co-ops I've seen in this space.
Can you be a bit more specific? This literally applies to the top 6 media corporations, Amazon, several banks, and pretty much every other large corporation.
The use by Musk of the term "public square" when he's running a private corporation on his own whims is what is causing him problems.
So far my experience is reminding me of 1990’s style connecting and chatting with interesting random people from around the world who are friendly and quirky, and I find being there a “nice” experience.
If they have to split their efforts among 10,000 independent groups, maybe the EV-chasers will go away and people will talk about things other than the latest scandal or movie.
I don't expect Twitter to go bankrupt, but it will need desperate measures to stay afloat. When it'll come to "either we do this or we go bust", they won't stop at anything. It's likely going to be a massive sell-off of user privacy on a scale that will make people run to Facebook for safety.
Has it still? A lot of interesting people I used to follow on Twitter either don't post much there anymore or straight out deleted their accounts when moving to Mastodon. I haven't deleted mine, but I certainly feel much less inclined to cross-post things to Twitter anymore as well.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
> My favorite might be Ben Thompson’s rather bearish post, which argues essentially that Twitter is a very unpleasant product that most people do not want to use, but is extremely appealing and addictive to a small minority of us with significant personality flaws.
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".