Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

infosec.exchange

331 pointsdoener355 comments

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.

But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar

I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

Such as Tumblr

For those downvoting the above poster, this probably wasn't a sarcastic quip - Tumblr really does plan to federate with the rest of the fediverse.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-...

I'm guessing some might have downvoted because I mentioned paid providers. As in letting you pay them to run a Mastodon instance. While the above poster seems to have read my "and more are sure to come" as more options in general rather than more paid options. But I didn't downvote as I agree, the promise of Tumblr support is a big deal and will be a good option for a lot of people.

I know that's not what you meant but Tumblr is not free like your friendly neighborhood Mastodon instance or a foundation instance, it's for profit and paid for by advertisers and via paid features.

> I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person.

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.

You've had the US President tweeting a lot. I'm sure the US government could replace Twitter with a bespoke version of Twitter if they didn't want to use Mastodon. Similarly there are news publications like the NYT which could operate their own bespoke Twitter. Reuters and the Associated Press basically already manage some services which could be described as a bespoke Mastodon instance. Who are the Twitter users who matter who can't afford to operate their own Mastodon server?

I'm not suggesting any individual do so, but this is not rocket science. I feel like maintaining a physical building is probably harder, so any organization with a physical building that has ~100+ members should be able to do this - and enough organizations doing this could replace Twitter.

I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way.

However.

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.

> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?

Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.

> there are no private messages on Mastodon

It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.

It's not about them being read, it's about them being used against me. Being scraped and weaponised to train some algorithm to exploit me. That's the issue I have.

In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).

I dont think it feels threatened. Most migrated Mastodon users dislike Musk and they deliberately rub him the wrong way.

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done.

Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.

Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

Note: if the server you're on is banned, you won't be able to move to a different server.

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but I don't think this is true. I have not tried it but as long as you have your data you can always setup your own instance with it. Ideally you have a server backup but if not there is a script that can convert the ordinary Mastodon export (the one you can do as a regular user in the UI of any instance) into a form suitable to import into the database of your instance.

You can't migrate your followers that way, can you? Which is (arguably) for many people more important than the content of their posts.

I haven't thought this through thoroughly yet, but I could not come up with a migration scenario where you could keep your followers. Your handle will change and as long as the old instance is banned I guess a redirect from there to the new handle does not work. So, fair point! I'd be curious what others think, maybe there is a way?

Mastodon supports user migrations that keeps your followers. It's pretty new and not supported everywhere yet, but it does work (I've used it) with the caveat that some followers on older software will still follow the old account at the moment.

It works by the old and new server "cooperating", so it won't let you move between two servers which won't federate with each other - in that specific scenario you'll need to go via a third server which both speak to.

The move appears to you as if your followers unfollows your old account and follows the new account, so they're all "redirected" to your new handle. E.g. you can see that here: https://mastodon.social/@vidarh

You indicate to the old server where you want to move to, and then to the new server where you're moving from, and the fact the old server will specify your new handle in your profile is used as proof when informing your followers instances of the new address.

If you do this, you can see mastodon.social returns a "movedTo" attribute for my old account:

    curl -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://mastodon.social/users/vidarh | jq .movedTo

You don’t own your followers. When you move they get a notification you moved and their following lists are adjusted accordingly.

Not when the instance you are on is banned or otherwise disappears and you use your exported data to "revive" your account on a different instance (with a different handle), which is the scenario I proposed above.

The only way to avoid that is to stand up your own instance. And that is the great thing about decentralized systems. Because you as a user have no visibility into the systems, finances, nor management of any of these platforms.

I still blog on a server I rent but the backup is hosted in a server in my closet. I’m fully aware that rental can go away any time. And that’s been the case for decades.

Maybe it’s a generational thing but it appears people assume these platforms owe them something. The TOS makes it clear they owe them very little. So you can be muted, banned or deleted at any moment.

I’ve watched many social networks disappear and end up in the footnotes of a Wikipedia article. Nothing about the internet is guaranteed nor permanent. Twitter nor Mastodon owe you anything.

I'm on my own Mastodon instance but should it get banned I'd pretty much lose my followers. I think that was the original point. Otherwise agreed, neither Twitter nor Mastodon owe me anything.

If you get banned on Twitter or any other centralized service, you lose all your followers. If you get banned on Mastodon, you lose your followers on the instance(s) that banned you.

But generally it takes a lot to get banned by most fediverse instances. You basically either need to be a nazi or consort with nazis.

There are, of course, instances that would ban you for less than that, but these tend to be much smaller and trying to foster a very specific type of community. If they'd ban you, they probably wouldn't follow you either.

If it disappears, you're right. If it's "banned" (not a thing, assuming you mean defederated) then you can't move to one of the instances which have defederated it. Any followers from an instance which has defederated yours will also be lost, not because you can't move them but because the block on their instance will automatically cause them to unfollow you.

The solution to this is to move to an instance which hasn't defederated from the one you're on. Worst case, setting up your own.

For everyone doing social media (semi-)professionally, followers are pretty much all that matters. That sounds like it gives server operators leverage against journalists and the like that happen to be on their server. They can move server, sure, but they lose their reach, that's ugly especially for smaller publications or individuals who can't easily hire staff to run their own instance.

Why would your server get banned though? It's not going to happen to moderated servers. If you pick some small, weird, or insurrection aligned server, that might be an issue. Otherwise, you're just stressing out about something that won't happen.

There is no "global ban" for servers. You won't be able to move to a server that has defederated the server you're moving to or been defederated by it.

But you can still move to a third party server. If you desperately want to move from A to B and A and B are defederated from each other, you can even do that by moving from A to C and C to A as long as both A and B are willing to talk to C.

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.

I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

Also, you can't back up your followers.

You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread.

I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

I have moved instances, so it made a practical difference to me. I also follow a lot of people who have moved instances and in all cases I only noticed because they posted about it (and hence there are probably more who have moved that I didn't notice).

It needs improvements, such as the ability to move in spite of the old server (the ability to get at your private key so you or the new server can sign an assertion about the move with the old accounts key would be one option which would at least give people the choice of being prepared), and moving over the old posts (there are some stupid concerns about "faking timelines" which you can trivially do anyway, so I think this is a question of time to resolve that - it's not technically hard), but it already does offer significantly more freedom than Twitter.

> I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist".

There's no moving on goalposts here. I have not replied to you suggesting anything less than this previously, so there were no goalposts for me to move.

> Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

So don't rely on instances.social if that is a consideration for you. If this matters to you, do your research. Joinmastodon.org does have a filter for "legal structure", but if you care about that you really should read the about page of your prospective server. Or run or pay for your own.

I simply provided you with a list of options if this is a consideration for you. It's your choice whether or not any of those options works for you.

> Also, you can't back up your followers.

Yes you can, though not from the default Mastodon UI. In fact anyone can download your followers list as JSON. What you can't do without support from the original server is to cause your followers to refollow you on the new account, and that is indeed a legitimate flaw that I'd like to see fixed (and it's doable - there are key-pairs associated with the accounts which would allow for signing an assertion about the account moving, and while the server need to have a copy of the main private key there's no reason for users not to be able to get a copy of it). It probably will be - the entire account move functionality is quite new and needs iteration.

you dont need to pick a small server like that man. that's what he's saying.

All servers can communicate. You're not locked into servers. This isnt an MMO... infosec.exchange, the one I use, isnt an exclusive thing. It basically just shows my name as: unloco@infosec.exchange.

I can see and talk to mastodon.social. I can use hashtags and people from other servers will see it just like twitter.

The server you pick is just a name and a local server. If you pick a server that's dying, just move to the next one. You keep everything, it just changes from:

unloco@infosec.exhange to unloco@mastodon.social. You wont lose the friends, just the host name changes.

If you have exported you data from the instance you should be able to set up your own instance with that data.

Well that sucks. But commercially businesses fail all the time. Sometimes you get a heads up and can plan accordingly. And other times it’s like FTX and the site is down the next day, after a major scandal.

The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

The internet owes you nothing.

> The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

No, that’s a failure of the specific protocol. Your identity could simply be a public key. This way it’s:

1) Tamperproof

2) Not dependant on any specific server

If your identity is "simply" a public key, then...how does anyone actually refer to you? By a handle? That's not part of a public key. An avatar? I guess you could generate one à la Gravatar from a public key, but those aren't going to be very memorable.

A public key is a way to securely and uniquely say "this is me". It says nothing about who you are, anything about you, what you like or do, your links to other people, or anything like that.

All that information has to be stored somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle

Most instances follow the Mastodon Covenant, whose promises include giving users three months warning before a shutdown.

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

> I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronisticm.

I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?

Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.

Yet nobody really showed how to solve p2p in a way that supports: moderation, not downloading massive amount of data, account recovery, safe protocol upgrades. For example scuttlebutt exists and the initial connection involves "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data.", you can't lose your keys, and unless something changed, moderation is still just wishful thinking "Presently, there is a "flag" feature, which is an extremely strong negative signal. If somebody is behaving poorly, feel free to flag them."

I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.

> fragments the community

I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.

I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.

I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed.

I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?

So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

>So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.

Just take your time and get familiar. I wemt through some teething troubles but have found it to be worth it.

The "Create Account" button does indeed let you create a Mastodon account. Just not on mastodon.social. I can't seem to reconcile your description with what happens when you press that button, though.

The official app has a significantly shittier UX than the webui. Third party apps provide a better experience, but randos who haven't already been on mastodon for years don't know that. This is where I've found a lot of the friction lives.

If users are confused by this process, then maybe the explanation of the process is the problem, not the users.

There are certainly improvements to be made, but people seem to largely figure it out.

I'll note that if you click "Create Account" on mastodon.social at the moment on desktop, it shows a modal that explains that you can interact no matter which Mastodon server you sign up on, then shows a "On this server" explaining mastodon.social is currently closed for signups, reminds people that they don't need an account on mastodon.social to use mastodon, then a "On a different server" header that explains that you can create an account on a different server, with a big blue "Find another server" button taking you to joinmastodon.org/server.

I'm sure this still confuses some people (and more confusingly, if you narrow the window enough the "create account" button takes you straight to the link above without explanation; that doesn't seem like great UX), and I'd love to see tweaks to make it better, but the above seemed odd to me, not least because it doesn't seem like they've tried the regular registration flow, so I have no clue what it is they actually did. It seems maybe they've clicked the "Learn more" link, given the description about a "wall of text" about what they can't do?

That server is swamped with registrations and had to pause them. Pick another.

This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally. And even if none of that happens, and the server you pick turns out to be a good one - then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

This is exactly the same thing as creating an email address, and as far as I know no-one is complaining because they have to choose a server/domain to use.

Most people get given an email by their workplace, school or ISP. Or there are big corporations like Google and Microsoft offering them (for free and paid). None of that is true for Mastodon now, which makes it not “exactly the same thing” at all

People used to have problems with this ca. 25 years ago (I ran an ISP back then, and it was difficult for people). It took a couple of years and then enough knowledge had diffused to enough people that anyone who struggled just asked a friend and got walked through it.

If Mastodon is successful the same thing will happen again.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

How do you choose anything? On joinmastodon.org/servers you're presented with filter options and descriptions. You look at the descriptions and pick one you think you'll like. If you don't, you can do an account move. Plenty of people will be happy to help.

Personally I'm perfectly fine with making people think twice if they're not willing to invest the time to find a server. It's ok - they can pick something else if that works better for them.

> Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally.

This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blocks. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits. None of which are listed on joinmastodon.org/servers - it takes effort or really bad luck to end up on a server where this is a big issue.

> then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.

It's an issue particularly now because signups are 10x-20x normal because of Musk. It's a scaling issue which will go away, as the number of new instances is also rapidly going up and people are addressing it. Additionally, if you e.g. go to mastodon.social and press "Create Account" you're offered an explanation and linked to joinmastodon.org/servers to pick another one.

> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

That's of course your choice.

> This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blogs. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits

Look at how many controversies there have been about whether Twitter should or shouldn’t ban some controversial figure (everyone from Donald Trump to J K Rowling). What happens if Mastodon gets similar controversies, and then big Mastodon server operators disagree among themselves about how to respond, and then block each other’s servers out of that disagreement? Nobody can say it can’t happen, I can’t see any guardrails to prevent such splits. If anything, Mastodon’s community seems to be full of people who think that Twitter (whether pre or post Musk) is insufficiently moderated and not banning enough people, which seems to make such a development only more likely

Nobody can say it can't happen, but the reality is that the operators of the big instances so far at least have understood that there's an inherent damaging effect to defederating instances that has a sizeable proportion of genuine users that means it's generally treated as a last resort except for "purebred" abusive instances.

What happens if it should come to pass is that users will need to decide whether they like it like that, or move to a third party instance that doesn't block either one or only block the one they want blocked.

And the prospect of a user exodus (for a decision either way) is an incentive for admins to pay attention to what their users actually wants. To me that's just fine (though I'd like improvements to the user migration functionality to make this process even easier).

I could worry about this, or I can worry about Musk's whims. On Mastodon I can move elsewhere (and did; where I started was fine, but I'm now on my own instance because I like having more control). On Twitter, there's no recourse. As such I'll take those future hypotheticals over what's happening to Twitter any day.

> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.

I'm beginning to see this as a feature. The best social network may indeed be one that requires effort.

> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose?

It's important to know that moving between servers is fairly well implemented; a few clicks and your followers will automatially migrate over to the new one. Your first pick doesn't have to be final.

It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared.

If not now, then when?

Because blockchains are definitely not built for that..?

Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.

> But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic

Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

> The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:

- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;

- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;

- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);

- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;

- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;

- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;

- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...

Previous HN discussions of Nostr:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)

You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

> How do I find people to follow?

> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow

And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.

You can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked.

The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you want even more "trendiness"

It makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery.

Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok.

It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

If you take content discovery out of the protocol, I would say it then behooves you to put at least an example of content discovery into the reference implementation.

There's a big difference between creating a protocol that's intended for fully-content-agnostic communication over the Internet (eg, HTTP) and creating a protocol that's specifically intended to be used to build a social network. The latter type needs various features that enable the type of behavior we know people on social networks desire from them. It does not, as you say, necessarily need to encode strong opinions about how content discovery should be done into the protocol at a fundamental level, but it at least needs to acknowledge that that is a thing that will be necessary for any social network to succeed.

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. There are many discovery options but they are all pull rather than pushed into your feed. They are under development. Feditrends.com fedi.directory trunk...

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon, it's been added ~3 weeks ago:

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/

I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again.

I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.

Technology Connections put it well

https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650...

> "Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."

Yes! I think the reason people struggle with Mastodon is they implicitly understand that picking a server is, whether they want it to be or not, a reflection of their online persona, and they don’t know how to find or gauge servers to see if they might “fit”.

I think universities should immediately make official instances for students and faculty. At least in academic twitter circles having an official institutional home would probably help a ton with migration; it would feel like a natural place to be.

> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media

And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

And people who host their own email server complain all the time that Google and Microsoft centralized email and set their own (often opaque) rules on what gets delivered.

Therefore, 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization.

> 'Gmail for Mastodon' would seemingly just swing the pendulum back towards centralization

Nobody outside a select few want to host their own server. And nobody wants to research which server to join, before they’ve experienced an ounce of product benefit, nor how to back up their data. This was always going to be centralised to a degree. But Gmail/Outlook with some Proton/Fast is distinctly better than Twitter, Musk or no Musk.

which is why email is a bad analogy.

email adoption was fast because it was a gamechanger compared to faxes and telegraphs. ISPs offered inboxes, as did universities and offices, years before Hotmail arrived.

Additionally, people got email because they wanted to communicate with friends. People get on social media mostly to escape boredom, not intentionally communicate with stranngers.

I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed.

The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?

I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.

> I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes

Has he really though? Apparently now he's banning journalists asking him for comments on stories. It seems to be getting worse and more arbitrary on his end.

https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...

Ariadna Jacobs says that Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, by asking her for her home address for “fact-checking” purposes, promising that it was not for publication, and then publishing it anyway - https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149...

Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt

That seems like a fairly big stretch for something, however bad, allegedly happening in 2020 off Twitter at all.

Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

> That seems like a fairly big stretch for something, however bad, allegedly happening in 2020 off Twitter at all.

Jacobs argues it did happen on Twitter, because Lorenz and others used Twitter to promote the NYT article in which she doxxed her.

> Besides, isn't any legal content fair game on the new Twitter?

I think when Musk said that, he really meant “ideas” not mere “information”. It might be legal for me to post your home address, but I don’t think that is what he had in mind. I think what he meant was that people with unpopular social/political/etc views should be free to express them if they are legal. Someone’s home address isn’t a social/political/etc view.

So I don’t think banning people for doxxing is really contrary to what he meant when he said that. Now, he actually has gone backward on what he meant - re-banning Kanye for extremely antisemitic posts, implying that extreme antisemitism is not going to be allowed even if legal - but surely it is good he went back on that?

(The problem with banning “non-extreme” antisemitism, is few can agree on where to draw the line - some pro-Israel people claim that anyone who criticises Israel “too much” is being antisemitic, effectively implying that almost all pro-Palestinian activism is antisemitic - but surely we shouldn’t just ban everyone who is pro-Palestinian. On the other hand, few would deny that sometimes, some pro-Palestinian activists do get “carried away” and veer into more clearly antisemitic territory. But how far is too far? Reasonable people can disagree. This is why I think it is okay to ban clearcut cases of extreme antisemitism, like Ye, but trying to ban every possible instance of it is not sensible.)

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.

Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there.

You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.

I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.

Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".

Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.

Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.

Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules.

infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social

I have build https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D

lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people.

without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.

at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.

When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like.

Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.

I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.

huh. ability to mute someone's reposts in your own timeline won't do much for purposes of browsing through that particular person's tweets though. it's not about 'how someone's tweets appear in your timeline', but 'browsing someone's tweets'. to be fair, twitter doesn't let you just filter out reblogs from someone's profile timeline either (though one could just do a search like 'from:username'), but with visible likes, this sort of 'personal curation' separates itself into 'profile tweets' and 'likes', with retweets getting used more sparingly.

I also don't like that difference in separation w/less visible likes/favourites.

Other than that I think what you're describing might well be a good feature for one of the frontends to support. Incidentally, since all of the profile info is available without auth, it's also possible to build an entirely separate profile browser that could offer that filtering for any profile.

EDIT: Mastodon in fact includes a profile browser for remote profiles; it's just that when logged out it will redirect to the remote profile instead of show the "local view" of it. So if someone wants to build a profile browser like that, all the necessary code for a good starting point is there in Mastodon already. Thought it might well be easier just to do it from scratch.

Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?

I trust an anarchist admin with my DMs more than any corporation, billionaire, intelligence agencies, and their data miners, but you do you.

I just setup a new instance in less than 30 minutes. There are many ways it can be done.. Hoops are optional.

Mastodon looks workable to me.

Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.

I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.

I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).

I am an admin of a small instance that most likely isn't on Twitter's block list, so my profile name and description could report the link to my Mastodon profile without getting me banned.

However, even without a ban from their side, this has really been the last nail in the coffin between me and Twitter. Suspending accounts for posting links to another (open-source) social network is wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start listing them.

So I've decided to permanently deactivate my account and say goodbye for good to the stinky fascist shithole that Twitter has become.

Note that the vast vast vast majority of people and posts on Twitter are not fascist. Stinky shithole I'll grant, but that's been true for a decade.

I'm never sure if people are downvoting because they disagree or because they think its a bad post that doesn't contribute to the discussion... maybe we should have a system with more than one way of voting?

This link shortener works: https://spacekaren.sucks/

It seems to work by blocking connections to the Twitterbot User-Agent while allowing other connections.

They'll then just ban links they can't open. They should serve some sort of content instead.

It's unlikely that Twitter has the (human) resources at this point to implement comprehensive censorship of Mastodon. They're currently only warning about links to popular instances such as mastodon.social, but links to smaller instances such as the one I use are still fine. One advantage of decentralization.

Every news outlet, and perhaps journalist associations such as the NUJ, should set up their own mastodon instance now and advertise that that's how to avoid Musk's blocks. There's no need for them to take this lying down.

And they’ll just be reporting news to each other leaving a massive vacuum on Twitter for others to quickly fill.

Most people don’t really care about this story. They’re just users looking for news, opinions, trending topics, etc. if you don’t follow these types of accounts then you haven’t noticed much change on Twitter.

Honestly if anything I’ve noticed Twitter is probably a bit more fun and interesting now.

People are on Twitter because of accounts like that, across the spectrum. It was the one place where you could find everyone, including politicians, organisations, journalists, experts, and random people with cool interests, and interact on a more or less equal basis.

When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your political background, but it'll never sustain the same user base.

Musk could have kept twitter that universal platform and keeping an eye on political interference from within, knowing that right wing people would just trust him doing the right thing.

But no, he wanted to make a big public outcry out of it, and he's now reaping the consequences.

Exactly. He couldn't stop his ego from taking over.

It is the if e universal platform. He’s just getting rid of the toxic people that thought they were immune to the types of canceling they’ve asked for more of previously.

Live by the cancel, die by the cancel, I guess.

I'm not leaving Twitter because they canceled somebody or because they don't have canceled somebody else.

I'm leaving Twitter because it no longer provides me an interesting timeline with content that I care about.

Enough people in my network left (for whatever reason) and that's enough to create a network effect.

I tried blocking musk and other accounts that created what I perceived as just noise I don't care about (I'm not a us resident, I've had enough of your culture war. It was educational and all but I'm also interested in other things!). But that wasn't enough, the Twitter recommendation engine keeps notifying threads about people I don't follow that talk about things I don't care about. Often just because Musk replied (and since I blocked him I don't really notice that until I click to see to details of a hidden post).

It's a shame. I'm not a social media person. I found Twitter to have been a nice low friction way to subscribe to interesting topics and people.

This whole drama has just turned it into a permanent worst version of itself

The audience for far left propagandists is much smaller than they’ve been telling you. They’ve been amplifying each other for years but as that infrastructure is taken away from them, they’ll head back to the margins where they belong. Like the far right trolls they aren’t too different from.

If you think the journalists suspended were all 'far left propagandists' there's not much more that can be said in this discussion. You're too far gone down your own rabbit hole.

I wish you luck finding your way back sometime.

Not all of them. But most of them (possibly unwittingly) do their bidding in amplifying their fringe message.

Far-left? On twitter?

A site that famously stated that if they applied their rules equally, they'd have to ban almost all republicans, so they currently don't apply the rules to those?

Twitter is a site where a statement as simple as ACAB, which is legally protected speech [See https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...] would get you a ban.

Twitter is as center-right as it gets. If you think twitter is far-left, you're living in an extreme filter bubble.

Twitter is both. The records hop from 'left wing bias' to 'right wing bias' over and over. Plus, the internet skews left-progressive, which makes even centrist views seem right-conservative.

For every case of ACAB you can find a case of white hate or man hate with loads of retweets left alone or soft-endorsed, with the opposite being flagged for ToS violation. Both those statements are far more dominant among far-left.

I guess this depends on whether you think "transwomen aren't women" is a right-wing or centrist statement. By world standards twitter was far left, by USA standards it was left, by California standards or non-USA anglosphere standards it was centrist.

> By world standards twitter was far left

Whose world standards? The US left is the European right.

And no one buys into the transwomem are women over here. On social issues euros are more conservative, more ethnocentral and more racist. If you're an immigrant you can become an American but you will never become a German, just doesn't work like that.

Where in Europe do you live? I was born and raised (and still live) in the Netherlands, and our experiences are clearly very different.

Of course, there exist racists in any country; I don't deny that. However, racism certainly isn't generally accepted here.

This is supported by the fact that the alt-right occupies less than 20% of seats in Parliament (10% in Germany).

A lot of the interactions what immigrants like me in western europe have to go through are considered racist in america, that was my point. Ask anyone who has been an immigrant in EU and US. America is far more welcoming.

Also in Spain where I live is welcoming to lgbt in general, the feminists are all what Americans would consider terf and it's mainstream, actually in power right now - women are women, no prostitution, no to surrogacy, no to porn production.

I am a child of immigrants. I'm sorry that our experiences differ on this point. It may be possible that the south is more conservative than the west, but be careful about falsely generalizing this to 'world standards'.

By the way, Spain is generally considered part of Southern Europe, not Western Europe. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Modern_division...

> the feminists are all what Americans would consider terf and it's mainstream, actually in power right now - women are women, no prostitution, no to surrogacy, no to porn production

This is excellent news for women - are they enacting / have they enacted laws to fulfil this?

The majority of Germans support self-id laws for trans people (Selbstbestimmungsgesetz). Both in parliament and society overall, a broad majority supports this.

So, you're wrong on this topic, too.

Places like Colombia, India, China, South Africa.

There the average person doesn't agree that transwomen are women.

South Africa has full legal protections for trans people, including permitting gender reassignment surgery without government interference and allowing them to apply to change the gender markers in their identity documents and the national population registry.

Discrimination against trans people for their gender identity is illegal, and the hate speech laws consider gender identity to be a protected category. [0]

It's true that a proportion of the population is conservative and does not agree with this or with LGBTQ rights in general, but that's true of any population.

[0] https://www.southernafricalitigationcentre.org/wp-content/up...

> Twitter is as center-right as it gets. If you think twitter is far-left, you're living in an extreme filter bubble.

I think this is what they call “gaslighting”.

Hilarious you see the NUJ as competent enough for that. In my view the NUJ, NCTJ etc are (sadly) not the answer for the challenges of media in 2022 and beyond - it could be argued they are not fit for purpose.

> Also, TIL you can put a meta-redirect inside of a data:text/html URI and it will indeed redirect. That will probably come in handy at some point.

> Also TIL, <script> works just fine in data:text/html URIs, despite me having NotScript installed... Also remembering that one for later.

This seems pretty concerning to me… I would’ve expected the browser to prevent this somehow. Any security experts able to verify?

I don't think Mastodon has any chance of overtaking Twitter. Here's how I would do it:

Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.

Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.

Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.

It's not about the look of the social network - it's about the people you are interested in moving to a place and you following them. Mastodon has been that for me (the infosec people moved over and enough interesting "celebs") and I've been enjoying my time after a couple of days of adjustment.

Not that I care, but you could even copy the current twitter usernames to your new twitter, alongside all their public tweets and followers. So, when switching, a user wouldn't even need to add back their data or find back their previous followers.

But then you have a platform with all of the architectural problems Twitter but doesn't yet have a disliked leader on charge.

It is basically inevitable that eventually this same thing will happen again and we are back in the same place.

This is why Mastodon is enticing. It provides some architectural advantages that mitigate this problem at a fundamental level.

You'll probably get that if Musk steps down as CEO... The best part about Mastodon IMO is that it's NOT Twitter, speaking as a Mastodon user of course. It feels way more manual and it feels like I need to build my feed and community myself, but it's empowering for specifically those reasons.

They mention base64 encoding messages to evade filters. There were actually other base{n} methods [1] created specifically for Twitter to be more space optimized though not as readily available to operating systems. I guess this is less useful if they are really expanding the text limit to 4k soon but figured I would add it in the event they add a parser for base64.

This assumes most people would be able to:

    npm install base2048

I think it might be interesting if Mastodon added a function to automatically detect and decode base2048 for browsers in javascript since JS is required to view a Mastodon site anyway. Bots would then have to adopt this logic, rendering most bots useless until they adapt and evolve. But I am not a developer and maybe this is just not possible.

[1] - https://github.com/qntm/base2048

This should be targeted by antimonopoly committee, now. This is a clear violation of fair competition rules. Antitrust law enforcement in 3, 2, 1.

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

Agreed. And the fact they are blocking mastodon shows it must be impacting Twitter user numbers.

Or, just as likely, mastodon users are elon critics and thus hurt his feelings, which is a bannable offense.

Thus mastodon cross-posting and reposting is a proxy for bannable offenses, and therefore a bannable offense.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you but when they start fighting you, you know you've won.

It has to first get a little more extreem. They have to not just fight but start killing. Look at Napster. Napster was attacked and eventually died. But napster also won. CD sales are dead and we all download/stream music online. Mastadon will soon be attacked directly. It will also probably die as napster: a first cassualty of a revolution. What matters are the long-term changes that survive.

Mastodon will not die in the same way Napster did; it’s decentralized and there’s no way it can be completely shut down since anyone can run an instance.

There are ways. Placing regulatory burdens or legal liabilities on anyone running a social media instance would quickly make Mastadon untenable. Something as simple as manditory age verification might be enough.

GDPR exists right now, actually, and most instances are far from in compliance.

How are they not in compliance?

For example by not providing a privacy policy that contains all the information required by GDPR article 14.

Wouldn't that be only applicable if they were harvesting people's information submitted by other people?

My first thought is that people running Mastodon wouldn't qualify as data controllers, but I am no expert in GDPR laws.

Legal strategies won’t work effectively, just as they haven’t against BitTorrent pirating and sites like the pirate bay. Likely there will always be a jurisdiction where those restrictions don’t apply.

The instances can move to jurisdictions where the regulatory burdens and legal liabilities are slightly different.

It’s also not massively violating copyright. Napster was shut down through legal action.

Napster didn’t kill CD sales. iTunes/iPods did

Arguably, it was streaming that really killed CD sales.

iTunes was the number one music seller between 2003-2008. Way before streaming became a thing.

That doesn't go against what I said, though, that it was streaming that really killed CD sales.

Delivery of music over the internet killed cd sales. Napster proved that people wanted online music. That enabled everything else. It forced the industry to adapt or die.

Napster peaked in 2000.

Here is a chart of CD sales

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/

You do not see any sharp drop off because of Napster.

No, but you do see the rise of online distribution, which killed cd sales.

Mastodon wouldn't have become so popular if it weren't for all these Elon actions. Elon is single-handedly leading a massive 'Streisand Marketing' campaign to sublime perfection.

The graphs are quite remarkable. Signups are nowhere near the peak but still 10x+ as high as before, and peaking everytime Musk does something new.

It's true, I have no idea what Mastodon is, but if some bastard's trying to stop me finding out about it, I am going to go and find out about it right now!

I am pretty amazed by how good mastodon actually is. It's like Twitter without the noise. The website defaults to chronological order and very few people assault others with crazy radical comments, because there are no rage-promoting attention-grabbing algorithms in place.

Comedy is now legal on Twitter.

Only if it doesn't include parody or bruise Elon's fragile ego.

The real comedy is the jokes that dont bruise his ego, the jokes he doesnt get. The emperor believed he was wearing clothes for most of the story. Only at the end did he realize everyone was laughing. Ironic flattering cuts deepest.

Almost every other tweet on my feed is mocking Musk. The tweeters aren't banned

Since Musk is the only person left in the moderation department, it takes him time to get to everyone.

Lol. Kneecapping competitors is what billionaires do. You dont win capitalism by following all the rules.

How many users will stay on Twitter because of this? And how many will leave because of it?

My guess: it's an extra indication that Twitter is not a reliable platform to build an audience.

Billionaires are billionaires because they build a product that everybody wants.

Twitter and "reliable"? Was that ever really a thing?

Yes? That’s why you have entire media businesses built on top of it.

> Billionaires are billionaires because they build a product that everybody wants.

That's a pretty wild claim.

It's what all people do when they have the ability.

Maybe the Machiavellian among us. The average person or company doesn't pull literally every lever of power to defeat competitors out of principal. When someone stole the coke recipe and tried to sell it to Pepsi, Pepsi called the cops. When the power goes out, power companies work together to get it back... Except Enron, which is now dead.

Which is why people who have an ounce of foresight and self-awareness build systems around themselves that mitigate their worst instincts.

This is the fatal flaw for every tyrant. They see the mitigation system as a problem rather than a solution, then their worst instincts get the best of them.

I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating it.

Musk's behavior in this whole thing seems far from competent.

He's the CEO of five companies and he just landed in Qatar to party at the world cup. His worth ethic is suspect and the stuff of myths. Supposedly he never stops working but he's an expert at Elden Ring.

Musk being CEO is not really like a startup founder being CEO. For example at SpaceX the company is basically run by Gwynne Shotwell, with Elon being the visionary and face of the company, with the clout and authority to dive deep into any part of the company he thinks is important right now and help facilitate or micro-manage stuff. But when he is occupied elsewhere for a couple months the gears keep turning without him just fine. I imagine his other companies (with the notable exception of Twitter) work the same.

* A few months ago SpaceX was on the verge of bankruptcy according to Musk.

* Tesla's stock is down and they haven't done any innovation in a long time. FSD is a complete failure. Musk's tweets are hurting the brand. People don't want to buy an alt-right electric car and Elon has become the brand.

* Revenue dramatically decreased at Twitter since Musk took over the company. Likely headed towards bankruptcy in the near future.

* Neuralink is a pipe dream that conducts unnecessary experiments that kill animals. He copied all the experiments of the lead academic researcher and passed them off as his own. There is nothing novel about what they have done.

* Boring Co. hasn't built anything of value. In fact, they have backed out of numerous projects.

It's a complete and total dereliction of duty.

He doesnt stop working. Thats the great thing about being boss: you get to define what "working" means. In his mind, what he is doing in Quatar qualifies as work. He probably deducts expenses, those he doesnt just charge to whatever company he thinks most benefits from his travels on a given day.

I think you're making the mistake of assuming the amount he works per week is constant, rather than varying from 80 hours during hell year to 20 when things are going fine.

There are a LOT of sources on him having worked very long hours at points.

> when things are going fine.

Things are not going fine. Things are on fire. How do you buy a company and immediately lose 50% of the revenue? That is a shocking failure.

Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way?

Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist.

Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower.

Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order.

Or when that tesla employee posted a self driving video of his own car--he fired him.

Or when there was an anonymous blogger that posted negative tesla investment advice, musk tracked him down, and called his employer trying to get him fired.

Im not going to keep going.. there are so many of these dating back a decade. I think the truth is he said what he thought people wanted to hear ("free speech absolutism"), and then once he obtained twitter, who he really is--exceptionally thin skinned--wont let him run it in a principled way.

So he’s just like Bill Gates in the 90’s. A little douche with an ego and deceptive business practices.

Not sure why no one mentions his asperger's syndrome because that’s an obvious mastodon in the room.

> asperger's syndrome

Elon Musk just _pretends_ to have Asperger's. I know plenty of people on the spectrum, they aren't assholes.

There's also the "Ye's bipolar disorder" effect. Its a challenge I'm sure to have it, but I also know people who are bipolar. Anti-semitism is _NOT_ on the list of symptoms. We can criticize Ye's anti-semetism without making fun of his bipolar / mental illness.

So even _IF_ Elon hada Asperger's (and I'm not convinced he does. I think its all pretend for more clicks / his public relations image), there's nothing about Asperger's that makes you a self-contradicting asshole.

I agree and not trying to typecast—but maybe their personality + Asperger’s = dubious people-oriented decisions? I’m not a doctor nor do I know anyone with Asperger’s but it is a variable at play.

But quickly looking it up it’s a social-oriented disorder. Elon is making dubious social-oriented decisions.

The entire field of psychology is about dubious social-oriented decisions and classifying them (hoping that by classifying them, we can gain insights into how to improve behavior).

The kinds of dubious social-oriented decisions associated with Asperger's does _NOT_ match what Elon Musk is doing. What he is doing is closer to narcissistic personality disorder and/or sociopathic personality disorder.

Being a dick doesn't disqualify you from being on the spectrum.

Anecdotally, from the Aspergous people I know, they and Elon share a certain kind of body language you pick up on over time. It's a slight fidgeting as if clothes are constantly uncomfortable (likely due to constant stimulation).

> but I also know people who are bipolar. Anti-semitism is _NOT_ on the list of symptoms.

Obsessing over some socially unacceptable idea absolutely can be a manifestation of bipolar disorder for some people. Especially when one considers that bipolar can sometimes be associated with psychosis, and obsessive antisemitic/racist/etc thoughts are not uncommon in people with psychosis (famous example: Terry Davis, who I think actually even had a bipolar diagnosis at one point - it is common for people to initially be diagnosed with bipolar before eventually getting a schizophrenia or schizoaffective diagnosis as the psychotic symptoms become more prominent and enduring).

Kanye’s antisemitism is wrong and reprehensible. I can’t tell to what extent it is a symptom of his mental health problems, and I don’t think you really can either: neither of us is a mental health professional, and he is not our patient/client. But simply looking at a list of symptoms, and saying “X is not on it”, is a very ignorant way to approach the topic. Even if his antisemitism is partially due to his bipolar, that doesn’t mean he should just be allowed to get away with it, just like how a bipolar person who commits a crime in a manic state (sometimes happens) doesn’t just get away with it, although it may be appropriate to take that into account as a mitigating factor (as opposed to a “get out of jail free” card)

Similarly, I have no idea whether Musk has ASD. But ASD absolutely can make some people behave in a way which others perceive as being an “asshole”, so if he does have it, those behaviours could well in part be contributed to by it. That’s not saying that everyone with ASD is an “asshole”, or that a person with ASD has no responsibility to try their best to adjust to meet society’s expectations - but isn’t it obvious that a disorder whose symptoms can include difficulty thinking about social situations or understanding social rules, obliviousness to the thoughts and feelings of others, unusual obsessions, etc, can sometimes lead people to behave in ways perceived by others as being an “asshole”, even a failure to adjust one’s behaviour in response to that feedback?

> But ASD absolutely can make some people behave in a way which others perceive as being an “asshole”, so if he does have it, those behaviours could well in part be contributed to by it.

Autistic people do things because they don't understand social norms.

Sociopaths do things because they don't _care_ about social norms.

There's a difference, and I can tell the difference. It is in a sociopath's best interest to pretend that they're autistic by the way.

ASD absolutely can make people care less about social norms, see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3198313/ (“Insensitivity to social reputation in autism”)

ASD can be a mixture of both not understanding and not caring. Sociopathy is all about the later without any of the former.

Elon Musk is the CEO of a major corporation.

Sociopathy, is often pointed out as an advantage in that situation. You rise above others in the social ladder and punch down your competitors. And we're seeing this behavior right now as Elon Musk is utilizing his powers to try to silence his critics (Mastodon).

Autism on the other hand, is a disadvantage in most leadership roles.

When we consider Elon Musk's role in society (leading corporations), he is far more likely to be a sociopath, rather than autistic. When we look at his behavior (punching down on Mastodon), its closer to sociopathy.

When we consider Musk's behavior in the past few weeks, it has more similarities to Narcissistic collapse than anything else I've heard of.

Armchair diagnosis is a rather foolish endeavour.

That said, a person as successful as Musk is, is more likely to have BAP (broad autism phenotype, subclinical ASD) than clinical ASD. BAP means one has some degree of autistic traits, but is insufficiently disabled by them to warrant a psychiatric diagnosis

Sociopathy isn’t a DSM-5 diagnosis - antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is. Diagnostic criteria for ASPD include a history of criminally antisocial behaviour (animal abuse, vandalism, violence, theft, etc), evident by age of 15. It also requires evidence to support a retrospective conduct disorder diagnosis prior to 15. I see zero evidence that is true of Musk. When psychiatrists evaluate someone for ASPD, they aren’t looking for mere allegations of questionable business ethics, they expect to see a criminal record, history of school expulsion, imprisonment or juvenile detention, someone repeatedly being fired for proven serious workplace misconduct, someone who refuses to seek gainful employment despite being capable of it, dishonourable discharge from armed services, domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse of children, serious child neglect resulting in malnutrition, use of aliases or false identities to commit fraud, etc

> Armchair diagnosis is a rather foolish endeavour.

Indeed. So we can stop with the Asperger's claim? But if the can of worms is open, I'm more than willing to contribute my 2-cents instead.

> I see zero evidence that is true of Musk.

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/antisocial-perso...

* exploit, manipulate or violate the rights of others

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/tesla-faces-california-l...

* lack concern, regret or remorse about other people's distress

https://www.tmz.com/2022/06/20/elon-musk-daughter-name-chang...

* behave irresponsibly and show disregard for normal social behaviour

* have difficulty sustaining long-term relationships

Check. Pretty much every girlfriend Musk has had has dumped him at this point.

* be unable to control their anger

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-reportedly-head-bu...

* lack guilt, or not learn from their mistakes

Twitter

* blame others for problems in their lives

Do I even need to point this one out?

* repeatedly break the law

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/elon-musk-loses...

Do you think Elon Musk is complying with his legal obligations for a Twitter sitter right now?

If I open up my copy of the DSM-5, I find on page 659 the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (301.7, F60.2):

> A. A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following: ...

> B. The individual is at least age 18 years.

> C. There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.

> D. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Now, to be diagnosed with ASPD, a person must meet all of A, B, C and D. You seem to be focusing on criterion A. Even supposing you are right that he meets criterion A – where is the evidence for him meeting criterion C? You can't diagnose someone with ASPD without evidence for the onset of a diagnosis of conduct disorder (CD) as a child/adolescent. It isn't necessary that they be diagnosed with CD contemporaneously, it is acceptable to have retrospective evidence for it based on school records, parent interviews, their own recollections, etc – but, without evidence for onset of a CD diagnosis in childhood/adolescence, you cannot have an ASPD diagnosis in adulthood. Do we have any evidence that Musk met the diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder in childhood/adolescence?

Is there any good evidence that Musk exhibited at least three of the following behaviours (conduct disorder criterion A, pages 469-470) prior to age 15?

    Aggression to People and Animals
    1. Often bullies, threatens, or intimidates others.
    2. Often initiates physical fights.
    3. Has used a weapon that can cause serious physical harm to others (e.g., a bat, brick, broken bottle, knife, gun).
    4. Has been physically cruel to people.
    5. Has been physically cruel to animals.
    6. Has stolen while confronting a victim (e.g., mugging, purse snatching, extortion, armed robbery).
    7. Has forced someone into sexual activity.
    Destruction of Property
    8. Has deliberately engaged in fire setting with the intention of causing serious damage.
    9. Has deliberately destroyed others’ property (other than by fire setting).
    Deceitfulness or Theft
    10. Has broken into someone else’s house, building, or car.
    11. Often lies to obtain goods or favors or to avoid obligations (i.e., “cons” others).
    12. Has stolen items of nontrivial value without confronting a victim (e.g., shoplifting, but without breaking and entering: forgery).
    Serious Violations of Rules
    13. Often stays out at night despite parental prohibitions, beginning before age 13 years.
    14. Has run away from home overnight at least twice while living in the parental or parental surrogate home, or once without returning for a lengthy period.
    15. Is often truant from school, beginning before age 13 years

Why do you expect me to know a detailed history of Elon Musk from 30+ years ago?

A, B, and D are fully set in my mind. The only question is one of personal history that obviously I don't have.

Musk doesn't fit the usual clinical picture of someone with ASPD. ASPD is usually encountered in a forensic setting – someone in prison, currently going through a criminal trial, child welfare cases.

I really doubt any actual psychiatrist or psychologist would diagnose Musk with ASPD in a clinical setting. Psychiatric diagnoses aren't just about reading a list of symptoms and matching them – you need to understand how professionals interpret that list in practice (the "clinical gestalt", as it is sometimes called). If you actually study the literature on ASPD, you'll find people like Musk are not the targets of the diagnosis. Indeed, the DSM-5 says (p. 662):

> Antisocial personality disorder appears to be associated with low socioeconomic status and urban settings

Musk is not now and has never been a person of "low socioeconomic status", which is the group of people in which ASPD is usually diagnosed.

Here's some more traits of ASPD, according to the DSM-5 (p. 661):

> They may be irresponsible as parents, as evidenced by malnutrition of a child, an illness in the child resulting from a lack of minimal hygiene, a child's dependence on neighbors or nonresident relatives for food or shelter, a failure to arrange for a caretaker for a young child when the individual is away from home, or repeated squandering of money required for household necessities

Musk is no candidate for "Father of the Year", but there is zero evidence his children are malnourished, extremely unhygienic, lack appropriate adult supervision, lack sufficient financial support, etc. That is describing the behaviour of low socioeconomic status bad parents, high socioeconomic status individuals may often be bad parents, but rarely in such a grossly physical way.

> These individuals may receive dishonorable discharges from the armed services, may fail to be self-supporting, may become impoverished or even homeless, or may spend many years in penal institutions

That doesn't sound like Musk either.

Some other common traits of ASPD (back to page 660):

> Irresponsible work behavior may be indicated by significant periods of unemployment despite available job opportunities, or by abandonment of several jobs without a realistic plan for getting another job. There may also be a pattern of repeated absences from work that are not explained by illness either in themselves or in their family. Financial irresponsibility is indicated by acts such as defaulting on debts, failing to provide child support, or failing to support other dependents on a regular basis

When they said "financial irresponsibility", a centibillionaire wasting $44 billion on a whim is not what they had in mind. They mean the parent who can't afford food for their children because they spent all their money on some inessential goods. None of Musk's children are going to starve, even if he stupidly loses $100 billion more.

> Individuals with antisocial personality disorder tend to be irritable and aggressive and may repeatedly get into physical fights or commit acts of physical assault (including spouse beating or child beating)

Haven't heard about Musk getting in to physical fights or committing physical assault.

Thanks for your help correcting a really common misconception about bipolar disorder.

People want to whitewash mental illness because mental illness can be scary and uncomfortable. There’s this concept of destigmatizing mental illness by pretending all sorts of bad behavior are somehow not associated with mental illness. This is often done to make people with minor mental illness feel less stigmatized but ironically can increase the stigma around people with more severe mental illness since now it’s not mental illness, they’re just a terrible terrible person.

Yes, psychosis absolutely can cause people to be antisemitic, racist, violent, etc. This should almost be obvious. But because it opens up difficult conversations about accountability, and because people with minor mental illness want sympathy without stigma, people like to pretend otherwise.

> that’s an obvious mastodon in the room

I see what you did there

No one mentions it because his Aspergers is a little heavy on the Ass.

Besides I thought we weren't calling it Asperger's anymore

Its the right wing radicalization that the parent is talking about. That's disturbing to watch.

tbf I'm not sure Musk's rightwingery is any deeper than realising what kind of one-liner appeals most to his stans on Twitter and deflects from stories about him which are bad no matter where you sit on the political spectrum (plus standard billionaire CEO views on regulation, employee rights and tax he's always had). I don't think we need to worry about him being more politically deft or ideologically driven than Trump either,.

I'd offer the alternative view: it's a bit sad to watch someone who once had the motivation and means to build flying cars get obsessed by 140 characters. The Twitter purchase feels less like his road to being the next Trump and more like Howard Hughes' passion for Vegas.

Disturbing, yes, but for those who have been paying attention, it's been on display for years now. This isn't new from Musk; he's just hiding it less.

> Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way?

I would describe it as what happens when existing personality traits are met by a bunch of sycophants. He’s been like this for as long as he’s been on the public stage, got worse as his wealth grew and social feedback for bad choices lessened, but now he has a bunch of alt-right types cheering on his every move so he’s not only getting positive feedback but it’s coordinated in one direction.

It’s like the difference between someone having alcohol problems and someone having alcohol problems when all of their friends are barflies and they just bought a bar.

Yes. However, I would argue that is a good thing. Musk has become a poster child one can easily point to and ask a question along the lines of 'is it reasonable for society to allow a person with resources near some nation-state levels to exist and not limit their ability to gather that amount of resources?'

While in general I am very permissive and I hate imposition on my individual freedoms, I am increasingly convinced that leveling of playing field is necessary. You reach an upper limit of say 'five small islands' and you start seeing major increase in tax burden. As you can undoubtedly tell, I am no tax expert, but I am tired of this prince equivalent of our times. Wait, not princes ( princes had some structures that kept them somewhat in check ). Maybe robber barons is a better comparison. US managed to get them under control once, but that required a world war II. I am honestly not sure we can repeat that approach this time.

<< Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating it.

I would hesitate to characterize Trump as incompetent. He and Musk share some qualities and note that both of them managed to use the existing system to their advantage better than an average person ( leaving for a moment the above average starting point for both ). Still, fool and his money is soon parted and notice that both of them manage to screw everyone they interact with ( but themselves ), which indicates some level of competency. Unfortunately, that competency is focused only one thing.

In short, I disagree. Twitter saga is just better documented. WH by necessity is harder to properly scrutinize ( despite all the leaks and media attention ).

> Musk has become a poster child one can easily point to and ask a question along the lines of 'is it reasonable for society to allow a person with resources near some nation-state levels to exist and not limit their ability to gather that amount of resources?'

It’s an interesting question but if you’re hoping for a ‘no’ answer, Musk is a pretty mild test case. For all his failings, he hasn’t used his personal wealth for anything that bad. Far worse is done by corporations and governments (and actual princes).

In fact, I’m not sure individualistic supervillainy actually happens all that much. Being bad at scale is still a team effort.

Oh, I absolutely agree. That is why I opened with poster child qualification, because it seems most people need an appropriate scapegoat ( it is just easier to have one 'bad guy' to focus on as opposed to a menagerie of individuals with varying levels of liability and involvement ). We like to keep things simple.

The part that annoys me is ( as you indicated ) that Musk actually did bring into being some rather neat stuff ( Tesla comes to mind -- I hate that he made car into subscription, but I love that he moved the entire industry 20 years ahead ). I probably need to qualify that statement. Like with most people, I like some of the things he did. I dislike some of the things he did.

To your point, with corporation at least that power is somewhat distributed and each individual is a ( mild, but still ) check on the other. You raise a good point though and I wonder if billionaire class overshadowed pan-nationals for me for some reason.

When a game is rigged, you don't have to be competent to win

It is an easy and cynical statement. And I am saying that as a cynical person myself. The game is heavily tilted, but it is still a game with real winners and real losers.

I do not want to assume too much though. Would you be willing to elaborate a little? It is difficult to argue Musk is not competent at his various roles. Are you saying he was guaranteed to be where he is now?

I was more referring to Trump not being necessarily competent, but using a big public profile to con people into handing over money and then deliberately not paying people and using bankruptcy to shield him from consequences. It's more a lack of morals than being competent.

Once someone has a lot of money, it becomes very difficult for them to decrease their wealth as capitalism rewards people/institutions that have lots of money and/or influence. If you have money available to purchase your way into owning various companies, then it's not too difficult to keep those companies alive though I would say that Musk has made some good decisions as to which companies to buy. I would consider that Tesla became successful partly due to a new potential market (which Musk should get some credit for spotting) and partly due to reaping the benefits from all the workers there - it's their talents that are making Tesla profitable and Musk is merely ensuring that he doesn't pay them sufficiently so that he can increase his own wealth.

Billionaires benefit from their own lack of morals more than being spectacularly competent.

Do you think you can become a billionaire with $25k from Daddy?

I don't have the psychopathic greed that billionaires have, so I would never have got more than a few million before helping others.

Radicalization is very interesting. Rather than talk of a person being radicalized in a paticular way (medical/religion/politics/flat earth etc) can a person become susceptible to radicalization across the board? Can someone be "radicalized" into taking radical stances in every context? I have seen older relatives fall down this hole. Every little thing is now life-or-death, order v chaos. Musk might be on that pattern.

How exactly is he radicalized? Because he suspended 7 journalists for 12-24 hours for doxxing the flight with his kid on it?

ElonJet pointed out where the flight was.

The journalists simply pointed out that ElonJet was using public data from the FAA. So no, its not considered doxxing. All airplanes must be tracked, otherwise there's a chance that they'll crash into each other.

If you don't like that, then maybe don't fly in a private jet all the time. Share your jet with others. Or God forbid, use a cheaper, more efficient, better-for-the-environment electric vehicle.

The flight in question, by the way, occurred on Monday: https://www.facebook.com/ElonJet

And Musk is blaming it for an incident that he claims to have occurred on Tuesday: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603190155107794944

An incident that was so serious that to this date, no crime report has been filed to the LAPD: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkD6LcVWIAEr-cC?format=jpg&name=... (and curiously, the reporter who first reported this fact was suspended from Twitter shortly thereafter).

Even if we're calling it "doxxing", the only one who did the "doxxing" was Jack Sweeney, he banned journalists just for defending him.

And it's been more than 24 hours since he said "Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now."[0], but elonjet and sweeney's main account are still suspended though...

[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603982891179839488

No, mostly the increasing association and listening to more right wing people as the left wingers ostracise him.

He's actually not coming across as that much more competent. He seems to be running Twitter into the ground, rather than improving it.

Yes, and how smooth it's been going. Human groups are still not well trained to resist this (especially if the rumor of remaining employees being under work visas)

What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?

I have seen a bit of that but most including myself still hold the same opinion. A private silo is not a free speech zone. Twitter wasn’t before Elon and isn’t now and never will be.

There’s layers of irony here. All the “libs” who were supposedly pro censorship ran off to the actual free speech zone. The Fediverse is almost uncensorable since you can hop instances or just run your own.

There is a difference though. It has no algorithm that boosts “engaging” content like craziness, hate, and trolling. I’ve always thought that what the far right was so mad about was loss of a free propaganda ploy that involved baiting the algorithm. You can always have free speech in a million places but a free promotion machine isn’t easily replaceable.

Of course the worst excesses of “cancel culture” were also driven by the algorithm. Moral outrage mobs increase engagement just like racism and wacko conspiracy theories do.

I personally hope centralized all encompassing social media burns. It’s driven all the craziest excesses everywhere.

Individual fediverse nodes can implement whatever moderation policies they like, and are free to defederate from nodes whose policies they disagree with. So it's not really "uncensorable".

You're free to leave the node. That's not censorship, it's the node owner's own free speech rights.

Right. I like mastodon's approach to moderation and ownership, it makes sense. But it's wrong to think of it as some sort of 8chan anarchy.

8chan wasn't anarchy. It's a closed fiefdom that had a highly permissive moderation policy. It could have decided to change at any time, and there's evidence that the owners manipulated it as well such as pretending to be "Q" and modifying trip codes for certain people.

Whomever admins the system owns the system. True for any Mastodon instance and true for Twitter.

I fall in the first camp. Elon's claimed stabd on free speech and his actions are just so opposite to each other, that calling out his hypocrasy makes absolute sense.

There's a big difference between how conservatives are calling the old order corrupt and criminal and calling for Jack et al to be arrested, vs complaining that Musk is being a clown and a hypocrite.

What about it?

Now we are just having the conversation we wanted the entire time. Rather than having people hide behind "free speech absolutism" we can have a discussion about why some people think that transphobia is more acceptable on a platform than making fun of Elon Musk.

I don't really see that pivot. Only the opposite in Musk. What people are complaining about is his hypocrisy: he claimed not to ban anyone except when required by law, but instead it looks like he's banning more people, and more arbitrarily, than Twitter ever did before his takeover.

Sure he has the right to do so, but it makes him a liar and a hypocrite.

Pretty sure Musk was discussing freedom of ideas.

That said; many of us also thought Kanye shouldn’t have been banned. Few on hacker news agreed lol

You either have absolute freedom of speech or none, in many ways.

That said, I appreciate that at least people are being told why they are banned. The prior set of billionaires who owned Twitter often wouldn’t say why.

Blocking links to competitors, blocking real-time tracking of people, and a guy telling the world how great hitler is are fairly mundane / reasonable things to block imo.

> at least people are being told why they are banned

This is not even true. "i did not delete anything. i received no notification about which tweet got me suspended. i still have no idea" https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1604227164416925696

Fair enough, perhaps it just seemed that way? Idk

Also, interesting to see you on HN (didn’t realize you were in the tech space). I saw you on Tim Pools show, recognized the name

> Also, interesting to see you on HN (didn’t realize you were in the tech space). I saw you on Tim Pools show, recognized the name

I am not Matt Binder. I just linked to his tweet.

Lol fair, then I’ll bring up how he was disingenuous on the Tim pool show (my impression anyway). Where he also advocated for abortion “after birth” and clearly was not being honest (or maybe he was idk lol). There were also several items of discussion where it appeared there were outward attempts to deceive.

I don’t view that dude as overly credible.

I personally have seen most people receiving a clear explanation. Previously, I’d had accounts banned without ANY explanation. I’m still suppressed in comment responses for some reason (on a different account)

> You either have absolute freedom of speech or none, in many ways.

I don't think there is such a thing as absolute freedom of speech. Speech always has some limitations, and that's never been controversial. Threats, blackmail, libel, discussing plans to commit a crime, those have always been illegal in some way.

But at the same time, Twitter/Musk banning people is also protected by the First Amendment. He is not the government, and the government can't compel him to allow or ban people on his platform.

Well, unless his platform is considered a utility or a monopoly. Then it becomes a different issue. And especially banning competitors could be anticompetitive behaviour.

People love to play this game of "well actually mastodon is bad because in this extremely specific situation you can lose your account or not be able to migrate"

In the case where all of the normal options are gone, sure, you're fucked. But in 99.9% of cases, you do have options to migrate.

Mastodon has options. You are given control, even notionally. Twitter doesn't even pretend to give you options. If you're banned, fuck you, that's it. If a billionaire buys the platform, fuck you, that's it.

If a mastodon server starts going downhill, you have options. If a mastodon admin goes off the rails, you have options. If dama happens and the server defederates from another, you still have options.

Mastodon gives you more opportunity and choice in all circumstances. There is no escape hatch for Facebook or Twitter, if something goes wrong you're just fucked. There isn't even a live person you could hypothetically talk to about it.

Sure, mastodon has problems. The exchange is that it's a truly free service without adversiments, algorithms, or coerced engagement. You don't generate money for the platform owner. That comes with risks, and you have options to deal with that risk.

Whether or not you like those options is entirely irrelevant. The options exist on mastodon, they do not exist on Twitter.

Given how clumsy this "censorship" is, I highly doubt that this is a conscious effort of censorship, and is instead an automatic filter that was already in place to prevent malicious activity.

Mastadon's original account was suspended for breaking the new TOS for linking to content that was in violation (the jet tracker), which then prompted many other people to break the TOS.

I suspect there is some algorithm that twitter has had for many years that checks:

IF link is highly associated with TOS violation, THEN flag content as "potentially harmful".

"Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter." https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

Lmao! My comment did not age well.

Wow. I can't believe they actually wrote this down.

You should be able to choose with your wallet or whatever you're paying with - your self in this case - but for communication classic server-client structure does not offer that option because you have to rely on the choices of the rest of your contacts. That alone is enough to support alternative solutions.

Yet, it's really funny how so many on HN, the vanguard of startups among news aggregators, rather continue to fanboy Musk than engage in brainstorming opportunities the Fediverse and ActivityPub offer.

Imagine you're the schmuck who agreed to Elon's "hardcore" work environment, showed up at 1 AM to do spontaneous code review, slept in the office, all because you so fervently believe in Elon's grand vision, and this is what you get assigned to implement.

I tried to post the link to this particular post (article?) on Twitter and it claimed there was an error:

> Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

Twitter is not letting me share this information!

It's a toot on Mastodon that's why

If it becomes a popular trend for youtube channels to upload YouTube videos that are just previews with a links to Rumble videos, and the destination videos violate YouTube TOS, if YouTube created a Rumble filter to quickly address it, it would solve the problem.

Would it be accurate to call this censorship or a quick and dirty solution against accounts trying to evade TOS?

Framing the Mastodon filter by omitting that context is insincere. This type of insincerity is fairly typical in politics (which this entire ordeal is).

This is being echoed throughout the thread but Mastodon instances whose TOS is similar or stricter than Twitter are also being banned. This is why I feel it's anti-competitive. The thing that makes yours a false equivalence is after looking up Rumble it appears to be a centralized. This is more like if Microsoft decided to block servers without the Windows Server headers citing the use of Linux servers in illegal activity. Windows server likely does make up a small amount of CP servers but that's not something within the control of those software competitors. In both instances the only link between illegal content and the vast majority of legit users is using a competing software.

Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it. My (and I think most peoples) problem is the hypocrisy displayed by Musk and his sycophants. I would respect Musk a bit if he dropped the free speech charade and simply said it's his playground and he'll do whatever he wants.

I don't think YouTube has ever claimed to be a public town square or a desire for free speech absolutism.

> Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it.

No, he can't violate anti-trust (or any other) laws.

Obviously he can’t violate the laws, but as owner of a private company he has a very wide berth with what he can do. Not linking to a competitor is not violating anti-trust here.

> Not linking to a competitor is not violating anti-trust here.

Of course it is and regulators will come down that way as it's even more blatant anti-competitive behavior than many other cases in the past.

I mean, that's the thing: He can. He just shouldn't. And he doesn't have enough people (or, most likely, anyone that he'll actually listen to) telling him what he shouldn't do.

I suspect this whole "Twitter blocking Mastodon links for anticompetitive reasons" narrative is wrong to the point of being disingenuous.

People have been tweeting links ElonJet trackers on Mastodon instances (including the official @joinmastodon account!), getting both themselves and the target Mastodon instance domains flagged. This is edgelord behaviour.

Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information. Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information (https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/privac...). Those tracker accounts are using non-public information.

Jack Sweeney, the guy who runs ElonJet, is on record saying he'll stop tracking if paid money. This is extortion. That is why Elon is pursuing legal action against him.

The only criticism I believe one can make here is that Elon's personal involvement (albeit brought on by attacks on himself and his family) has meant Twitter's moderation team has made enforcement of this particular ToS violation a priority. I agree that the solution to Twitter's previous bias is not more bias, and I look forward to Elon & the Twitter team coming up with a better solution for this.

Unfortunately left-minded techies have uncritically jumped on this narrative of Elon cravenly blocking Mastodon links because 'he feels threatened by it'. Just because someone has been very successful does not mean it is legitimate to mistreat them.

> Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information

This is a novel Twitter policy interpretation and everyone knows it. It’s par for the course for Twitter. But it’s hypocritical of Musk to be doing it.

> Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information

No, it does not. It lets operators rotate their aircraft address. Elon didn’t. He held the phone wrong.

If the FAA wanted to restrict the use of this information, it wouldn’t be publishing it.

My understanding is that the information is public. Can you provide some links to support that?

Alas.

Since I made this comment, Twitter announced their new Third Party Social Media policy, and it looks terrible and unnecessary.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

It's so unreal watching this unfold. Whenever you think it can't get any worse they go one step further.

> Twitter's anti-Mastodon filtering is clown shoes amateur hour.

I'd think it will be effective for 90%+ of people trying to link to where they're leaving. This evasion manual will not be seen or understood by an average user.

From what I've seen, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People have gotten creative and far more have spoken about it.

Loud minority.

The average user's exposure to any of that is minimum, and they're not about to abandon their twitter clout for some unknown platform.

We're not talking about the average user, but about users trying to link to Mastodon.

All platforms other than Usenet started out as a minority of previous platforms... but Twitter is leaking 2-4,000 users an hour while censoring all links to said platform.

From the very bottom of the Mastodon front page: "Sponsorship does not equal influence. Mastodon s fully independent." This has never worked in the history of everything.

These are some fine tricks. But potential downside is Musk could start banning people who are evading the censorship

I wonder how long before Twitter patches this, one thought is that since they've fired so many people they may not be executing well enough to patch this quickly.

Also, is there a way to do this where they won't be able to patch? Maybe alternate domain names for these known domain names that are being blocked, similar to what thePirateBay did.

How long before Twitter's knee-jerk, whack-a-mole patching causes some regression due to insufficient QA, accelerating Twitter's demise?

Something about authentication is already failing for me, it keeps thinking I've logged off randomly

I like how Mastodon is becoming the new Outkube:

https://www.theonion.com/new-decoy-website-launched-to-lure-...

For a free service, there’s a lot of strong opinions here.

While I’m no Elon fan, he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns. And he paid a bunch of money to have that right.

I think people mostly take issue with the hypocrisy of claiming to be a paragon of free speech while censoring all kinds of things because Musk personally dislikes them.

Isn’t the simple answer, just stop using Twitter if you feel so strongly about this n

That's exactly what people are trying to do by switching to Mastodon! And Twitter seems to be trying to prevent people from switching to Mastodon.

A service is trying to make it difficult for you to switch to a competitor. Surprise surprise.

> Isn’t the simple answer, just

> difficult for you to switch to a competitor

Do you not see the self-contradiction in your own comments?

In other words, the so-called "simple answer" is not so simple if you can't even post your Mastodon link on your Twitter profile.

It is, and shockingly for some, it's also exercising free speech to point out the hypocrisy. You can do both!

Sure, but that changes nothing about the hipocrisy or your right to speak up against it. It's fine to point out flaws in something you're not (or no longer) a part of.

> he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns

As has been said already many times, the debate is not whether he has the legal authority to do this, the debate is over his hypocrisy of claiming free speech absolutism.

Glad to see Twitter is doing this.

The reason Musk bought Twitter was to rid it of the type of behavior you frequently see on m6n. It's a direct competitor to Twitter. Twitter is a commercial product and needs to maintain its users and revenue. It'd be foolish for it to amplify a coordinated attacked on its existence by the very people who very publicly advocate for the destruction of Twitter.

I'm sure many people will do their best to minimize the influence of these cult-like echo chambers with negative contribution to society.

Free speech absolutism is so complicated

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