The Shit Show
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I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)
I just hope the last few people I follow on Twitter who I really enjoy following move over too. But unfortunately that's "Space Twitter", so we will see...
For learning ActivityPub specifically, the best meta-guide I’ve found is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/
I was lucky enough to live in a freshman college dorm (a music-focused dorm, no less!) circa 1997-1998 when Napster was still a thing right after MP3's were a thing, and that shit was amaaaaazing
I mean given how much people love music, I never had any doubt that MP3's would be revolutionary
I couldn't read a single word of Swedish or Russian, but my friends and I figured out how to navigate to the music downloads.
These days it's a USB cable rather than a cinch cable, and vorbis/flac rather than mp3, but my PC has been my main music player for more than 25 years -- and the only pair of "game" speakers I've owned were positioned in the living room. Come to think of it, those speakers may very well have been the reason I was allowed a computer in my bedroom :)
Anyway... thank you for prompting that trip down memory lane, I enjoyed it.
To put a timeline on this: I also ended up buying one of those Empeg in-dash MP3 players.
I remember my processor struggled so much even playing it, I basically had to just listen to the mp3 on its own. I eventually figured out I could play 96kbps mp3s without slowing things down too much. These were such amazing times for me, suddenly exposed to an entire planet of music there's zero possible chance I would have otherwise heard.
(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)
So what was your original argument against this?
This contradiction flares up in many places. Most obviously, the existing community HATES all kinds of analytics, search, etc because they’re concerned they can be weaponized by trolls. At the same time, Mastodon has all kinds of unauthenticated APIs that make it trivial to slurp data. Mastodon doesn’t even let you post stuff to just your local instance!
I expect that the current post-twitter-collapse energy will result in ActivityPub 2.0, and that revision of the spec will make it easier to control where your posts go.
Ultimately I think the Fediverse will agree on the core protocol, splinter over activity vocabularies, and scatter over moderation standards. That Will Be Fine and we’ll have something clearly better the Web 2.0 local maxima we’ve been trapped in for the last decade or so.
I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.
I guess I better get coding again.
I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/
I have a thread going here https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109688815511361197
But the upshot is, get involved with:
What’s the term you prefer for this stage of its growth then?
The jump to 7 figures of MAU in the wake of Twitter’s collapse seems like an important change to me. The idea might be 15 years old, but the dominant implementation (Mastodon) started ~2016, the modern protocol (ActivityPub) arrived in 2018, and the last four years seem to have been mostly a small community working out the kinks.
Now it’s going mainstream. It’s held up remarkably well so far, but there are significant technical, economic and governance challenges to overcome if Fedi is going to fulfill it’s potential as the dominant interoperability layer for online collaboration.
Fret not; when Sony released the first digital Mavica (the one that stored pictures on 1.44" floppys) I would have made a bet that digital photography will never take off.
My only lame excuse it that at this time it was just unfeasible imagining that one day in the not too distant future you'd be able to store terabytes of memory on a device the size of a thumbnail.
Still, not one of my best predictions.
They didn't have to worry about a set-top box + I believe MS helped them serve content from XBL servers.
I see everyone talking about Twitter and how it needs to be replaced. But I want to know how we remake these smaller communities. That's what I miss about the internet. There are clearly size thresholds for these. Finding them is often hard and word of mouth. But what I want to know is how we make these flourish and bring personhood back to the internet. We should have both types of communities. But I don't think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this. I think many even have seen this change as HN has grown. There are several people that I recognize their names but as the community has grown we have too seen a change in content, culture, and how we speak to one another. For good or bad. But I do think it is nice to have small communities as well that do develop their own cultures. Maybe I'm just old now though.
I’m sure crypto and Defi has some good people, but a huge proportion of them seem to be grifters and scammers who I’d want nothing to do with. That wasn’t really the case on the early web.
Probably has to do with your age.
I made many friends in my 20s, most through the internet.
This got less and less as I grew older.
But I know a bunch of people in their 20s who still make friends online.
I also feel like all this noise about Twitter is just the Twitter early adopters realizing what the old IRC and imageboard users knew long ago: social media is a semi-public space now that everyone is online.
The golden age of the open Internet was really between about 1996 when it started to go public and 2010. The net today feels like either a ghost town or a hellhole. The only remaining good places seem to be niche sites or groups and private forums. The fediverse is decent but I am concerned for its long term future if it becomes big enough to be a worthy target for spammers and trolls.
As for the cause of the decline I can think of a few big factors:
1. Engagement maximizing algorithms give weight to the most inflammatory content. These hit the scene big starting around 2008. If you forced me to pick one root culprit I would blame this.
2. Thanks to monetized social media “Internet troll” is now a career option. You can make money. You can maybe even become the President of the United States.
3. Speaking of politics, I think something changed when enough people got online that the net became the major source for political opinion. There is now not just money but power to be gained by manipulating things online. This attracts a whole different level of scum.
4. Trolls have escalated to the point that people have died. Mass shooters post their manifestos on boards now before they go on killing sprees. Running a forum today is just not fun anymore, especially if it’s not narrowly focused and topical. Nobody in their right mind would set up something like Something Awful or 4chan today.
What happened to optimistic online cyber culture reminds me a bit of what happened to the 1960s counterculture. In a few years it went from exploration and optimism and art to Manson and Altamont. There seems to be a pattern where whenever humanity seems to be making a cultural breakthrough we get naive and then things go real bad real fast.
I wonder if maybe It Can Be Different This Time. I think it will take focused work at the protocol level, because you’re right that the Fediverse is a juicy target. I worry that the next 6 months will be a war against spam and other attackers… one that instance admins are under-resourced and under-equipped to win.
We need to get a governance structure going and iterate towards something like OcapPub https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub
ActivityPub is not designed for a battlefield. I worry that this dooms it.
It used to be a wild-west sort of escape from real life, and exploration of the ten principles [1].
Now politics dominate and there's only one right-think. When I brought up some of my concerns about this, I had someone in leadership of one of the largest regional burns tell me "you all had your time with the ten principles stuff. We're in charge now".
Sad, that community really helped me grow into a better person.
This isn't new, or even kinda new. Tabloids, TV, billboards, they've al been doing this since before anyone posting on HN was born.
> 2. Thanks to monetized social media “Internet troll” is now a career option. You can make money. You can maybe even become the President of the United States.
Not for much longer. GPT-4 gonna take that over.
Dang robots, takin er jerbs.
Reddit offers two features for supporting intentionally-small communities: first, you can restrict posting to accounts that have been manually approved (although I think voting is still open to anyone with a Reddit account), and secondly you can make the subreddit private such that only approved accounts can see its contents (which solves the aforementioned voting problem).
As for Mastodon, that's a matter of setting up your own topical instance and restricting who can make an account.
Welcome to your 30s. You will make fewer friends than you did in your 20s.
"I have three kids and no money... Why can't I have no kids and three money?"
To be honest unplugging from the political outrage machine helped my mental state...and I might in time make some friends on that site...
--
To recreate the feeling of a small group of people chatting like it was commonplace two decades ago, I created a Discord server for strangers to just hang out and chat whenever one feels like. No pressure, no overbearing rules, just a small island in the modern lonely internet.
Its been going on for a little over a month now, there's about 15 people that are more or less regular. If you or anyone reading is interested, send me an email with your Discord name.
--
Still, any attempt like this is still so unlike the Internet we had in the 2000s. Myspace died and with it the sense of community. The modern internet feels as lonely as standing in Piccadilly Circus on a Sunday afternoon. So many people, with so little time for anyone else.
That said I think we forget that barriers to using the internet were the gates that kept it a cozy medium-sized community. I knew older programmers than me who were content learning languages and frameworks by buying books or renting books from the library, but only socialized with colleagues, friends, and family in purely offline venues. Only a certain type of person put up with the jank of the internet and the early Web and that's the kind of person who was writ large on it.
Just how in real life we don't invite the world into our homes or grab lunch with anyone off the street, likewise our internet presences are now becoming circumscribed to specific groups. The trick is to make the barrier to entry just high enough as to select for compatible people but not so high that the group becomes a clique.
> I really want an official public statement. We have a large number of sub. renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we're permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I'd rather not do.
But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days.
Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move since Twitter should have been a protocol from the outset.
They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.
This is a wise attitude. I can’t imagine any company whose existence is wholly reliant on another single organization not entering into an agreement with the said single organization to protect itself. I feel sorry for them, but damn…you need to protect your product.
Can we return to dumb protocol designs? No?
Oh well, I guess we did not suffer enough yet then.
edit: All this twitter drama may actually result in useful changes to to the net.
Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/, the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me.
I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out. But if Tweetbot at least isn't restored, I will switch roles and will likely try out Mastodon for a while, posting just a little on Twitter.
The problem is, most of the "Fediverse" right now is a big echo chamber (kind of like Voat was when Reddit had its weird issues a few years back, or more charitably like a community like HN is... it's not always bad as long as people are aware of it). So it's not the same kind of community as Twitter had.
Up until a couple of days ago I was still using Twitterific to keep up with those who hadn't yet made the jump (mostly non-tech-adjacent people/communities), but with the iOS version now being dead my usage has seen a nosedive. For now I still check every so often with the Mac version since it's still functional, and if that dies then I'm going to try to figure out alternatives for aforementioned communities (probably Discord, but we'll see) and drop Twitter altogether. I have no interest in the stock client/site whatsoever.
It was an interesting case study in how free speech can decline to a lowest common denominator type situation.
In what way? Don’t probably 99% of people who use Twitter not use Tweetbot (including myself)? I use the browser and/or the iPad app and don’t find anything unusable about it. What am I missing in my ignorant bliss?
My understanding is that the significant accounts tend not to use the official apps / web interface, one of the biggest reasons being so that they can track accounts for reading purposes without providing what the algorithm treats as a positive endorsement of them, and so that they can use the signal boosting effect of “following” selectively and separately.
> Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use
So some celebs, journalists, and the overwhelming minority of users have to use a burner or browse incognito?
Someone said Twitter was essentially unusable without Tweetbot. As someone who finds Twitter very usable without Tweetbot, I asked, “Why?” Someone else said that a very small number of people have a very specific use case that makes Tweetbot better than the Twitter apps/website. I said that was a neat example but doesn’t really apply to many people.
I’m not too worried about it. I just read what it shows me when I open the app or go to the site. If I’ve seen it before, I keep scrolling. When I lose interest I stop.
I don't think this should be that surprising, because people already use _email_.
I like that he sees that ActivityPub should be so much more than Mastodon. "a truly universal timeline" of various things on the internet.
For that to happen we can't limit ourselves to just Mastodon, but start building alternative takes.
Yes, some aren't viewable on other clients, but that's fine, then they just show a link, but at least you can reply/reblog/like items.
I trust that Space Jerk will give Mastodon a very long opportunity window but the sooner the better.
Maybe revolution is a good idea and I’m completely wrong. But I still find Mastodon so frustrating and unreliable that I am just not on social media at all now.
Running is a bit easier than walking, walking is a process of carefully balancing at each step. Running is just falling, but you catch yourself before you hit the ground. As long as you aren’t too concerned with steering, you can easily at least run until you find an obstacle. And then you’ve learned about a new type of obstacle!
Even the fastest baby should have trouble getting into trouble as long as the parents are attentive — they are tiny and parents have long arms to catch them.
Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves I’m pretty sure.
Or I dunno, at least I survived. Apply this to your analogy as you’d like.
“You’re probably wondering how I got here…”
I’ve always understood this to be what the expression was about, though. Skipping the first step to jump recklessly and possibly incorrectly to the second.
Yeah I’m not sure I feel strongly about my own opinion. I think I’m just worried that a bunch of engineers, in absence of designers and product, are going to do what engineers do best: find fun technical problems to solve.
I learned to walk before I learned to crawl.
In between, supposedly, I just scooted around on my butt.
> Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves
Sneezes are one way.
It works if I catch up the next morning. But there is no reliable ability for real-time Toot Blooting.
In all fairness I took two weeks off. Maybe it’s better. Or maybe I need to try another server (three tries so far.)
Figuring out what server to pick was ridiculous. I eventually decided “just find a really popular one.” But they were all just crashing out when making an account or were closed to new accounts.
I misunderstood what “federated” meant because I also learned that it really matters what server you’re on. It’s not like email. The length of your Toot is different, rules of what you Toot is different. The stuff on your server is a bit more first class than what’s on other servers. And my Toot Boots didn’t Doot Doot or Bloot Flute.
When the next wave comes I hope if Mastodon can't get its act together there are commercial offerings that can take the wave, and I'm all for it. Cloudflare is building its own Mastodon API-compatible server, and Medium put its own instance.
From top of my head, there are more extensive lists out there: Pixelfed (Instagram alternative), Peertube (YouTube alternative), Pleroma (another Twitter-like microblog), Bookwyrm (Goodreads alternative), Funkwhale (like a mashup between Soundcloud and a podcast host), Owncast (Twitch alternative), Mobilizon (event organizing), lemmy (reddit alternative)...
They're all rather tiny and unpolished, having even less resources to work with than Mastodon, but you should be able to follow a user on any of them from Mastodon. At least in theory, haven't tried with all of them.
The annoying thing in my opinion is that you can't have a set-in-stone identity and then use different frontends for different purposes, kind of like you can on Facebook for groups/events/marketplace/stories. You have to have an account on all of them to make use of all features, even though they're all relying on the same protocol to a certain extent.
If these people who pioneered the use of Twitter and fundamentally steered how it developed through their community contributions turn their experience to Mastodon and the Fediverse, big things will come.
From the ashes of one thing can be built the future.
Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade.
Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.
i find the new tabs at the top of the screen take up too much space and they scroll down when i go through my timeline. (i browse on my laptop via firefox, no idea what the mobile experience is like)
The only thing that truly changed is "latest tweets" got renamed to "following" and it now takes up more vertical space (53 pixels to be exact) completely unnecessarily for something you're quite unlikely to click on on a regular basis.
Change for the sake of change. Doesn't actually have an impact on anything.
That vertical placement on a desktop is by far the biggest part of my complaint. It's half a two-line-long text-only tweet less on your screen at all times (spacing and controls below the tweet included), accurate to the pixel. It annoys me enough that I used inspect element to measure it. The implementation on a phone is way less horrible.
I think Elon Musk is a horrible person, but... this one is on you, right? You thought that a company's service was your social backyard? That's on you.
Just because it’s a company doesn’t mean they get to behave like assholes and then put the blame on their users for being gullible or ignorant.
Bank deposits are yours! If the bank collapses and can't give them to you, there's FDIC insurance so the government will get you that money.
This is nothing at all like Twitter and only weakens your argument.
Your property after the deposit is the IOU, not the money (you gave the money away in exchange for the IOU!).
There is contract + law that governs how the IOU can be redeemed for money (up to a limit the federal government guarantees some kinds of IOUs via FDIC/etc).
Once the bank has your money (for which they gave you the IOU), they in fact can use the money at their own discretion (it is their money!) subject to some legal limitations. Those limitations are not about how banks use other people’s money (because normal banks aren’t custodial), they are limitations based on risk and collaterization of IOUs (the bank’s liabilities).
These limitations are not expression of your property rights, they are in fact limitations on bank’s property rights (their freedom to deploy capital) since historically banks were not very responsible and blew up (in which case they failed to cover their liabilities, so IOUs were redeemed for less than their face value).
Edit: as an aside, this
money => money + IOU + IOU short
Is exactly how most of “money” in circulation is produced. People take the IOU and spend it like money, banks take the money and lend it collaterized by houses/factories/etc. So you get people spending more than total cash in circulation (because they spend IOUs), while banks accumulate large IOU short position (again, collaterized through stuff like houses, factories, etc).
Nothing bad about this, this is in fact working as intended.
... and when you say "the people that were hurt"... If you leave your wallet on the street, it might be stolen and you might be hurt. I'm not blaming the victim; someone stealing your wallet is wrong even though you left it on the street. It's not your fault, I'm not blaming you, I blame the thief for the theft. On the other hand there's something that you could've done that would've avoided it - don't leave your wallet on the street.
No one is trying to "steal" twitter in this thread, we are saying he used his "property rights" to unnecessarily hurt others.
You're the one who is saying this is just peachy keen and "that's on you".
You're defending the harm.
That said Elon is not doing this to anyone. He is not attacking anyone. He simply made a business decision. This happens all the time. Companies let suppliers go for financial reasons, they let staff go for similar reasons. People invest their lives into helping these businesses only to find they were let go for a few dollars. It sucks and it's can be super painful. Businesses mostly exist to make money and people should avoid investing their identity and loyalty into businesses as they probably won't reciprocate.
I mean, you are presenting something as inevitable, I just don’t understand why.
It's just that we need to see business as business. You make relationships with people and put your trust and faith in people not in businesses. They're entities that can be bought and sold and exist purely to make a profit. They have their place and offer huge value to society but they are not people.
E.g., being rude isn't forbidden, the freedom of speech is important, so is the right to express your personality. But lecturing the affected person about these rights may not be the best reaction when they have been insulted by someone.
I think the main point to discuss is not the rights, but whether the owner of a company should act more responsible, even if he is within his rights. And that's also the point of the OP.
Taking a poorly run site that had such a great influence in society and somehow running it even worse so that it loses its influence and revenue capability is breathtaking. It’s a lesson on how the modern hands off approach to corporate governance puts society at risk and is a lesson for limiting the rights of property owners.
Just because Musk has the power to do things like this doesn't absolve him from the absolute shittiness of his behaviour. He doesn't get a free ride because he's the owner, quite the opposite. People who wield power should act responsibly with it. Musk hasn't heard of the concept because he's so self absorbed and insecure he has no room for any sort of basic human empathy.
Obnoxious people
And I'm not defending Elon Musk here. I don't care about him one way or another. This isn't an issue that rational, educated people should get agitated about.
The idea that what happens on the internet is unimportant compared to what happens "in real life" hadn't made sense for over a decade now.
The internet is real life.
It matters.
We are literally talking about a posting from the CEO of a company that has been essentially shutdown by this change. Other companies have also been placed in this predicament. People will probably lose jobs, at least, and these companies may go bankrupt.
In return for this value, the users got a social ”backyard”.
We like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it’s also true that the free lunch is an exchange.
ISTM Elon is breaking this agreement.
The "for you" was already the default option, if anything they made easier to switch to the "following" that before was kinda hidden on top and hard to find.
p.s.: i dislike musk since it was cool to like him.
You don't have to be politically motivated to realize Elon is an ass.
Think Blogger, not Twitter or Facebook.
In the meantime, there's lots of smaller servers that are taking signups. I ended up on infosec.exchange; it's been fine (thanks, infosec.exchange people!). I'll be on my own address sometime in the next month or so.
The problem with Mastodon is that it ties your main account (and yes, most people just want a single account to represent their online persona) to a single instance which might have a very silly name and a very strong and unique culture (i.e. local timeline).
The solution to this is not to self-host, because the infrastructure was not made for it. The solution would be to completely rethink the Mastodon experience, but that will never be done
ActivityPub is like RSS and Google Reader rolled up in Twitter's UX. That's what I'm psyched for, and the part of it that I think will catch on.
As someone who's looking to do exactly that myself, what server are you thinking of running? Mastodon itself, or one of the others?
Pleroma seems interesting too, though some drama in the community there turned me off a bit. I might keep an eye on Takahe too, I hadn't come across that one. Cheers!
This is a dumb question because I've yet to mastodon-on but how does this work? Like, how do the followers of the old id start following the new id?
If anyone reading this just wants a simple Twitter replacement, I recommend masto.ai, another large and general-purpose instance which is accepting signups. But, yes, this is very much The Problem.
> Some toots are not shown https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/3794
> Turns out, there's a lot more messages in the conversation, and Mastodon shows barely a fraction of it. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9409
> I can only see one or two toots […] Some toots don't appear to have any replies https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017
> you are often missing replies https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18150
> the existing behavior is a barrier to Mastodon usage for those who are not sufficiently technical https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20533
About a week ago I was in Twitters web settings checking stuff like connected apps, just to see if there are some, and switched the theme to light, the default blue-white, which probably 90+% of the users see.
I then noticed that Twitter looks nicer when not in dark mode (I have this same issue with IDEs, but yet I always stay with dark themes), that it looks friendlier.
Does Mastodon have a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location, or is this something the owner of the server decides? because if 90+% of those light themed Twitter users are confronted with default black themed mastodon feeds, it might give them a bad association towards this dark web thing the news talk about, or some depressive mood.
I wonder if it would help if Mastodon instances had a light theme by default.
Hopefully the different model will create something new and amazing. Twitter had amazing elements, but it’s sunset has arrived!
Really? So if you go on a rampage of profanities and spew never ending hate and be as ugly and rude as possible that's praiseworthy?
> "For You" appears as the default option
No, it had been the default for several years now and every time you disabled it, it would mysteriously re-enable itself after a while.
> The "For You" timeline is only for Elon
No, he even complained about this feature, shadow-banning, censoring, and basically brain washing the masses among other things, before he bought Twitter.
> Mastodon is not great right now
No, because it will never be great. We discussed de-federation when I was at Twitter in the early days. It was clear an archipelago of decentralized servers can never generate momentum to drive enough revenue to get the wheel of acceleration spinning fast enough.
It was true then and it is true now, no matter how many hipster wanna be crypto bros who work on m7n tell you otherwise.
Pretty clear where your values are here. Personally I quite like a system that's explicitly not being designed to drive revenue, and would like to interact with other people that also want to be in a place with a higher value then the dollar bill. Im perfectly happy to let people with your values stay on twitter away from me.
Revenue is one way to provide value, not the only.
Most recently I used Twitter pretty much exclusively for following the war in Ukraine, and it’s been a big loss for me—Telegram is a good source for primary content, Twitter was great as a human-driven social redux. I followed a person in Mariupol, some people in Russia and Belarus, lots of people in Ukraine and Europe. It was a great for keeping up with such a terrible thing.
RIP Twitter.
Reports of Twitter's demise are greatly exaggerated by people with "Spaceman Bad" political brainworms.
Elon has already been muzzled quite a bit and I haven't seen much out of him recently, so I imagine as long as that keeps being the case going forward we're going to see Twitter do just fine.
Ever heard of Space X, Tesla, and the Boring Company?
> The only way it goes under is if they are losing revenue and they actually go bankrupt at some point.
That said,
> According to press reports, Twitter requires more than a billion dollars a year just to maintain its debt service and anything that endangers loan repayment or workforce security could endanger the business.
it won't be easy.
Which client?
Elk (https://elk.zone) seems pretty good to me, though I'm not particularly fussy about UX in this particular case (I only check social media a couple of times a week). But there's quite a range of clients to choose between.
The "For You" timeline is a new name for the "Home" timeline that's been around forever. And now it's easier to get to the chronological feed ("Following"), the first actual UX improvement to the site since the acquisition.
Then between the takeover and giving up entirely at the end of November, I was hitting block every time I looked at the website. For instance, I'd never had to trouble to block Elon Musk before, but he was suddenly constantly popping up.
I'm pretty sure that some settings got fairly dramatically tweaked.
[0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
I think this is the push I really need. Space Karen has done me a favour.
I sure as shit won’t be going back to Twitter’s dumpster fire of a native client.
Edited timelines, promoted tweets and user preferences that randomly reset themselves to the most annoying settings.
Nope.
https://tidbits.com/2018/08/20/twitter-cripples-third-party-...
And there are only two examples given: streaming and push notifications.
The first as Twitter pointed out was because it was only ever a beta feature and even today their own apps don't support this feature.
I know this has been a trend for the last couple of years but this kind of lack of communication seems like a milestone.
But, it was helping to wean me off my constant doom-scrolling. And now that Tweetbot no longer works, I am even less inclined to reinstall Twitter on my iPhone, and I'm opening the Mastodon app more often.
In reality the argument for federation is as I've already said - more personal sovereignty, less centralized, corruptible, overlord control. Twitter is certainly doing much better now than before, and that doesn't mean federated communities online still are not, in principle, superior.
If someone wants to use crypto to do justify sentiment like this, they'd be mocked here, but this is much better? It goes to show that people denouncing different approaches often aren't doing it because those approaches lack coherent justification, but because those approaches are related to aspects of technology some people don't like and don't care to examine.
There are plenty of reasons to lampoon the majority of approaches 'crypto' takes to 'solve' problems - that doesn't mean one shouldn't lampoon carefully and thoughtfully. Likewise, there is reason to justify federated platforms, but a dislike of Elon Musk's politics will not be the true driver.
This rings very true. The move to Mastodon isn’t likely to translate into “…but why do we need speech owners at all”. Unaccountable and unjustified concentrated power is simply not a concern to most. Once the dust settles, business as usual will kick in. It’ll either be a feudal lordship of mastodon instances, or a brand new dickhead in a leather jacket.
So the thing about Twitter (and actually I think this is something Musk badly misunderstood) is that Twitter users, particularly long-time Twitter users, have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It's always been a bit of a broken unpleasant mess; there's a reason that Twitter users affectionately call it the hellsite.
Previously, federated services were a nice idea, but there was never really the push needed; significant numbers of people weren't sufficiently annoyed with Twitter to leave. Now, well.
(I pretty much expected this to happen once Saint Car bowed to the will of the Delaware Chancery Court, but I've got to admit I thought it would take a lot longer, via a thousand cuts. This API thing feels like such an unforced error.)
Also, this has served as a timely reminder that, even if the private service you like (or love-hate) is fine now, it could at any moment be taken over and ruined by a weird idiot. Even if your interests align with the platform's interests, you can no longer assume the platform will act in its best interests.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/15/23556359/tweetbot-twitter...
It's a temporary workaround at best. The new API access is rate limited and Tweetbot will likely be banned again.
But Mastodon excites me the way I used to be excited about social. There's possibility again to turn it into the things we gave up on a decade ago. I look forward to a new wave of innovation here.
And yes, I refuse to say the name of the company or the owner at this point. I agree with the author. It isn't deserved.
How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?
Which is a thing that happens.
The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it.
So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control.
If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so.
And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here.
If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
i don't think his mum's death was a comedic prop, it was a storytelling device. what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
> We loved this app like I loved my mom.
He genuinely loves an app like his own mother? It says a lot about his opinion of his mother that an app can be on the same level in his estimation. For his sake and his mother's I hope this was an attempt at gallows humor, but it's a pretty horrible one.
> what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
I'm not belittling his life, I'm belittling the phrase "life's work" used by the parent commenter. I wonder if the article's author would even consider it his life's work. He appears to run an entire company with a number of other projects.
I'm aware of the innovations. Personally I don't find them all that profound, but either way, it's just an alternate UI for a social network that isn't a particularly positive influence on the world. People in this thread painting it as some sort of magnum opus are being a bit grandiose, don't you think?
Look, if I was this guy I'd be pissed too. But elevating a Twitter client to the level of his recently deceased mother is in unbelievably poor taste, no matter how "groundbreaking" it was.
On what basis do you give advice? Please outline your own career and accomplishments over the past 16 years.
> billionaire bozo
> comparisons to his Mother's death
Yeah, I had a hard time getting through it. At least, I don't get the point the author is trying to make.
Is this really a surprise given the direction social data has gone in the past decade or so? APIs will only remain public as long as they are useful.
Elon sees an upside to making the API at twitter more private, in order to maintain control over Twitter's direction. You can argue as much as you want for, or against this, but don't add noise and make me rake through it.
Being coarse on purpose to express yourself is perfect valid. It's not like he's being asked to critique Schopenhauer and his reply is "Fuck that shit." He's responding to having years of work rendered moot for no apparent reason beyond one man's preference.
He's angry because it was apparently done without notice on the orders of billionaire bozo Space Karen.
You should just evaluate Twitter on its own merits. Don't worry about the fact that Elon Musk doesn't march lockstep to woke orthodoxy.
Why is this hard to understand without bringing your politics into it?
If you build an app that depends on an API, it really sucks if that API is taken away. But we all know it happens. Even so, most companies care enough about goodwill that they will give some advance notice so that you can prepare for it.
In this case, the API was revoked with absolutely no advance warning for people like TapBots, who have been selling and supporting TweetBot for literally years, and now have to clean up the unexpected mess.
That's why, on their merits, Twitter the company and Musk the owner are complete dicks here.
Can you understand that, or is basic common decency too much woke orthodoxy for you?
> Why is this hard to understand without bringing your politics into it?
Pot, meet kettle.
I don't use it much these days, but hopefully it'll stick around, even if only as a Parler clone with $5B in debt, mostly populated by angry reply guys whining about wokeness. I'm sure you'll be happy there.
I don't even have a twitter account, by the way.
Everyone knows using the word "woke" like this is a cheap shot pejorative that has no substance, but pointing out someone using it like this is some kind of "obsession"? If the original poster didn't intend to be so provocative, maybe they shouldn't have leaned on using the words "woke orthodoxy" to make such a lazy point for them.
There's no substance to name-calling a billionaire. The entire article is emotional drivel.
Who does that remind you of?
Or is it still the case that if you piss off the server owner/they decide to call it quits without allowing migration, that all your data is gone?\
It's a glaring flaw really.
In my opinion, you can only push it so far. You rely on some of the “power” users to run a platform. In HN, think of it of people that post, comment and visit the most. The rest of the users are mostly “followers”. These “power” people make and set the trends.
This is the last nail in the coffin. These people will find new territories and hopefully they’ll learn this time that they need to own the platform, and not just their contributions. If successful, this will make it hard for any future centralized platform to see the light again.
If success, this will probably take Facebook and other social media networks too. This will make it even harder (or easier?) for governments to control narrative or even understand what’s going on.
I’m optimistic today for the future. Thank you Elon Musk!
There never would have been an exodus to other protocols had the awful people responsible for all of the above not gotten what they deserved. They would still be relishing exactly the position and behavior they now openly hate musk for: petty tyranny.
All in all, a positive development. Twitter didn't fall as predicted, tons of incriminating evidence is coming out, and people who are used to always getting their way are now hearing what an unconditional "no" feels like from the other side, for the first time in their lives it seems.
[0] https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/state-of-the-twitterver...