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Comment by montroser | Hacker News Reader

The sooner we get away from the delusion that "twitter is basically a public service," the better.

This timult has been good for people to internalize that it's a private, for-profit company, whose leadership can change, whose moral compass is up for grabs. Not the right venue for official communications from governments and institutions, let alone you or me...

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i think elon himself is actively trying to have it both ways - he's attempting to run it like the for-profit business you've mentioned but he's also continuing that "town square" idea/rhetoric:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1666945495334256642

I like the second tweet (sadly he does not mention crimethInc, but considering he banned them I understand why) (and yes, I'll keep mentioning that ban until I get the reason why) but the first one is so full of shit, even if I'm not a fan of the guy I don't think he wrote it himself. Maybe the new corporate CEO did, totally the kind of corporate shit I'd expect from a salesman (saleswoman in that case)

This is really only because he's moving it more towards something like an utility - it still is a for-profit company, one can't easily just change that especially considering the hostility towards freedom of speech in the world currently.

People don’t think the company is a public service - they think that about the function. The real delusion is mastodon being a reasonable replacement.

> The real delusion is mastodon being a reasonable replacement

Personally, I've found Mastadon to be a fantastic replacement. What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement? It definitely fits better with the public and open service that people wanted Twitter to be.

> What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement

Nobody uses it. Talking to yourself was not a mainstream use-case for Twitter users.

I currently follow 447 people on Mastodon, and 258 follow me. I think on Twitter, after 15 years of having an account, I followed about 1000 people, many inactive by the time I tired of Naughty Old Mr Car’s antics, and was followed by about 1000 (presumably ditto). _In my niche_, it’s a perfectly adequate replacement, and is better than old-Twitter in some ways (it is so much better than the post-Musk mess it’s not even funny), but it would not be for everyone. I post about as much, maybe a little more (it’s easier to have a conversation, for a variety of mechanical reasons.)

I do miss quote-tweets as a mechanic; while they could certainly be abused, there were legitimate use cases. Mastodon plans to add them, but AIUI getting the appropriate changes made to ActivityPub to allow for consent-based quote-posting is a whole thing.

Different technical communities are joining Mastodon one at a time (math, rust, and enthusiast product communities). Time will tell if this can lead to a critical mass. I wouldn't hold my breath but I also wouldn't discount the possibility to the point of not thinking about it.

Most of my people have moved to either Slack or Signal, depending on how much written content there was. Slack for people with a lot to say, and Signal for social chats. The majority of my Twitter follows have left the platform. I still use it though.

By that logic, nobody should have started using Twitter in the first place, because when it started, no one used it either. It's circular reasoning.

Most social networks try to provide the energy necessary to get a critical mass of users aboard, but Mastodon is the opposite. Mastodon throws up a torrent of Nerd Bullshit® to make sure that only the chosen few will tolerate it.

> Nobody uses it.

Who is nobody? Almost all of the people I used to follow and discuss the topics I cared about on Twitter are now all on Mastadon. I find that I'm having similar discussions at this point with almost all the same people I used to.

The network effect you describe is not a property of the platform itself

Mastodon is great for talking to an engaged audience. My feed is full of interesting stuff. Less good for narcissistic babbling to thousands of “followers.”

Mastodon is a reasonable replacement for some subset of Twitter’s userbase. It works for me, say, because the sort of people I followed on Twitter largely ended up on Mastodon. It would work less well if, say, you were into influencers (dunno where if anywhere those are going), celebs (Threads), crypto-people/metaverse-people/AI-people/other-tech-hype-people (still committed to Twitter, I think), or journalists (there are some experimenting with Mastodon, but Bluesky is generally their Twitter-in-Exile).

I’m not sure that there will ultimately be _one_ Twitter replacement; with the exception of Digg->Reddit, it’s actually rather unusual for that to happen when a social media site dies. Livejournalers-in-exile mostly didn’t go to Dreamwidth, say; they scattered to a bunch of rather dissimilar social networks.

This and Facebook. The way Americans + the rest of the world treat it, you’d think it was a public utility.

Are Americans not part of the world?

Edit: the parent used to read "Americans and the world". Ergo, my comment.

The edit is as silly: "Americans and the rest of the world", why not say "the world" then?

Sometimes it feels like that here.

Americans + the world = the world?

https://morbotron.com/caption/S02E07/121811

Edit for clarity

It is more like a piblic service than ever now. Maybe the "bias" is more visible for some people than before, but it's gone down to 10% of it was before (no mass bannings of conservatives and general oppressiveness against speech!!). Only shows the blindness towards those that think it's somehow more biased now. Jesus.

The old board's moral compass was surely for sale, that is true. Never again.

I know this will be perceived as “mean” or “bad discussion” but based on your comment history you truly have an unhealthy obsession with Elon Musk and that fact really scares me because on this site your vote equals ten of mine because you post all the time.

I have a healthy appreciation of the person. If he was an AI, or an anonymous council, I would say the same. But these entities tend to be exceptional humans. I have had largely the same opinion of the man for ~10 years and understand where his decision-making comes from so with nowadays's trendy ill-informed hate-opinions I tend to drive discussion out of the distasteful anti-progress rhetoric that is undeserved. I can assure you my decisionmaking and posts come from a good place. In an increasingly skewed world straight lines don't look right anymore. For what it's worth, I don't think you're unaligned to the current state of the world saying what you're saying.

> Because I post all the time

I don't? I have had lengths of years of just lurking. Maybe I'm a bit more active nowadays but am far from as active as the top 20% or so on the platform probably. Also my vote doesn't count more than yours. But from what I've seen at times I think some botters votes truly mean more than ours. I still put the original thought and work to every single one of my writings while knowing that. Truth and hard work will always prevail.

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