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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

Twitter was the closest thing we had to a centralized, yet "distributed", one-stop shop for news.

If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.

It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.

Unfortunately that didn't last for long.

What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.

The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.

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Why not? The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see. It's Twitter reframed as a regression back towards RSS and the blogosphere, which people here should be into; it's like that scene in High Fidelity, Mastodon picked up where your precious Google Reader left off.

The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!

> The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see.

Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.

If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:

https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437

I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.

I read this thread and it's not really clear what it's about. It seems to be about the need to mute and block people explicitly. I haven't had to do that much with Mastodon. I had to do it a lot on Twitter, and by all accounts it has gotten much, much worse.

I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.

My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

Personally I couldn't stand to use Mastodon without a lot of keyword blocks and blocked users.

There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.

There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...

and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.

I have never had that problem, nor have I personally seen anyone have that problem.

The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.

I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.

>I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.

I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.

we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.

It's funny. We yearn for the days when everybody had a quirky website at ~username on their university server, but all those sites disappeared when you graduated.

> This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

Are you paying for it? I've been using omg.lol for some time and I'm not concerned about that mastodon instance disappearing anytime soon.

> Are you paying for it?

I've been donating to the instance, yes. Although the reason this time is to do with UK's new laws on social media sites.

> I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

This will keep happening until people realize that:

- there is a significant cost to properly manage an instance

- there is a significant cost to develop sustainably the software

- there is a significant cost to deal with moderation

and that these costs can not be covered by donations from a small minority.

moderation aside, is the cost any different from any other site you can host on?

Single-user instances, maybe not. But running a Mastodon instance for a couple of thousand people is a lot more resource intensive than running a blog or a XMPP server for the same amount of users.

>my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.

And why is your instance shutting down?

-----

from link:

>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people

I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.

>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.

Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.

Posts are identified by URL, so if the URL is gone, the post is gone.

> I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub?

To allow others to see your posts, yes.

But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).

Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.

> And why is your instance shutting down?

This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.

> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.

I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.

> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.

I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.

Something about fool me once or twice, but fool me six times.

Mastodon is awesome.

I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.

Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.

But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.

Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.

>I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.

nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum.

On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.

I don't understand why it should be the one or the other.

RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter.

And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing).

Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.

>I don't understand why it should be the one or the other.

In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue.

RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0]

>Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics

The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform.

But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this.

0: https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed

> I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.

EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/

> Why not?

Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?

> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.

Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.

Mastodon.social probably has a feed from nearly everybody except those who opted out.

Yes, it's just a firehose, it doesn't curate or boost anything. I want interesting things to be surfaced. Twitter/X is still pretty good at this and it's why millions continue to use it.

https://mastodon.social/explore Looks pretty algorithmic to me!

> "was"

Twitter/X is still the de facto global real-time news platform.

If 5% of X's top users exited to a different platform, X users would just screenshot and redistribute their noteworthy content on X and it would be business as usual.

You can't beat the network effects.

Probably, but at that point it means there is a new competitor and some people may jump closer to where the content is being made. Worst case, it means you don't have to stay on Twitter.

I say that's a huge win, when you shift your lens away from "the destructon of twitter" and instead "options outside of twitter"

>What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.

That makes Threads probably a much closer approximation of what the average person cares about. You have to be like five levels deep into bizarre internet drama to be glued to your phone to get live updates about Sam Altman's and Helen Toner's employment status.

> Threads was as if it didn't even exist

Key people covering OpenAI e.g. Alex Heath, Kara Swisher, Casey Newton were all posting on Threads first.

It was then re-posted on X.

> What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage.

I apparently missed this. What important role did Twitter play there?

All the OpenAI employees posting their hearts in support, @sama responding, etc. All happened on X.

Was that really the important part of the whole debacle? Or was the important part the actions of the board?

That was the cringiest part of the whole debacle.

> What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is

I'm not sure that twitter added much other than allowing us to spectate the whole thing in realtime. I don't think it impacted the outcome in any meaningful way or provided us a ton of useful context. I actually worry that the endless speculation (and intentional misinformation at times) can be a bit dangerous. Kind of like when news stations went 24/7 and then grasped for anything at all to put on the screen to fill all that airtime.

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