iteratethis

Mastodon's lack of growth or even perpetually declining MAU is not a coincidence. The community is obsessively anti-growth.

It's politically intolerant in the sense that the vibe is left to hard-left, and even within that sphere there's lot of infighting. Sure, you can use Mastodon as a normie centrist, but the culture is unappealing to many.

Any attempt to plug Mastodon into other decentralized media (Threads, Bluesky) is met with extreme hostility.

Any attempt to make Mastodon more discoverable and searchable is met with hostility. A vocal part of the community is obsessed with safety culture and consent.

Institutes, celebrities, influencers can't use Mastodon because there's no reach and users act like stung by a wasp when anything remotely commercial happens.

Anybody within Mastodon that tries to improve or grow things is shot down and crushed.

The guy that created Mastodon has sacrificed a decade of his life into this thing, for a compensation bordering poverty. He's under constant attack and framed as evil just because he didn't implement some random feature.

There's now a guy creating an Instagram clone called Pixelfed. He's white and talks hip hop slang. Which is close to inevitable for young men as it's deeply integrated into music, gaming, etc. He now stands accused of "cultural appropriation". As he did not immediately fall down to his knees to apologize, he's now framed as a racist.

There was a gay man running a large LGBT instance. Activists were flooding it with spoilers of that Harry Potter game. He tried to stop it and got angry at this behavior, after which he was bullied into a total breakdown, and shut down the instance.

There was a man running a large instance with supreme infra skills. The instance was ballooning. The instance was instant-fast and scaled beautifully. It was popular for being very middle of the road, a generic instance with decent moderation. It was the only instance at the time having a proper search experience. The activist community kept hammering on him for even enabling search and for his moderation not being strict enough, until he ultimately just gave up.

Mastodon doesn't grow because the vocal minority that runs it are chronically online purists that take sadistic joy in destroying anything that would grow it.

I mean, even Mozilla quit their experiment after 3 months. It's shockingly bad.

Commenting from the Netherlands. My take is this:

If you want the masses of households to convert to electricity, then electricity should be dirt cheap (and stay cheap) and any solution should be idiot-proof.

Electricity being cheap gives people the confidence to make the large investments in home optimization (i.e. isolation), a heat pump, EV, etc.

The upper middle class will convert regardless but the big masses need this carrot, else it will all move to a grinding halt. I don't care how we make electricity consistently cheap, I'm just saying its a precondition.

As for simplicity. I mostly live around the working class, not the educated glass. They are unable to grasp an energy contract. There's just too many variables at play. They would struggle to understand the article too.

And that's just the conceptual part. The actual custom implementation part can be complicated as well. People are overwhelmed by it and feel they're running an energy central, watching it like a penny stock trader.

The goal is worthy, but when it's expensive, complicated to understand and hard to use, people will resist it.

I think the times have changed. The Great Powers of the world are becoming more hostile to each other yet we continue to operate the naive way. We play by the rules but our rivals have no rules. This makes us weak, exploitable and ineffective.

As such, I support the ban, for the sake of doing something. I admit it's not ideal but we live in a messy and tense world. User's speech isn't really taken away, just use another dopamine feed. Better yet: use none.

You'll find it's in particular activists protesting this move.

It's in the story. She married a wealthy real estate developer. Dumped her husband, took his money, and sent it to "Brad Pitt".

Now claiming to have done this to save his life but surely she wouldn't sent this money to random bloke "Tim Johnson".

Many children have always hated homework and sought ways to avoid it or cut corners. This tool is disturbing in that you actually do finish the homework, yet in a way where you learn nothing at all.

I personally believe children should have no homework or far less of it. Typical education lasts 12-21 years. An insane amount of time. Use the lesson time more effectively and give kids some breathing room.

Disturbing detail of the post is this young girl watching Squid Games. This is a show where a few dozen people get executed each episode. Some are shot and kept alive so that their organs are fresh for harvesting.

How on earth do you let a 11 y/o girl watch that?

All of this seems like total neglect, but frankly I understand it (somewhat). The modern couples I know are dual income. By the time they're done with work, dinner and cleaning up, it's 8PM. Now we expect them to dig into the homework of their children and micro manage every media they consume? They don't have the time and energy and often don't even understand half of it.

Dual income society is a societal disaster.

"If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server"

He's completely wrong about how easy it is to move a Mastodon account to another server.

First, your instance admins can completely wipe your account before you even have a chance to move.

Second, you can't move an account, you create a new one on another server which produces a new handle. You can move followers over using some clunky process few users would understand. It can take up to 30 days to process and may require multiple tries. In case any blockage happens between your old and new server, it gets even trickier.

Worse, your content cannot be migrated. It is forever stuck at the old server and at the whims of whoever runs it. Same for the redirect from your old account to your new account.

If the point is to have a robust network where your account, content and followers/followings are safe...Mastodon is the worst.

This doesn't solve the problem. One "wrong" word and instance mods cut your ties.

In the Netherlands we call it a "stamkroeg", your home bar.

I've had the routine to attend one on most Saturdays and Sundays with a group of mates for 15 years straight. It's fun, relaxing and in a way also efficient if you have a large group of friends. A predictable moment where you catch up with everybody.

Then most of us had children, but we continued with a home version of the routine. We meet every Sunday, same time, and we rotate whom is hosting it. I thoroughly enjoy it because this is exactly the age where friendships water down.

And there's a very interesting side effect. This group of old bar mates effectively become extended family to the children of the hosts. They see all of us very regularly, often more than their grandparents or uncles/aunts which they typically have few of anyway.

And it keeps going. As we see these children grow up, we throw opportunities at them. For sports, work, anything.

I suppose it's common sense. When people spend regular time with each other, bonds and networks form. Common sense as it is, the modern age has few institutions to facilitate it.

A case like this demonstrates that principles are as soft as butter when they are tested.

Mozilla is all preachy about privacy but is in bed with the greatest private data hoarder in the world. They take the blood money and continue to enable the monopoly status quo.

Mozilla is in favor of more competition to combat Big Tech, but as soon as an actual measure is taken that does that but has negative second order effects for themselves, it's...wait, not like that.

Mozilla is looking out for all types of marginalized folks if you have to believe their activist blogs but in reality spent huge sums on leadership that failed to achieve any target at all for a decade in a row.

Mozilla is the definition of woke capitalism. Hypocritical to the bone.

This is an organization that ordinarily cannot exist. It is showered with money for doing nothing at all: just keep the search box pointed at Google. Half a billion to piss away at hobbies. There is zero accountability to any one or any thing.

The only true principle Mozilla has is that it likes to continue this toddler organization. Free money, no accountability. All the do-good talk is a cover for this.

If ChatGPT increasingly gets better at coding, why don't they deliver official plugins for the main IDEs in the way Github Copilot does?

Is this because Github mostly uses OpenAI models under the hood anyway?

What people whom carefully tweak their feed don't understand is that they are the exception.

Most normies embrace the out of the box algorithms because it is the least amount of effort. Lazy always wins.

A lot of people in this thread are expressing that their main use case for using any social network is to follow experts in their field.

Allow me to improve your life by freeing up massive amounts of time.

For any given field, say AI or programming, find the best weekly newsletter. Subscribe to a few of them, read them for a few weeks, and cut them down to the smallest number possible.

Anything of any importance in the field will be in that newsletter. Designate a fixed moment in your weekly schedule to read/skim them and be done with it. You can now delete the social media app.

I used to spent 2 hours per day "following tech news" and such. It's mostly noise and you'll be tempted to hang around and hate-read the social outrage of the day.

Somebody has sifted through all that garbage for you and put the gems in a newsletter, for free. Make use of it.

To add: Google uses Chrome's established user base to bundle other products in the same way Microsoft uses Office subscriptions to push Teams.

The most recent example being Gemini now deeply integrated into Chrome. Had Gemini been a stand-alone product, it would have to fight for every user. Now billions of users have it at their fingertips.

I remember my first usage of S3 close to its initial launch. It was the first time I came across the very concept of pay-as-you-go. I remember being anxious about unexpected charges and the forum was full of people begging for a cost cap feature.

That was 18(!) years ago. It's still nowhere to be found.

There's like 17 ways to do analysis, some of them paid, but none address the actual problem of capping a bill. It's pure malice.

I'm skeptical about the prosperity claim. If the entire planet has access to affordable/cheap and very capable AI, this still leaves two problems.

Since the access itself is not differentiating, it's going to be the most educated benefiting the most. Already today few people can use the o1 model because they can't dream up a PhD level question nor understand its answers.

More importantly, access to AI does not mean access to assets. Me, a total nobody, can use AI to design the world's best car. But that does nothing because I don't have money or land. Anybody can query AI for that car but only asset owners can actually implement the idea and extract value. Those asset owners could use AI to bring widespread prosperity to all of mankind, but we know they won't.

We don't need more material prosperity, we need social prosperity. Family formation, the restoration of community life, economic security. Not "more stuff".

Indeed. A typical major iOS version has hundreds of new features.

New iOS features are typically announced at the WWDC event. Which is a developer event that surely no normie watches. But even if they did, it's still a summary featuring like 5% of new features.

Normies may not know or suddenly discover features introduced a decade ago.

"I consider OLED to be relatively meh for HDR. Not really bright enough for me"

Hence my remark on OLED with increased brightness. In the TV world, they're called OLED.EXT panels. The new iPad Pro uses a different technique (layered panels) to achieve the same thing.

Infinitely deep blacks combined with high local brightness is god-like to experience.

"I believe even if Apple had chosen Bing instead most people would have changed the search engine back to Google."

If that is true then I guess Google really has too much money.

Alternative social media is discovering what hard problems centralized media has cracked. Problems we don't even see or know about, things we take for granted. Things not appreciated because we almost exclusively pay negative attention to social media, for understandable reasons.

Storage, as an example. It balloons. With video even more. Ever growing costs not necessarily on par with income. Hate FB as much as you like, but my photo posted 16 years ago is still there.

Depending on the software, social media can be compute intense. Not cheap.

Compliance. The legal headache of complying with every jurisdiction

And of course the worst: moderation. Deleting clearly illegal content, gore, scammers, spammers, impersonators followed by the large gray zone realm of the culture wars. A 24/7 operation that you can't ever walk away from and hollows you out over time.

All of that for what? A little carved out box for "your" people? Just open a normal forum, Reddit, Discord and piggy back on another platform.

You're carrying a disproportional burden for questionable benefits. You're never going to rebuild social media at scale from scratch. You're effectively creating a small chat group for like-minded individuals.

Mastodon is the biggest attempt at alternative social media. It's 8 years old and has 800K MAU and that MAU is perpetually tanking. It carved out a little corner for misfits. Good for them, but the entire "fediverse" is unlikely to account for more than that.

Mastodon is 8 years old and as a whole has 800K MAU. Note that MAU is an optimistic metric still, it says very little about meaningful activity.

Not just post-Moores, it sometimes feels like a reversal.

Look at high-end gaming PCs. Monster-sized GPUs and cases. CPUs with stupendous requirements for cooling. Insane power draws. The prediction for next gen (5000 series): significantly larger power draw still.

Things are not getting smaller and faster, they're getting bigger and hotter and more power hungry.

Yes, it's so much better that they pay Apple billions each year to make it the default search engine.

TV shows and movies aren't mastered like that either.

I have an incredible TV. OLED with increased brightness, the latter being new tech. The combination of OLED and HDR is jaw dropping to witness. To me and to everybody that I show it to.

What do I show them? A Youtube list with TV demo videos that specifically demonstrate the effect. Deep blacks with locally bright highlights. Not to mention very deep vibrant colors.

I watch the demo videos every 2 months or so to remind myself that I have an awesome TV. Because I most certainly do not experience anything remotely like that on ordinary TV channels, streaming services, the like.

I don't care if you personally use Whatsapp or not, it's beyond the point. Whatsapp is by far the most used messenger app in the world. The US is unique in the developed world for using iMessages or SMS.

I know somebody that works in a wooden floor business. They take perfect new wood and move it through a cylinder that drops pebbles on it. They sell it for 2-3 times the price of undamaged wood.

As for the difference in tech, especially software, I think the US has a black hole effect going on. A massive concentration of risk capital in one place that has snowballed into an enormous powerhouse. A gravitational force in particular for software companies that want to make it big.

For Europe to replicate that is as difficult/impossible as it is for the US to undo the gravitational pull of Asian manufacturing.

As for regulation, tech is grossly under-regulated in many ways. Europe is not wrong to try and regulate it, but it is true that if the US and China don't, you get left behind.

And then we can connect the dots: capital concentrates and does so in places with the fewest hurdles.

I agree. I do think Apple is thrilled with the sudden AI hype as this gives them 1-2 generations of new "selling points" as they were truly running out.

But still, it masks the problem of an underlying demand that will stagnate if not decline. They're aware of this danger, hence to pivot to earn more from services.

Do I believe that? Absolutely. Never underestimate how lazy people are. I very commonly hear battery health as the reason for replacement. In fact, I'd say it's the most common reason heard. A 3 year old iPhone is still excellent, why else would you replace it?

Besides effort, there's also trust issues. I once had a battery replacement done but the "new" one was just as bad as the old one.

Fully agree. Same for putting a speaker on the Apple watch.

"Great for when you don't have your airpods with you"

Yes, and surely it will be normalized in the culture to just blast your watch in public.

The lack of distinction between LCD and OLED can be explained. The specific condition in which OLED thrives rarely occurs. You'd need deep blacks in low ambient light viewing conditions for it to really stand out.

iOS, most apps, most websites, even most video isn't mastered as such and not consumed in those conditions.