I get the sudden urge for Mastodon, and the anti-twitter sentiment at the moment, but IMO changing platform is irrelevant.
Firstly, let's assume that we are upset with twitter firings enough to quit twitter. Moderators, accessibility teams, etc - we consider them important enough that we leave when they go, and go to mastadon? Which has how many content moderators?
I'm no fan of elons style, but he's not wrong that a company losing 4m a day is sustainable. And saddled with 13b of new debt to pay off the old owners won't help.
Advertising won't save twitter. That's been tried and failed.
While there are edge cases where twitter is valuable, the vast majority is just noise, and not in a good way. The one-line sound bite has been co-opted by politicians and celebrities, to to little more than gain attention. It panders to the over-simplification, it eschews serious discussion of nuanced viewpoints. It is driven by those seeking attention, when absolutely any attention will do.
It is the bottom that internet communities raced to. Overall I think a world without twitter is better than a world with twitter, regardless of which platform it ends up on.
Big picture, Mastodon isn't just Twitter minus the moderation -- it's Twitter minus the algorithm for promoting the most "engaging" content. That's a big win, because it's the competition for the most engaging content that always ends up as a race to the bottom.
The dumbest, silliest, and rudest comments and commenters get promoted on Twitter (and Facebook etc), because that gets the most clicks. Get rid of all that manufactured promotion, and what's left is a quieter space where users can self-organize their own communities -- more like a chill party or friendly conference hallway than a staged political rally.
None of them, but that's fine. People moving to Mastodon believe that communities can largely self-moderate, by aligning with the owners and kicking out people who don't play by their rules. Twitter is arguably the same, but it tries to be all things to all people and fails. Mastodon instance owners aren't trying to be that. They only want to keep a small number of people happy. That's a much easier job.
I think it works quite well. Mastodon instances aren't ever going to be a platform to broadcast a message to the public to like Twitter tries to be, but that's OK. There's a place in the world for lots of things that aren't Twitter.
It is the bottom that internet communities raced to.
People choosing to leave Twitter aren't convinced that's true. They believe it will get worse.
The post I was responding to is talking about "people employed as content moderators." when the author wrote "Moderators, accessibility teams, etc - we consider them important enough that we leave when they go, and go to mastadon? Which has how many content moderators?". Mastondon has moderators, but not really in the same sense, because it doesn't need them. The people running instances do the job voluntarily, applying much simpler rules.
This applies if you're thinking of Twitter as a business or as a tool for mass-broadcast. If you think of something with a similar format but that fits a different space, that's the use for the Fediverse: it's more like USENET or BBSs or even 2008 Twitter than it is like 2022 Twitter.
Is Twitter losing $4m per day his fault? As in the acquisition was a LEVERAGED BUY-OUT and he scared off advertisers at a advertising summit that would have locked-in adrev for the year of 2023.
When you borrow money at an obscene interest rate during a leveraged-buyout, the fastest way to pay your creditors is to cut headcount if history serves correctly.
I have seen no numbers indicating they were losing anywhere near that per day looking at their published financials.
> I have seen no numbers indicating they were losing anywhere near that per day looking at their published financials.
They seem to have lost $221M in 2021[1] which would be ~600k/day but that seems to have been influenced by an $800M lawsuit loss - that would imply they had (theoretical) profits of ~$580M for 2021.
Which implies that Twitter's profits were $1.5M/day rather than the $4M/day loss claimed by Musk. Something seems off there but I can't figure out which figure most accurately reflects reality. If in fact Twitter wasn't haemorrhaging money it casts a distinctly unpleasant pall on the reasons for the 50% cut to headcount.
After months of trying to get out of the deal he took the equivalent of a pay-day loan, funded by multiple creditors, to complete the acquisition.
I am shocked there are as many people here not taking the time to look into the financials of that deal and are assuming Musk is some sort paragon of finance.
Re. moderation, I think you’re right to be skeptical of all-volunteer moderation, but I see it as a return to the phpBB days. My big worry is that once spammers/trolls start their own instances existing instances will have to lock down federation to other known instances, similar to what’s happened with email.
I’d argue that the things you don’t like about twitter have more to do with its business model than tweet-form content in general.
Interesting. Just to be on the same page, which social media you think needs to survive? Ig? Fb? TikTok? The reality is that social media is part of everyone's life wether we like it or not. Twitter may die but something else will take its place. Same goes for fb, ig, etc...
Regarding twitter itself, I also think twitter has an uphill battle (to say the least) to be profitable and maintain relevance in this climate. I think Elon will try different routes (some combination of twitch, YouTube for creators) just before call it quits but let's not forget that twitter is still the "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" Platform. There's no other one to even come to mind when you want to know which news is happening atm.
Heck, he could enter in some sort of agreement with news outlets and add realtime video capabilities attached to trending tweets, etc...
I feel like my thumb enjoyed tapping the link with the word "BIG", so maybe a bit of a disconnect between the average caveman thumbs / mousing fingers-brain and the further implication of the word in terms of resource use.
That'd be cool, but it just uses publicly available APIs for this. Most of the data like that isn't reported through the public APIs across various types of software. Bad data is tossed out (e.g., the you-think-your-fake-numbers-are-impressive.well-this-instance-contains-all-living-humans.lubar.me lists over 7 billion accounts) but data that is (as far as I know) accurate is presented as-is.
Looks like you are correct, yeah, and the raw logs show 7,410 of the 10,729 live instances have it. Lemme hack it in real quick; I can't put it onto the big pages and not sure how well adding another column to that table will work, but give me like five minutes.
the backlash to twitter (to the extent that it exists) is mostly ideological. Mastodon is not ideological in general. individual instances are, but they can't scale to the size that the ideologues want them to. So i m afraid they are going to have to wait for the next centralized forum to be deployed.
There are elements of ideology, but I think a lot of us just see the writing on the wall in that twitter now needs to squeeze more profit out of its userbase (to pay the interest on the debt from the LBO) and is likely to change in big ways.
To the extent that it’s ideological, the ideology is that many small instances are better than one big one so that a billionaire can’t destroy it in a flash.
maybe the people who tweet will care about it, but most people dont tweet, they read. Unfortunately mastodon servers tend to block each other on ideological grounds, which defeats the purpose of having a single identity.
The most active instance, Pawoo, was started by Pixiv after Twitter banned lolicon. Pawoo is blocked/silenced by many instances in the west. Pawoo is no more the property of Pixiv since 2020.
Pretty sure I said as much in another thread and got excoriated for it because #NotAllFediverseNodes. Well, here's your proof: the Fediverse is largely populated with all manner of sexual content that is intolerable pretty much everywhere else, hence why nobody wants to use it.
Guys, there's like four layers of defence between you and the big bad porn:
1. Your instance having banned misbehaving porn instances. A.K.A. all instances that are exclusively meant for porn/sex work.
2. You not following porn accounts or accounts that boost porn posts.
3. Porn having an NSFW content warning (literally haven't seen non-blurred porn yet).
4. You personally blocking/reporting porn instances/accounts that get through to your feed by the means of a boost.
Or - here's a wild idea - degenerate porn is so ubiquitous on the Fediverse that we'll all just steer clear of it because the effort required to remove it is too great because:
1. Instances that have banned porn instances are few and far between.
2. Not following porn accounts is simple enough, except that so many accounts share porn.
3. There's no way you haven't seen non-blurred porn yet.
4. Playing whack-a-mole with instances/accounts on Fediverse is about as productive as it is on Twitter... which is to say they'll be back in under five minutes.
It's a passionate place we have here at HN in a lot of ways too.
I like that the Internet is for passion, even if it's essentially kitted out most people with a straight up zippo lighter when it comes to satisfying the human need for that burning kind of sensory heat.
The "Fediverse" should focus on _CON-federation_ making the /private/ individual autonomous.
Otherwise people will simply be swapping a couple of emperors for many kings.
To realise this and solve most problems, hosting instances must be made as easy, cheap and convenient as possible.
isnt't there some sort of confederation as you are mentioning in fediverse now?
like you, as an instance admin/owner/mod can have your mod decisions public, there can be a public mod log, you can share block lists with other instances.
this instance has their rules public and other instance owners can decide, often with users inputs of a remote instance should be blocked or not. others are free to accept or reject their decisions but yeah...
many kings is fine so what do you suggest? every person has their one person instance? sure
a person has to be tech literate enough to buy and set up a domain. if they can do that, even if following online guides, they should have no trouble installing any of these services
The fediverse automatically becomes a confediverse when everyone hosts for themselves
So yes, what you are saying is right although not relevant for NORPS.
Ideally, we'll see people selling instances as a service payed via a management app in the playstore or something. I'm disgusted by the playstore as it's against my values, but I make this argument because if it's not convenient & easy, people will not use it and rather sell their rights and freedoms ( And those of others without realising ) for whatever is convenient and easy.
Firstly, let's assume that we are upset with twitter firings enough to quit twitter. Moderators, accessibility teams, etc - we consider them important enough that we leave when they go, and go to mastadon? Which has how many content moderators?
I'm no fan of elons style, but he's not wrong that a company losing 4m a day is sustainable. And saddled with 13b of new debt to pay off the old owners won't help.
Advertising won't save twitter. That's been tried and failed.
While there are edge cases where twitter is valuable, the vast majority is just noise, and not in a good way. The one-line sound bite has been co-opted by politicians and celebrities, to to little more than gain attention. It panders to the over-simplification, it eschews serious discussion of nuanced viewpoints. It is driven by those seeking attention, when absolutely any attention will do.
It is the bottom that internet communities raced to. Overall I think a world without twitter is better than a world with twitter, regardless of which platform it ends up on.