including I suppose Elon's experimental approach to management.
I hope that in 10 years, we will look back at this twitter 2.0 (= musk's debacle) as the impetus that lead to more widespread adoption of social media 2.0 (= federation)
I already see the snowball effect getting momentum with all this coverage (NPR, NYT...) and big name exits (Apple...)
That instead of one poorly managed understaffed silo full of trolls and abusers you have 2000 poorly managed, even more understaffed systems with 2000 different approaches to moderation and content doesn't make anything easier or fixed for people who use Twitter today.
It is the same like we had federated chat with Jabber for 20 years now - and nobody uses it. The best implementations of it ended being the nonfederated ones - like Google Talk or I believe Whatsapp used that protocol. And apart from nerds and some engineers literally has no clue that something like XMPP even exists.
People don't care about the technology, they care where they want to communicate with their friends and network.
The Twitter issues are first and foremost human, business, management and social problems, not something you can throw some network protocols and technology at and declare it solved.
It is not about short-term problem solving. It is about long-term investment in more decentralized social networks. 2000 different approaches is exactly what is needed for "natural selection" to do it job.
> are first and foremost human, business, management and social problems, not something you can throw some network protocols and technology at and declare it solved.
Agreed. But the protocols should by designed to adress and resolve those problems the best they can. This will take a lot of iterations. The more (and sooner) people jump ship, the better chance we have to test and iterate.
I don’t think users are going to participate in these sorts of experiments long term. People are signing up now out of fear and anger and hope but Mastodon still lacks the user base — people for you to follow and people to amplify your posts. (Partly because it’s still a fraction as popular as Twitter and partly because the hosts all seem to be blocking a different half of the other hosts so even if two people are both on Mastodon they may not be able to connect.)
If, on top of all that, people are expected to tolerate “a lot of iterations” before things work right I see them leaving. Let’s not forget that the Twitter/Mastodon mode of interaction can be pretty toxic so there needs to be a big carrot for people. Mastodon doesn’t have it. Twitter barely did tbh.
There are nearly 3M users across the fediverse. I can't keep up with my timeline. This genuinely sounds like the words of someone who hasn't actually looked at mastodon in the last month.
> people are expected to tolerate “a lot of iterations” before things work right I see them leaving
This is literally what Elon just said they're gonna do with Twitter.
Look, don't get me wrong, I think it's very likely mastodon remains a bit niche. But not for these reasons. I'm much more concerned about issues of search/discoverability, general usability, and the downsides of a purely chronological timeline than I am about either of the issues you just focused on.
You are right, not in the mainstream. What I'm talking about is what is already happening in the underground (and also hoping for some right people to join in). This is enough for that "natural selection" work. Don’t you feel the pace of those decentralized new projects every week on HN?
> if people are expected to tolerate.... I see them leaving
Maybe you're right? I said I'm "hoping". Deep inside, I believe this crisis is just a steppingstone (may be an important one ?). At the very least we have sown some seeds in mainstream social networks (like Tumblr's move to federate) and mainstream media (all the mastodon talk). We need more underground work to sort all the stuff you and others are complaining about. The next crisis we will be more ready.
Twitter's current issues by and large are a result of trusting corporate media silos with our precious time, data, and safety online. It's wildly unacceptable.
Smaller communities can be more focused and managed. Trying to get everyone in one place agreeing on one set of rules sounds impossible. At least federation has the potential to let groups exist differently as desired.
They do it to interact with the globe, and the more people on that network the better it is.
There are a million ways to create a niche site (like hacker news) that allows a Small Focused Community to interact, that is not a replacement for Twitter
Everyone was on Facebook too. We're not all looking for Facebook 2.0 currently, are we? Yea, we have different form factors of social networks, definitely. But some (not all!) of the core features of Facebook were misguided or mismanaged. Some features of Facebook aren't looking to be replaced.
I'm not saying Mastodon is a replacement for Twitter. I'm simply saying maybe some features of Twitter aren't worth being replaced for many people.
I do not agree, and it does not make me unhappy at all. I am late 70's child, I experienced the Wild West of the internet, nothing posted to twitter (or the chan's for that matter) shock me, or makes me unhappy
I think people need thicker skin, and maybe more anonymity not less...
Censorship is not the solution, never has been in history and never will be in the future.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Actually plenty of us (and I've also been on the internet for many decades now) would like to hop online to engage with some cool folks about [insert interesting topic here] without having utter garbage and dreck thrown up in our faces like racism, transphobia, misogyny, bigotry, etc., etc.
I support giving people the power to create their own echo chambers and safe spaces, feel free to do so..
No one should be forced to communicate with anyone they do not want to, however you also should not be able to prevent me from communicating with others that I desire to
>>What a ridiculous thing to say
Not really, it is sad parents have stopped teaching "Sticks and Stones my break my bones but words will never harm me"
We really have lost the cultural axiom "I may hate what you say, but I will defend your right to say it" haven't we.
Yea, i did say "everyone" but i didn't actually mean everyone. Lots of people enjoy Facebook in all it's glory, too.
> Censorship is not the solution, never has been in history and never will be in the future.
My comment wasn't about Censorship, though. It was about people and a possibility that they may prefer categorized focused communities like many of us grew up with. Which may or may not include moderation (aka "censorship")
I certainly enjoyed the forums of old more than the modern day global scroll feed. But i prefer focused/categorized content, clearly.
My point wasn't that you do or don't. Merely to pose a question. A question (among many) that could dictate whether or not the Forums of old have a place in the modern day. Whether or not the global attention draw that is Twitter is actually desired. edit: Desired enough to keep it alive and "successful", at least.
LOL. You posted this to a moderated forum.
> I experienced the Wild West of the internet
I was on USENET in the early 90s, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c.moderated were created for a reason. Unmoderated forums end up as cesspools.
But it would effectively kill the various cat-and-mouse gaming of the entire system by spammers, scammers, and sub-nation-state adversaries.
I feel HN is not that moderated - bar - I don't feel like it happens that often that people's opinions get disappeared - Imo the main appeal of the site is that people of differing opinions are and worldviews are able to have informed debates about stuff here - even if limited to the world of technology.
You can be sure that if a flood of new users happens, the current system won't scale, and we'd see a diminishing quality of content and comments posted. Some old timers would probably say that has already happened, but it's still largely under control.
This site doesn't have the benefit of, say, Reddit, where niche communities can still exist in relative isolation and with their own moderation rules, even with the amount of users and low quality content on the rest of the site.