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If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because peopl

If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. There is an irony to Mastdon, a more open platform than Twitter, becoming more popular because people thought Musk would make Twitter... more open.

tasuki 4y ago
> If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?
- psychphysic 4y ago
  You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is". Mastodon is even worse. I can't see it taking off.
  - infinitezest 4y ago
    As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      Which server? Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that inconvenient? Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms. Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join popular rooms. God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite dB.
    - lutoma 4y ago
      „recently“ being the key word here. For the first few weeks/months, my Matrix server worked great too, but it’s becoming increasingly brittle as time goes on.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Synapse is not the only implementation
    - psychphysic 4y ago
      It's the only full featured implementation. The alternatives like dendrite are significantly more work. And good luck getting any federation working at all unless if you replace sqlite.
starefossen 4y ago
For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might have content policies in place.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Wait, that's literally Zuckerberg? How was it OK when a Saudi Prince bought into Twitter to make sure Saudi Arabia wouldn't be hit by an Arab Spring[1]? I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic these days just plain hysteria? [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-buys-twitter-stake--recoils-from-arab-spring.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-bu...
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    Yeah, it is not about a whole social network being controlled by a single person. It is about a whole social network being controlled by a single person you disagree with.
    - kramerger 4y ago
      You don't have to disagree with Elon as a person or politically to feel that an open speech platform controlled by one person who is known to micromanage everyone around him is bad. The tweets about Pelosi should that he is absolutely open to using his power as a prominent figure to control the narrative long outside his area of expertise
      - raspberry1337 4y ago
        We need to reduce harmful information. Only experts on A may speak about it. Experts are decided by trustable media outlets.
        BlargMcLarg 4y ago
wraptile 4y ago
I think "More open Twitter" is a red herring. The bigger issue seems to be that people simply dislike and distrust Musk.
- awestroke 4y ago
  I think that's a vocal minority. The majority doesn't care, and two equally small, vocal minority groups love and hate him, respectively
  - concordDance 4y ago
    In hackernews and reddit and my small RL sampling the haters outnumber the lovers about 3 to 1 atm. And about 1 in 4 or so care.
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      I'd like to see a poll on hacker news for this
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      In my friend group there were a handful of specific blunders that significantly changed the tide of opinion against him, all around the 2018 timeframe. "Pedo guy" was the biggest one mostly because of how stupid and unnecessary it was and his unwillingness to back down, but the "taking Tesla private for $420/share" drama was a close second. The increasingly pubic tawdriness of his love life was a factor too; prior to then he'd done a good job cultivating an image of a family man.
    - vultour 4y ago
      Specifically on Reddit I've never seen anybody support him anywhere near what one could consider "faboyism". They have this funny feedback loop where there's a (usually negative, or only marginally relevant) Musk post on the front page at least once a week, and the comments are all about how they hate Musk and how people need to stop giving him attention. Somehow everybody is completely oblivious to the fact that these posts are the only ones that most people ever see.
akho 4y ago
Mastodon has moderation facilities and is famous for instances having CoCs, refusing federation with instances with conflicting views, &c.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.
  - akho 4y ago
    You can run your own and federate with whomever. It’s unlikely that this scenario will be common. It’s more likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting eventually. Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to maintain the tunnels these things will need to be accessible. That entity can again be pressured into moderation. It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      > It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale. It runs into basically the same problem as torrenting: How do you punish people who try to leech? It more or less requires the majority of participants to apply the same policy consistently so that defectors are punished for their defection. Ultimately, the solution is more or less the same as it was for FidoNet: Defederate and form your own network with stringent requirements so that jackasses that want to ignore the rules when it suits them will be shown the door. Networks then grow to encompass precisely the number of people who can be trusted to keep to the policy and no further. Thus, you wind up with a patchwork of disconnected networks. I for one am fine with this sort of future since it worked just fine before. The only people who'd really not like it are those who prefer centralization in order to easily engage in influence operations... and of course their opinions don't count.
guywithahat 4y ago
I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving messages from other servers. I think something would have to fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a few hundred thousand active users.
rpgbr 4y ago
“More open” as owned by a billionaire extremist that promised to destroy moderation efforts that weren’t even good to begin with. People in the US have a weird notion of what “open” means.
rchaud 4y ago
It won't though, this isn't going to be like the Digg exodus. Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both sites was the interesting links that people would post and discuss in the comments. Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the 'personalities' on the platform. Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet. Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people coming from a walled garden.
aaroninsf 4y ago
The only people interested in Musk's disingenuous theory of "open" are the right wing industrial-scale disinformation peddlers and those enabled by them. QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of intent. Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of the companies he's associated with; and his success with them hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.

tasuki 4y ago

> If Mastodon takes off because of Musk ill be pretty amused. Iirc, Elon Musk said social networking should not be centralized but distributed. Perhaps he bought Twitter just to shut it down so that ActivityPub would become more popular?

psychphysic 4y ago
You've only got to look at the inconvenience of setting up a matrix home server and soon think "centralised it is". Mastodon is even worse. I can't see it taking off.
- infinitezest 4y ago
  As someone that recently set up a Matrix server, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    Which server? Synapse needs dual core with 8GB ram. You don't call that inconvenient? Even then you might have timeouts joining some rooms. Most will not meet that spec and won't be able to join popular rooms. God help you should you not replace the standard sqlite dB.
  - lutoma 4y ago
    „recently“ being the key word here. For the first few weeks/months, my Matrix server worked great too, but it’s becoming increasingly brittle as time goes on.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Synapse is not the only implementation
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    It's the only full featured implementation. The alternatives like dendrite are significantly more work. And good luck getting any federation working at all unless if you replace sqlite.

starefossen 4y ago

For me it is how one person can suddenly own an entire social network and dictate the rules as he likes or dislikes. Mastodon it self is more open, the server you choose to sign up to might have content policies in place.

rjzzleep 4y ago
Wait, that's literally Zuckerberg? How was it OK when a Saudi Prince bought into Twitter to make sure Saudi Arabia wouldn't be hit by an Arab Spring[1]? I don't really like Musk, but is every conversation and topic these days just plain hysteria? [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-buys-twitter-stake--recoils-from-arab-spring.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2471759/arab-prince-bu...
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  Yeah, it is not about a whole social network being controlled by a single person. It is about a whole social network being controlled by a single person you disagree with.
  - kramerger 4y ago
    You don't have to disagree with Elon as a person or politically to feel that an open speech platform controlled by one person who is known to micromanage everyone around him is bad. The tweets about Pelosi should that he is absolutely open to using his power as a prominent figure to control the narrative long outside his area of expertise
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      We need to reduce harmful information. Only experts on A may speak about it. Experts are decided by trustable media outlets.
      - BlargMcLarg 4y ago

wraptile 4y ago

I think "More open Twitter" is a red herring. The bigger issue seems to be that people simply dislike and distrust Musk.

awestroke 4y ago
I think that's a vocal minority. The majority doesn't care, and two equally small, vocal minority groups love and hate him, respectively
- concordDance 4y ago
  In hackernews and reddit and my small RL sampling the haters outnumber the lovers about 3 to 1 atm. And about 1 in 4 or so care.
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    I'd like to see a poll on hacker news for this
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    In my friend group there were a handful of specific blunders that significantly changed the tide of opinion against him, all around the 2018 timeframe. "Pedo guy" was the biggest one mostly because of how stupid and unnecessary it was and his unwillingness to back down, but the "taking Tesla private for $420/share" drama was a close second. The increasingly pubic tawdriness of his love life was a factor too; prior to then he'd done a good job cultivating an image of a family man.
  - vultour 4y ago
    Specifically on Reddit I've never seen anybody support him anywhere near what one could consider "faboyism". They have this funny feedback loop where there's a (usually negative, or only marginally relevant) Musk post on the front page at least once a week, and the comments are all about how they hate Musk and how people need to stop giving him attention. Somehow everybody is completely oblivious to the fact that these posts are the only ones that most people ever see.

akho 4y ago

Mastodon has moderation facilities and is famous for instances having CoCs, refusing federation with instances with conflicting views, &c.

EarlKing 4y ago
This. Mastodon is a federation in name only. If the protocol is not the policy then you really don't have a federation at all, rhetoric notwithstanding. I note that this is not a problem particular to Mastodon/The Fediverse, though, as its the exact problem that led to people forking their own networks off of FidoNet.
- akho 4y ago
  You can run your own and federate with whomever. It’s unlikely that this scenario will be common. It’s more likely that the large instances switch to whitelisting eventually. Maybe self-hosting could be made more common through selling a (cheap) appliance with self-hosted services pre-installed. It is not clear how to solve the chicken-and-egg problem with such a setup. Also, someone will need to maintain the tunnels these things will need to be accessible. That entity can again be pressured into moderation. It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale.
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    > It’s not at all clear if effective freedom of speech is attainable at scale. It runs into basically the same problem as torrenting: How do you punish people who try to leech? It more or less requires the majority of participants to apply the same policy consistently so that defectors are punished for their defection. Ultimately, the solution is more or less the same as it was for FidoNet: Defederate and form your own network with stringent requirements so that jackasses that want to ignore the rules when it suits them will be shown the door. Networks then grow to encompass precisely the number of people who can be trusted to keep to the policy and no further. Thus, you wind up with a patchwork of disconnected networks. I for one am fine with this sort of future since it worked just fine before. The only people who'd really not like it are those who prefer centralization in order to easily engage in influence operations... and of course their opinions don't count.

guywithahat 4y ago

I think a number of other people have tried and it turns out mastodon isn't a very good piece of software. Gab was based off mastodon for along time and what they found was it's just not set up to scale, and they were constantly removing features during peak use to keep the servers from crashing. Pleroma is written in elixir scales a lot better (which is why all the biggest instances like poa.st use it) but fundamentally you're still dealing with a lot of overhead sending and receiving messages from other servers. I think something would have to fundamentally change with the API if it wanted to grow past a few hundred thousand active users.

rpgbr 4y ago

“More open” as owned by a billionaire extremist that promised to destroy moderation efforts that weren’t even good to begin with. People in the US have a weird notion of what “open” means.

rchaud 4y ago

It won't though, this isn't going to be like the Digg exodus. Digg and Reddit were basically like-for-like, the friction in moving over was non-existent, because the focal point of both sites was the interesting links that people would post and discuss in the comments. Twitter is different because the 2010s social networks did everything to kill external links, and turn the focus on the 'personalities' on the platform. Also trying to go from Twitter to Mastodon is going to be like what beginners experience trying to set up a crypto wallet. Terrible UX, especially with dialog prompts with inscrutable messages about 'instances' that are meaningless to people coming from a walled garden.

aaroninsf 4y ago

The only people interested in Musk's disingenuous theory of "open" are the right wing industrial-scale disinformation peddlers and those enabled by them. QElon's amplification of deranged right wing conspiracy theory wasn't mere trolling or stupidity; it was a declaration of intent. Never forget he was partners with Peter Thiel, and the two of them together have minted a fascist-friendly grift into literal kleptocracy pipeline for themselves. You don't have to do more than peel back the sticker to learn Musk hasn't invented any of the companies he's associated with; and his success with them hinges on dishonesty and card tricks.