15 ms·

It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

258 points by swyx 4y ago

roenxi 4y ago
It is fascinating that people feel justified ignoring the user experience on Twitter when talking about whether to use Twitter. I don't know what it "really means" when all the motivations, incentives and goals are unpacked, but there are surely some fascinating lessons here to be learned. Previously I've only seen social networks come under pressure when the user experience changed markedly so this seems new.
jimbob45 4y ago
Surely no one felt more desperation for Mastodon to operate as an adequate substitute for Twitter than GOP leadership in the aftermath of Trump's Twitter ban and the 2020 election. If those people, the most motivated people in all of time to make Mastodon work, can't make Mastodon work, then I struggle to see how the Musk-haters plan to switch over successfully. I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - if someone could have done it better than Twitter, then you'd better believe that the GOP would have already been all-in on that platform long before you got there.
- throwaway-jim 4y ago
  Anecdotal - I had a account in one of the largest english mastodon instances for a few years now and have seen multiple waves of twitter exodus into mastodon. Server becomes extra lively for a few weeks and then it returns to normal. None of these people last.
  - OscarCunningham 4y ago
    https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon It looks to me like not all of them go away. There was a noticable step up after the spike in May.
- mcv 4y ago
  But Mastodon works. If Trump's people can't make it work, it's possible that it's not Mastodon that's the problem. (For the record, I'm not on Mastodon, but I follow a lot of people who are.)
polote 4y ago
The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.
  - buf 4y ago
    People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those. But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself. PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
    - Doddler 4y ago
      I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.
      - watwut 4y ago
        I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.
      - low_tech_love 4y ago
HanTrio3 4y ago
- blowski 4y ago
  Someone got out the wrong side of bed? I’m also in the process of moving from Twitter to Mastodon, albeit I have very few followers on either. As such, I found it both interesting and useful. I imagine he does want engagement and wants to get it from Mastodon instead of Twitter.
- swyx 4y ago
  keep in mind author is Simon Willison, who cocreated Django and whose blog goes back to 2002.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    I’ve made a living working with Django for the better part of the decade, and certainly know who Simon is, but still wouldn’t kid myself about this meaning anything.
- Marazan 4y ago
  Twitter is dead dude. It is Friendster. It is MySpace. You just don't realise it yet. (Disclaimer I have a Twitter account that I use to post stuff)
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Friendster and Myspace failed because of scalability problems and lack of features compared to the alternatives. Mastodon has both of those.
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  I'm not even mad, it's just funny. It's just another salvo in the culture war - from this point of view, a management change in a major SM platform is pretty significant, especially when that platform was openly biased in one direction. So you have the usual noise, which has absolutely nothing to do with Twitter as a product or company.
FortiDude 4y ago
It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.
  - nathias 4y ago
    people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently
    - TulliusCicero 4y ago
      Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.
      - nathias 4y ago
        for me that would be completely reasonable, but it isn't necessary, you can have many decentralized filters like automatically block people that are blocked by a % of people I follow and many similar mechanisms
        deleted 4y ago
silisili 4y ago
- Researcherry 4y ago
  haha True, I don't know why you are getting downvoted.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  It is funny cause your comment makes you sound like the insufferable one. I bet more than anything if people shift to a new network that you'd be the one to eventually change and pretend like you always saw it coming.
- rvz 4y ago
  > They exist and thrive only through validation from social media. Exactly. They will announce that they are 'leaving' but don't have the guts to delete their Twitter accounts and their followers as they will continue to lurk and post links from Twitter on wherever they moved to.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon. I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.
- Isinlor 4y ago
  Even email is not really that decentralized - it's mostly Google + Microsoft.
  - ErikCorry 4y ago
    The reason why this happened is instructive. Fighting spam is really hard and the best way to do it is to be good at machine learning and to have access to a good percentage of worldwide mail, unencrypted. Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Not everywhere is America. Most institutions in European countries run their own e-mail servers and deliverability is OK.
    - ErikCorry 4y ago
      I guess if you count on-prem Outlook as running your own servers.
      - 4y ago
zekrioca 4y ago
I respect their line of though, only because it is their own opinion. I know projects such as Orca and give real praise to all of them. But to me, leaving Twitter because Musk fired the accessibility team does not seem like the best argument for leaving. If anything, it just sped up what was already happening (internally) even before Musk bought Twitter. Accessibility becomes ‘real’ (though not perfect) thanks to a wide range of technologies that work together and respect certain patterns, not just due to the UI interface. This, assuming Twitter represents a big chunk of the real world, which I doubt, though it reaches a great proportion of it. However, what is it to say that Twitrer’s accessibility will get worse, or that Musk will not hire even more capable people later? This is why I think the person left Twitter not only because Musk fired the accessibility team, but also because Twitter itself does not represent anymore the philosophy they believe in.
tomcam 4y ago
The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know nothing about the accessibility team there, but for all we know he has a better team lined up. The author and I both agree the reverse may also be true. Could be they get replaced by something worse. To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.
- almost 4y ago
  I think you might in fact be a fanboy. Which is fine, fanboy all you like if it makes you happy! Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with. Maybe.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    A most interesting comment. Lots of words, no falsifiable assertions. Just a steaming pile of innuendo.
    - almost 4y ago
      If you say so
- beachy 4y ago
  > To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption. Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth. In fact this approach might even attract some more hungry and gung ho warrior types who are attracted by musk's style, and could be better suited to bringing about his vision than the existing team.
GrumpyNl 4y ago
I think, they are happy will all the attention https://www.mastodon.com/ https://www.mastodon.com/
- Tepix 4y ago
  :-) For those who are wondering, the page you are looking for is at https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
coffeeblack 4y ago
I liked Mastodon when it first came out. But nowadays it’s seems to be more like a Left wing version of Gettr. Wouldn’t use either.
- saboot 4y ago
  We're more polarized now compared to when mastodon, and twitter, were first introduced. I'm convinced making a twitter clone is going to be impossible as most people are seeking to sort themselves into ideological buckets at the outset.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - coffeeblack 4y ago
    Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Trump's twitter clone has disabled federation as far as I'm aware.
    - DoItToMe81 4y ago
      If I recall correctly, it was initially built on a relicensed version of Mastodon, with federation disabled. No idea what's going on with it now, or if it was even legal to do so with Mastodon's AGPL license.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        I don't think it's even relicensed, they pretty much just stole the code as far as I'm aware. From what I've read (I can't even reach the service as a foreigner) it's not even built on a recent version of Mastodon.
marceloabsousa 4y ago
I find mastodon a bit hard to navigate between the servers and how to engage in a particular server.
tga 4y ago
> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.
- imperialdrive 4y ago
  - spion 4y ago
    Thats precisely right - the software itself isn't really that impressive [*], the connections and people is what (can) make it great (or terrible, depending on who you follow). [*] - as a product - there is some really great engineering due to the scale of course.
  - jdub 4y ago
    So you're saying you don't really know what you're talking about?
    - oefrha 4y ago
      That’s a significant part of social media: shitting on things you don’t know shit about.
- MrDresden 4y ago
  There is a very strong signal being given right now about the trend Twitter will be on for a long time.
  - szundi 4y ago
    Musk talking for days is not a signal yet
asplake 4y ago
Question: If you run a Mastadon server, what legal liabilities does that expose you to? How might that vary by country?
BenGosub 4y ago
I don't see a valid reason to leave Twitter in his post. IMO laying off the accessibility team isn't a reason to leave. But, each to his own opinion. The layoffs will have effect, but it doesn't have to be a bad one. Once they get leaner, they might have a clearer vison and know where to expand.
- ealexhudson 4y ago
  If Musk wants twitter to be the town square for the world, that town square needs to be accessible for all. Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with your feet?
  - flyinglizard 4y ago
    You don’t need a whole accessibility team for a product to be accessible. It can be handled by raising the awareness of other product teams plus some central auditing, for example (Twitter after all is a pretty basic product, UX wise).
    - mongol 4y ago
      Someone needs to do that though. With the foremost experts sacked, and staff down with a half, who will bother?
      - awestroke 4y ago
        Maybe the employees on the accessibility team were all useless and hated by the whole org? Maybe starting fresh with real accessibility experts is a better way forward?
        extra88 4y ago
        There was no accessibility team before 2020, Twitter hired real accessibility experts to be on the team, and they have been responsible for a number of accessibility improvements.
andrewclunn 4y ago
[flagged]
- lovelearning 4y ago
  The move to decentralised tech is not to escape corporate censorship. It's to avoid the right's obnoxiousness that's set to spike now on Twitter under Musk's "free speech" vision.
- mcv 4y ago
  The left has always been about decentralisation, opposed to corporate censorship, concerned with election integrity and open source. And they're not going to drop their environmental concerns just because of new Fed appointees. I'm sure there are people in the political center (or maybe politically undecided or flexible is more accurate?) who do change their opinions based on how the political winds blow, but most of these issues have been left-wing issues for a long time.
xvilo 4y ago
If you're not setting up your own instance, make sure to help fund the instance you are using. Maybe it's on the about page or DM/Mention the server admin! They can tell you where to donate
joeevans1000 4y ago
As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.
- vorticalbox 4y ago
  there could be a number of reasons other than "Elon doesn't care about xyz" other members of the dev team can/are already doing this Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job Maybe he has his own team to replace it We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    Jumping ship because of X at this point is just ideological flexing, we have zero indication how this will play out yet.
    - klabb3 4y ago
      I wouldn't go that far. I agree that there's a lot of that visible right now, but Elon demanded round-the-clock hours from employees as his first "executive order", as well as locking down offices. He just doesn't seem that good of a boss, and more like a traditional capitalist in a sense. Is it ideological to want decent working hours?
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      > we have zero indication. That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    > we have zero knowledge So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.
dcj4 4y ago
- padolsey 4y ago
  Why comment then?
Nican 4y ago
Mastodon may not have the better interface, or the better community, or it may not yet be the most intuitive to use. But I want to invest my time to help Mastodon reach the critical mass it needs. I would love to have a social network not controlled by capitalistic needs, and let open source developers help evolve it.
nudpiedo 4y ago
I find Mastodon doomed by design, understanding design as a whole, not just software. It looks like the technical right choice, including all the bells and whistles: decentralized, own your instance, etc. However twitter's issue, and most of social network issues are the human factor. And by that design Mastodon is not inmune to any of it, it even encourages larger echo chambers, and reduces audiences. I would say, very tech savvy people used their hammer to something they believed to be a nail.
stanislavb 4y ago
> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim. This
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  Who did you think you were working for before?
schipplock 4y ago
I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithmic timeline "easier" to consume, I don't have to invest time to find the perfect user to follow, I don't have to fiddle with lists etc..., just open Twitter and consume). (btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))
- watwut 4y ago
  I think that it is case of preference or just different use case. If you follow few people that tweet sparsly, you want chronological. If you follow many people who tweet a lot, you want algoritmus.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    That just sounds like algorithmic with extra steps. An algorithm can take information about your follows tweeting patterns and adjust the amount of chronological timeline you see.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Chronological means it is chronological no matter what. As in, you as a user decided that this is what you get no matter what algorithm thinks. That is much different then algorithm that sometimes shows chronological.
- swyx 4y ago
  stated vs revealed preference. many people say they want chron, but actually end up using algo a lot more (figures)
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.
buckaroot 4y ago
If Twitter and Mastodon were taken permanently offline tomorrow, would this be of any significant loss to the world? When I see people like the author getting so publicly and verbosely upset about a social media website, I wonder about their perspective. There are surely much more important things going on than preening to the crowds.
- mongol 4y ago
  It is not what would happen if Twitter disappears that is worrying, it is what it might become if steward unwisely.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  There are more important things happening on twitter than preening to the crowds. It's easy to dismiss if you don't find utility in it yourself, of course, but many people clearly find it very useful. Twitter is a very simple tool - it's what you make of it. That can be preening or organising revolutions or anything in between.
- zero_shift 4y ago
  Twitter is a great place to read work by scientists, researchers and other academics. There aren’t many places to tap into that world if you’re not already working in academia.
Tepix 4y ago
Is there a stable mature lightweight mastodon/PubSub server (ideally with sqlite storage) that's easy to maintain to serve a handful of users?
- ghostDancer 4y ago
  Can't give opinion as I don't use it but you can take a look at https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/
  - Tepix 4y ago
    I meant software, not service
- kmlx 4y ago
  if there’s just a handful of users can’t you just share a note from the notes app, or is that too personal?
  - Tepix 4y ago
    I don't see how a note from the notes app will serve as a maston server.
panic 4y ago
It's exciting to see a truly open social network getting so many users.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Is it really getting all that many users. If so: What kind of users? From Musks perspective Twitter isn't about the HN crowd or personal interaction between lower and middle- class people. It's all about the real influencers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, C-suite class, investors, millionairs and billionairs. Sure if you follow these people, boosting their follower count and their ego, you're welcome on the platform, but you're only there to read the messages from the upper echelons of society. If your yearly income isn't measured in the millions of dollars you're not really part of Elon Musks vision for Twitter.
  - pera 4y ago
    Academics, scientists, and engineers. Almost every non-institutional account I used to follow in Twitter is now actively using Mastodon. The only "category" of people I haven't seen migrating yet is independent journalists, and I can understand why.
rambambram 4y ago
Uh, I don't know about Mastodon, can't judge about it, but I'm following your website's own RSS feed. Website + RSS feed does the job for me. And as long as you keep publishing a feed, I'm able to read your content just fine. The web is already 'social media'! Edit: oh, by the way, my homegrown newsreader only shows the first x amount of characters, so I always have to click through to your website if I want to read more.
fazfq 4y ago
Twitter has always been a cesspool of hate but it may be worth signing up if people who bitch about Musk owning it keep leaving.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
The fake consternation and lament over Twitter has been tiring. Really, most of the world does not care.
- low_tech_love 4y ago
  Please don’t get me wrong; I also don’t care (never used Twitter) and this is an honest question. Why does it bother you that people are consternated? I mean, Twitter is one of the leading communication platforms internationally, and LOTS of people use it intensively both for business and personal stuff. I guess it’s understandable that it affects them deeply. It is at minimal weird that half the staff has been fired in less than a week. If you ask me it sounds much more like a hit job than an honest attempt to improve it.
monstertank 4y ago
And I'm finally going to try Twitter!
- angrycontrarian 4y ago
  Same, just signed up for a paid account today. Looks like the full $8 blue checkmark experience hasn't been released yet though.
low_tech_love 4y ago
Unfortunately I have to say that I’m too removed from this to care (I guess decisions like this happen invisibly in every company all the time). However, the true intentions about this acquisition do make me curious. Does he really think that patting the backs of a handful of conservative extremists will make Twitter better? (An already global leader in its segment?) can anyone give me a concrete analysis of the scenario? As far as I know there were a couple of attempts to create such “free” networks and it never really goes anywhere. I really appreciate his work as an engineer but I have a feeling he overreached here.
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  Who know's Musk is one of the wealthiest people on the planet who tends to take big gambles he uses twitter a lot and probably sees value though that it's like the more modern version of buying a vanity newspaper and looks to be following the same pattern
ksidudwbw 4y ago
Stop whining jesus
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
'Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.' Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them. This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for example the post says that 'the entire accessibility team' has been laid off then points to a tweet about someone saying there team had been laid off, firstly there is no indication that this is the 'entire accessibility team', just that the team this person was head off, secondly, the author has no idea about twitters accessibility plans in the future, for example, accessibility could have been given an even higher priority and given to a more competent team. Now i know this is likely not the case, but the real thing, is basically we don't know. To make a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of assumptions is crazy.
- sshine 4y ago
  It certainly is a knee-jerk- reaction. tl;dr: "I don't like Elon Musk either!" Nothing but virtue signalling.
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    Not liking Elon Musk and moving to a different platform is taking an action. Taking action is the opposite of virtue signaling.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      > Taking action is the opposite of virtue signaling. No, you signal your virtue with actions. That action can be lots of things, from buying some brand, to protesting some policy, or hating some person.
      - tchaffee 4y ago
        You are wrong. The act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action. [1] And from the person who coined the term: British journalist James Bartholomew claims to have originated the modern usage of the term "virtue signalling," in a 2015 Spectator article. His 2015 formulation described virtue signalling as empty boasting. "No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things...[that] involve effort and self-sacrifice." [2] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue%20signaling https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue%20signalin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#History
tescocles 4y ago
Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.
cryptoaquinas 4y ago
A year ago nobody would have thought free speech/open platforms are going to be adopted by censorship-loving left wingers. This is actually excellent for open platform technology improvement, as most engineers tend to lean left.
- dmix 4y ago
  Like everything on social media the most important thing is not the rationale or outcome of actions, it's first and foremost about virtue signalling. Although it's always a good thing when outrage drives people to open-source and federated platforms.
petesergeant 4y ago
FFS. Fine. Dear Lazy Web: * I am happy to pay for an account on an instance and have to never worry about that side of it again: where should I sign up? * What’s the quickest way to import people I follow on Twitter? * What’s the least annoying iOS app?
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  Neil young is back on Spotify. Nuff said.
  - oktoberpaard 4y ago
    Not in my country, except for songs that appear on albums that are outside of his control. I do expect him to eventually return, though.
- atoav 4y ago
  For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there. I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.
  - Taurenking 4y ago
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
    > For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. Maybe you should invest your time productively instead
qwertox 4y ago
> but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team How accessible is Twitter's website? As a normal user I already find it to be an utter chaos, a horrible UX, which is why I rarely go there. Are the apps better? Doesn't some third party offer a more accessible interface?
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Maybe they were fired because the Twitter UI is so horrible? Given that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, I doubt accessibility was ever that high on Twitters list of priorities. If the team has not managed to show any real work or progress, I can see some one like Musk just dropping the entire team. But yes, it would be great to hear from people who depend on accessibility feature: How good is Twitter really.
4dregress 4y ago
Why do people care so much about twitter?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Is it possible to create a program that would create timelines/filters for me individually and locally, based on my clicks maybe, not sending anything to the net? Like a personal AI.
pie_flavor 4y ago
I find it comedic whenever someone talks about how they're a truly longtime user of Twitter but they can't stomach staying on now that the owner doesn't share their values. Elon's values are extraordinarily similar to Jack's! If you were going to leave when someone's values diverged hard, you'd have left when Parag joined, because his did, and that's the entire reason Elon bought it! In reality it is some combination of personal association and public persona. And these are not the worst reasons to refuse to use a service, most of us have been guilty of the same at one point or another, but at least admit that that's why.
valeg 4y ago
I feel like there is a massive branding issue with Masto. Derives its name from an extinct animal (often misspelled or confused with the band), toots sound funny. Twitter got this right from the get-go.
hrbf 4y ago
Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance. The alternatives appear to be * paying around $9/month for a managed instance * hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service) * signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest) None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service. From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances). For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.
- est 4y ago
  I keep saying that ActivityPub should be a static protocol to begin with, then people can host their profile on some Github Page easily. Effectively zero cost.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Mastodon doesn't require you to host an instance. You can sign up for an account on any instance of your choosing. Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent. The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers. Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers. Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route. There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish. I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions. Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.
low_tech_love 4y ago
Judging by the top responses to the accessibility guy’s tweet, things look pretty grim right now. I never used Twitter so I don’t know if it’s always like that, but those people are really angry and negative. That is kinda depressing.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Top responses to his tweet are a very extreme sampling of twitter users. It'd be like going to a D&D convention in New York and judging Americans by what people say there.
mabcat 4y ago
It looks like the Mastodon instance host Simon is using, masto.host, closed for new sign-ups 8 hours ago. Is there another recommended alternative? I don't think I have the energy to maintain a self-hosted Mastodon instance. I sure haven't missed running a mail server...
- Nasreddin_Hodja 4y ago
  Biggest instances are https://mastodon.online https://mastodon.online and https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social but there are a lot of it https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers Also Mastodon isn't the only platform, there are some other activitypub compatible engines which are able to federate with Mastodon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/
  - mabcat 4y ago
    Thank you, against my better judgement I've set up a self-hosted Pleroma
kelsolaar 4y ago
Toot! is a great (paying) iOS client, it can have multiple servers compared to the official Mastodon application: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toot/id1229021451 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toot/id1229021451
concordDance 4y ago
It's great that more people are moving to the properly federated FOSS alternative! Even if they are doing so due to unreal fears.
neals 4y ago
Mastodon is too difficult to understand for the average user. I got on some page where I needed to select a room of some sort, most of it was in german and I couldn't find Trump or anybody I wanted to listen to. Is anybody actually believing that there will be some mass migration?
- glenstein 4y ago
  There's been numerous mass migrations to Mastodon since 2016, from different individual communities. The furry community, lgbtq+ individuals who wanted to leave twitter, comic book artists who overlapped with the two prior groups, political news junkies from India, and every year there's a couple more. I don't think that all of Twitter is going to migrate but just some slice of the user base, just like all the previous times.
parkingrift 4y ago
Loved Twitter under Jack Dorsey. Hates Twitter under Elon Musk. Jack Dorsey rolled in his equity. Do you really think these people are different?? Anyway, see you on Twitter in a few weeks.
simonw 4y ago
Looks like this blew up on Hacker News right after I went to sleep. I would encourage people to read the first paragraph more carefully: > There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. That's not me saying "I quit because he fired the accessibility team". That's me saying "There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down" as a shorthand for how this has been one of the worst-handled layoffs I've ever heard of in my industry - see https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552 https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552 And then "For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation." - I'm using the accessibility team here as a single representative instance of how I feel about the decisions Elon has been making, but I disagree with practically every other decision he has made in the last 8 days. I'm sorry (OK, not sorry) I didn't write a detailed essay about the many reasons I was leaving Twitter. The goal for my post was to talk about the things I was liking about Mastodon so far. I'd also encourage people to read about the "trust thermocline", which really helped me understand why, at least for me, things were going downhill far too quickly to continue wanting to ride it out and see what happens: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433 https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433
gnuj3 4y ago
I dont really understand how Mastodon works. I tried to search for this guys profile (our of curiosity, I dont know who this is) and it doesnt come up in search results even if I search by his handle directly. Why is that? Do I need to be on the same server as him or something?
janandonly 4y ago
I’m waiting for the decentralised self hosting app to be on iOS for my iPhone. Then I’ll join. I know there are clients enough to use on iOS, but I mean servers to do my own hosting.
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 4y ago
'It looks like' - so the big headline already contains a 'maybe'? recent tweet of his: 'To clarify: I'll likely continue to post new stuff (blog posts, project releases etc) here, and I'll watch out for DMs and mentions, but I'm not going to be refreshing my timeline or actively seeking out conversations to engage in any more' - link for the curious: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568 reminds me of all the "Quitting Facebook" memes. I'm gladly going to be wrong, but Mastodon will never be mainstream _anywhere near_ to what Twitter was/still is for all the reasons that have been pointed out on every HN thread about it for days now... How about waiting to see what happens instead of an ideological knee-jerk 'pat myself on the back' half-quitting but not really reaction? Sigh... and the love it gets here, I can't understand it... It's going to come off as harsh but I can't read this and not think of a petulant child not getting what it wants. Maybe it's just because I don't have Twitter, Facebook or any of that crap so I guess I can't understand it because I don't have a stake in any of it... guess that kind of reaction is typical for someone living the messy life of hour by hour social media craze. (sorry I could not refuse to write this comment)
RickJWagner 4y ago
I've never been good at mob behavior or just doing what I'm told. I'm staying on Twitter until I see if it's significantly better or worse. IMHO, the current "I'm leaving" fad seems to be somewhat political, and I don't think political boycotts are constructive.

258 points by swyx 4y ago

It is fascinating that people feel justified ignoring the user experience on Twitter when talking about whether to use Twitter. I don't know what it "really means" when all the motivations, incentives and goals are unpacked, but there are surely some fascinating lessons here to be learned. Previously I've only seen social networks come under pressure when the user experience changed markedly so this seems new.

jimbob45 4y ago

Surely no one felt more desperation for Mastodon to operate as an adequate substitute for Twitter than GOP leadership in the aftermath of Trump's Twitter ban and the 2020 election. If those people, the most motivated people in all of time to make Mastodon work, can't make Mastodon work, then I struggle to see how the Musk-haters plan to switch over successfully. I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - if someone could have done it better than Twitter, then you'd better believe that the GOP would have already been all-in on that platform long before you got there.

throwaway-jim 4y ago
Anecdotal - I had a account in one of the largest english mastodon instances for a few years now and have seen multiple waves of twitter exodus into mastodon. Server becomes extra lively for a few weeks and then it returns to normal. None of these people last.
- OscarCunningham 4y ago
  https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon It looks to me like not all of them go away. There was a noticable step up after the spike in May.
mcv 4y ago
But Mastodon works. If Trump's people can't make it work, it's possible that it's not Mastodon that's the problem. (For the record, I'm not on Mastodon, but I follow a lot of people who are.)

polote 4y ago

The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?

TulliusCicero 4y ago
This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.
- buf 4y ago
  People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those. But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself. PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
  - Doddler 4y ago
    I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.
    - watwut 4y ago
      I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.
    - low_tech_love 4y ago

HanTrio3 4y ago

blowski 4y ago
Someone got out the wrong side of bed? I’m also in the process of moving from Twitter to Mastodon, albeit I have very few followers on either. As such, I found it both interesting and useful. I imagine he does want engagement and wants to get it from Mastodon instead of Twitter.
swyx 4y ago
keep in mind author is Simon Willison, who cocreated Django and whose blog goes back to 2002.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  I’ve made a living working with Django for the better part of the decade, and certainly know who Simon is, but still wouldn’t kid myself about this meaning anything.
Marazan 4y ago
Twitter is dead dude. It is Friendster. It is MySpace. You just don't realise it yet. (Disclaimer I have a Twitter account that I use to post stuff)
- collegeburner 4y ago
  i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment.
- narrator 4y ago
  Friendster and Myspace failed because of scalability problems and lack of features compared to the alternatives. Mastodon has both of those.
radu_floricica 4y ago
I'm not even mad, it's just funny. It's just another salvo in the culture war - from this point of view, a management change in a major SM platform is pretty significant, especially when that platform was openly biased in one direction. So you have the usual noise, which has absolutely nothing to do with Twitter as a product or company.

FortiDude 4y ago

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it. I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

TulliusCicero 4y ago
It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.
- nathias 4y ago
  people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.
    - nathias 4y ago
      for me that would be completely reasonable, but it isn't necessary, you can have many decentralized filters like automatically block people that are blocked by a % of people I follow and many similar mechanisms
      - deleted 4y ago

silisili 4y ago

Researcherry 4y ago
haha True, I don't know why you are getting downvoted.
encryptluks2 4y ago
It is funny cause your comment makes you sound like the insufferable one. I bet more than anything if people shift to a new network that you'd be the one to eventually change and pretend like you always saw it coming.
rvz 4y ago
> They exist and thrive only through validation from social media. Exactly. They will announce that they are 'leaving' but don't have the guts to delete their Twitter accounts and their followers as they will continue to lurk and post links from Twitter on wherever they moved to.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon. I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.

Isinlor 4y ago
Even email is not really that decentralized - it's mostly Google + Microsoft.
- ErikCorry 4y ago
  The reason why this happened is instructive. Fighting spam is really hard and the best way to do it is to be good at machine learning and to have access to a good percentage of worldwide mail, unencrypted. Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Not everywhere is America. Most institutions in European countries run their own e-mail servers and deliverability is OK.
  - ErikCorry 4y ago
    I guess if you count on-prem Outlook as running your own servers.
    - 4y ago

zekrioca 4y ago

I respect their line of though, only because it is their own opinion. I know projects such as Orca and give real praise to all of them. But to me, leaving Twitter because Musk fired the accessibility team does not seem like the best argument for leaving. If anything, it just sped up what was already happening (internally) even before Musk bought Twitter. Accessibility becomes ‘real’ (though not perfect) thanks to a wide range of technologies that work together and respect certain patterns, not just due to the UI interface. This, assuming Twitter represents a big chunk of the real world, which I doubt, though it reaches a great proportion of it. However, what is it to say that Twitrer’s accessibility will get worse, or that Musk will not hire even more capable people later? This is why I think the person left Twitter not only because Musk fired the accessibility team, but also because Twitter itself does not represent anymore the philosophy they believe in.

tomcam 4y ago

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know nothing about the accessibility team there, but for all we know he has a better team lined up. The author and I both agree the reverse may also be true. Could be they get replaced by something worse. To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.

almost 4y ago
I think you might in fact be a fanboy. Which is fine, fanboy all you like if it makes you happy! Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with. Maybe.
- tomcam 4y ago
  A most interesting comment. Lots of words, no falsifiable assertions. Just a steaming pile of innuendo.
  - almost 4y ago
    If you say so
beachy 4y ago
> To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption. Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth. In fact this approach might even attract some more hungry and gung ho warrior types who are attracted by musk's style, and could be better suited to bringing about his vision than the existing team.

GrumpyNl 4y ago

I think, they are happy will all the attention https://www.mastodon.com/ https://www.mastodon.com/

Tepix 4y ago
:-) For those who are wondering, the page you are looking for is at https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/

coffeeblack 4y ago

I liked Mastodon when it first came out. But nowadays it’s seems to be more like a Left wing version of Gettr. Wouldn’t use either.

saboot 4y ago
We're more polarized now compared to when mastodon, and twitter, were first introduced. I'm convinced making a twitter clone is going to be impossible as most people are seeking to sort themselves into ideological buckets at the outset.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
[flagged]
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Trump's twitter clone has disabled federation as far as I'm aware.
  - DoItToMe81 4y ago
    If I recall correctly, it was initially built on a relicensed version of Mastodon, with federation disabled. No idea what's going on with it now, or if it was even legal to do so with Mastodon's AGPL license.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      I don't think it's even relicensed, they pretty much just stole the code as far as I'm aware. From what I've read (I can't even reach the service as a foreigner) it's not even built on a recent version of Mastodon.

marceloabsousa 4y ago

I find mastodon a bit hard to navigate between the servers and how to engage in a particular server.

tga 4y ago

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

imperialdrive 4y ago
- spion 4y ago
  Thats precisely right - the software itself isn't really that impressive [*], the connections and people is what (can) make it great (or terrible, depending on who you follow). [*] - as a product - there is some really great engineering due to the scale of course.
- jdub 4y ago
  So you're saying you don't really know what you're talking about?
  - oefrha 4y ago
    That’s a significant part of social media: shitting on things you don’t know shit about.
MrDresden 4y ago
There is a very strong signal being given right now about the trend Twitter will be on for a long time.
- szundi 4y ago
  Musk talking for days is not a signal yet

asplake 4y ago

Question: If you run a Mastadon server, what legal liabilities does that expose you to? How might that vary by country?

BenGosub 4y ago

I don't see a valid reason to leave Twitter in his post. IMO laying off the accessibility team isn't a reason to leave. But, each to his own opinion. The layoffs will have effect, but it doesn't have to be a bad one. Once they get leaner, they might have a clearer vison and know where to expand.

ealexhudson 4y ago
If Musk wants twitter to be the town square for the world, that town square needs to be accessible for all. Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with your feet?
- flyinglizard 4y ago
  You don’t need a whole accessibility team for a product to be accessible. It can be handled by raising the awareness of other product teams plus some central auditing, for example (Twitter after all is a pretty basic product, UX wise).
  - mongol 4y ago
    Someone needs to do that though. With the foremost experts sacked, and staff down with a half, who will bother?
    - awestroke 4y ago
      Maybe the employees on the accessibility team were all useless and hated by the whole org? Maybe starting fresh with real accessibility experts is a better way forward?
      - extra88 4y ago
        There was no accessibility team before 2020, Twitter hired real accessibility experts to be on the team, and they have been responsible for a number of accessibility improvements.

andrewclunn 4y ago

[flagged]

lovelearning 4y ago
The move to decentralised tech is not to escape corporate censorship. It's to avoid the right's obnoxiousness that's set to spike now on Twitter under Musk's "free speech" vision.
mcv 4y ago
The left has always been about decentralisation, opposed to corporate censorship, concerned with election integrity and open source. And they're not going to drop their environmental concerns just because of new Fed appointees. I'm sure there are people in the political center (or maybe politically undecided or flexible is more accurate?) who do change their opinions based on how the political winds blow, but most of these issues have been left-wing issues for a long time.

xvilo 4y ago

If you're not setting up your own instance, make sure to help fund the instance you are using. Maybe it's on the about page or DM/Mention the server admin! They can tell you where to donate

joeevans1000 4y ago

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.

vorticalbox 4y ago
there could be a number of reasons other than "Elon doesn't care about xyz" other members of the dev team can/are already doing this Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job Maybe he has his own team to replace it We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  Jumping ship because of X at this point is just ideological flexing, we have zero indication how this will play out yet.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. I agree that there's a lot of that visible right now, but Elon demanded round-the-clock hours from employees as his first "executive order", as well as locking down offices. He just doesn't seem that good of a boss, and more like a traditional capitalist in a sense. Is it ideological to want decent working hours?
  - tchaffee 4y ago
    > we have zero indication. That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
- tchaffee 4y ago
  > we have zero knowledge So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.

dcj4 4y ago

padolsey 4y ago
Why comment then?

Nican 4y ago

Mastodon may not have the better interface, or the better community, or it may not yet be the most intuitive to use. But I want to invest my time to help Mastodon reach the critical mass it needs. I would love to have a social network not controlled by capitalistic needs, and let open source developers help evolve it.

nudpiedo 4y ago

I find Mastodon doomed by design, understanding design as a whole, not just software. It looks like the technical right choice, including all the bells and whistles: decentralized, own your instance, etc. However twitter's issue, and most of social network issues are the human factor. And by that design Mastodon is not inmune to any of it, it even encourages larger echo chambers, and reduces audiences. I would say, very tech savvy people used their hammer to something they believed to be a nail.

stanislavb 4y ago

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim. This

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quixoticelixer- 4y ago
Who did you think you were working for before?

schipplock 4y ago

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithmic timeline "easier" to consume, I don't have to invest time to find the perfect user to follow, I don't have to fiddle with lists etc..., just open Twitter and consume). (btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))

watwut 4y ago
I think that it is case of preference or just different use case. If you follow few people that tweet sparsly, you want chronological. If you follow many people who tweet a lot, you want algoritmus.
- xmprt 4y ago
  That just sounds like algorithmic with extra steps. An algorithm can take information about your follows tweeting patterns and adjust the amount of chronological timeline you see.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Chronological means it is chronological no matter what. As in, you as a user decided that this is what you get no matter what algorithm thinks. That is much different then algorithm that sometimes shows chronological.
swyx 4y ago
stated vs revealed preference. many people say they want chron, but actually end up using algo a lot more (figures)
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.

buckaroot 4y ago

If Twitter and Mastodon were taken permanently offline tomorrow, would this be of any significant loss to the world? When I see people like the author getting so publicly and verbosely upset about a social media website, I wonder about their perspective. There are surely much more important things going on than preening to the crowds.

mongol 4y ago
It is not what would happen if Twitter disappears that is worrying, it is what it might become if steward unwisely.
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
There are more important things happening on twitter than preening to the crowds. It's easy to dismiss if you don't find utility in it yourself, of course, but many people clearly find it very useful. Twitter is a very simple tool - it's what you make of it. That can be preening or organising revolutions or anything in between.
zero_shift 4y ago
Twitter is a great place to read work by scientists, researchers and other academics. There aren’t many places to tap into that world if you’re not already working in academia.

Tepix 4y ago

Is there a stable mature lightweight mastodon/PubSub server (ideally with sqlite storage) that's easy to maintain to serve a handful of users?

ghostDancer 4y ago
Can't give opinion as I don't use it but you can take a look at https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/
- Tepix 4y ago
  I meant software, not service
kmlx 4y ago
if there’s just a handful of users can’t you just share a note from the notes app, or is that too personal?
- Tepix 4y ago
  I don't see how a note from the notes app will serve as a maston server.

panic 4y ago

It's exciting to see a truly open social network getting so many users.

mrweasel 4y ago
Is it really getting all that many users. If so: What kind of users? From Musks perspective Twitter isn't about the HN crowd or personal interaction between lower and middle- class people. It's all about the real influencers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, C-suite class, investors, millionairs and billionairs. Sure if you follow these people, boosting their follower count and their ego, you're welcome on the platform, but you're only there to read the messages from the upper echelons of society. If your yearly income isn't measured in the millions of dollars you're not really part of Elon Musks vision for Twitter.
- pera 4y ago
  Academics, scientists, and engineers. Almost every non-institutional account I used to follow in Twitter is now actively using Mastodon. The only "category" of people I haven't seen migrating yet is independent journalists, and I can understand why.

rambambram 4y ago

Uh, I don't know about Mastodon, can't judge about it, but I'm following your website's own RSS feed. Website + RSS feed does the job for me. And as long as you keep publishing a feed, I'm able to read your content just fine. The web is already 'social media'! Edit: oh, by the way, my homegrown newsreader only shows the first x amount of characters, so I always have to click through to your website if I want to read more.

fazfq 4y ago

Twitter has always been a cesspool of hate but it may be worth signing up if people who bitch about Musk owning it keep leaving.

mechanical_bear 4y ago

The fake consternation and lament over Twitter has been tiring. Really, most of the world does not care.

low_tech_love 4y ago
Please don’t get me wrong; I also don’t care (never used Twitter) and this is an honest question. Why does it bother you that people are consternated? I mean, Twitter is one of the leading communication platforms internationally, and LOTS of people use it intensively both for business and personal stuff. I guess it’s understandable that it affects them deeply. It is at minimal weird that half the staff has been fired in less than a week. If you ask me it sounds much more like a hit job than an honest attempt to improve it.

monstertank 4y ago

And I'm finally going to try Twitter!

angrycontrarian 4y ago
Same, just signed up for a paid account today. Looks like the full $8 blue checkmark experience hasn't been released yet though.

low_tech_love 4y ago

Unfortunately I have to say that I’m too removed from this to care (I guess decisions like this happen invisibly in every company all the time). However, the true intentions about this acquisition do make me curious. Does he really think that patting the backs of a handful of conservative extremists will make Twitter better? (An already global leader in its segment?) can anyone give me a concrete analysis of the scenario? As far as I know there were a couple of attempts to create such “free” networks and it never really goes anywhere. I really appreciate his work as an engineer but I have a feeling he overreached here.

cokeandpepsi 4y ago
Who know's Musk is one of the wealthiest people on the planet who tends to take big gambles he uses twitter a lot and probably sees value though that it's like the more modern version of buying a vanity newspaper and looks to be following the same pattern

ksidudwbw 4y ago

Stop whining jesus

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

'Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.' Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them. This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for example the post says that 'the entire accessibility team' has been laid off then points to a tweet about someone saying there team had been laid off, firstly there is no indication that this is the 'entire accessibility team', just that the team this person was head off, secondly, the author has no idea about twitters accessibility plans in the future, for example, accessibility could have been given an even higher priority and given to a more competent team. Now i know this is likely not the case, but the real thing, is basically we don't know. To make a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of assumptions is crazy.

sshine 4y ago
It certainly is a knee-jerk- reaction. tl;dr: "I don't like Elon Musk either!" Nothing but virtue signalling.
- tchaffee 4y ago
  Not liking Elon Musk and moving to a different platform is taking an action. Taking action is the opposite of virtue signaling.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    > Taking action is the opposite of virtue signaling. No, you signal your virtue with actions. That action can be lots of things, from buying some brand, to protesting some policy, or hating some person.
    - tchaffee 4y ago
      You are wrong. The act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action. [1] And from the person who coined the term: British journalist James Bartholomew claims to have originated the modern usage of the term "virtue signalling," in a 2015 Spectator article. His 2015 formulation described virtue signalling as empty boasting. "No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things...[that] involve effort and self-sacrifice." [2] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue%20signaling https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue%20signalin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#History

tescocles 4y ago

Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.

cryptoaquinas 4y ago

A year ago nobody would have thought free speech/open platforms are going to be adopted by censorship-loving left wingers. This is actually excellent for open platform technology improvement, as most engineers tend to lean left.

dmix 4y ago
Like everything on social media the most important thing is not the rationale or outcome of actions, it's first and foremost about virtue signalling. Although it's always a good thing when outrage drives people to open-source and federated platforms.

petesergeant 4y ago

FFS. Fine. Dear Lazy Web: * I am happy to pay for an account on an instance and have to never worry about that side of it again: where should I sign up? * What’s the quickest way to import people I follow on Twitter? * What’s the least annoying iOS app?

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.

cloutchaser 4y ago
Neil young is back on Spotify. Nuff said.
- oktoberpaard 4y ago
  Not in my country, except for songs that appear on albums that are outside of his control. I do expect him to eventually return, though.
atoav 4y ago
For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there. I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.
- Taurenking 4y ago
- newaccount2021 4y ago
  > For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform. Maybe you should invest your time productively instead

qwertox 4y ago

> but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team How accessible is Twitter's website? As a normal user I already find it to be an utter chaos, a horrible UX, which is why I rarely go there. Are the apps better? Doesn't some third party offer a more accessible interface?

mrweasel 4y ago
Maybe they were fired because the Twitter UI is so horrible? Given that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, I doubt accessibility was ever that high on Twitters list of priorities. If the team has not managed to show any real work or progress, I can see some one like Musk just dropping the entire team. But yes, it would be great to hear from people who depend on accessibility feature: How good is Twitter really.

4dregress 4y ago

Why do people care so much about twitter?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

Is it possible to create a program that would create timelines/filters for me individually and locally, based on my clicks maybe, not sending anything to the net? Like a personal AI.

pie_flavor 4y ago

I find it comedic whenever someone talks about how they're a truly longtime user of Twitter but they can't stomach staying on now that the owner doesn't share their values. Elon's values are extraordinarily similar to Jack's! If you were going to leave when someone's values diverged hard, you'd have left when Parag joined, because his did, and that's the entire reason Elon bought it! In reality it is some combination of personal association and public persona. And these are not the worst reasons to refuse to use a service, most of us have been guilty of the same at one point or another, but at least admit that that's why.

valeg 4y ago

I feel like there is a massive branding issue with Masto. Derives its name from an extinct animal (often misspelled or confused with the band), toots sound funny. Twitter got this right from the get-go.

hrbf 4y ago

Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance. The alternatives appear to be * paying around $9/month for a managed instance * hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service) * signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest) None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service. From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances). For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.

est 4y ago
I keep saying that ActivityPub should be a static protocol to begin with, then people can host their profile on some Github Page easily. Effectively zero cost.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Mastodon doesn't require you to host an instance. You can sign up for an account on any instance of your choosing. Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent. The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers. Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers. Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route. There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish. I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions. Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.

low_tech_love 4y ago

Judging by the top responses to the accessibility guy’s tweet, things look pretty grim right now. I never used Twitter so I don’t know if it’s always like that, but those people are really angry and negative. That is kinda depressing.

concordDance 4y ago
Top responses to his tweet are a very extreme sampling of twitter users. It'd be like going to a D&D convention in New York and judging Americans by what people say there.

mabcat 4y ago

It looks like the Mastodon instance host Simon is using, masto.host, closed for new sign-ups 8 hours ago. Is there another recommended alternative? I don't think I have the energy to maintain a self-hosted Mastodon instance. I sure haven't missed running a mail server...

Nasreddin_Hodja 4y ago
Biggest instances are https://mastodon.online https://mastodon.online and https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social but there are a lot of it https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers Also Mastodon isn't the only platform, there are some other activitypub compatible engines which are able to federate with Mastodon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://fediverse.party/ https://fediverse.party/
- mabcat 4y ago
  Thank you, against my better judgement I've set up a self-hosted Pleroma

kelsolaar 4y ago

Toot! is a great (paying) iOS client, it can have multiple servers compared to the official Mastodon application: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toot/id1229021451 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toot/id1229021451

concordDance 4y ago

It's great that more people are moving to the properly federated FOSS alternative! Even if they are doing so due to unreal fears.

neals 4y ago

Mastodon is too difficult to understand for the average user. I got on some page where I needed to select a room of some sort, most of it was in german and I couldn't find Trump or anybody I wanted to listen to. Is anybody actually believing that there will be some mass migration?

glenstein 4y ago
There's been numerous mass migrations to Mastodon since 2016, from different individual communities. The furry community, lgbtq+ individuals who wanted to leave twitter, comic book artists who overlapped with the two prior groups, political news junkies from India, and every year there's a couple more. I don't think that all of Twitter is going to migrate but just some slice of the user base, just like all the previous times.

parkingrift 4y ago

Loved Twitter under Jack Dorsey. Hates Twitter under Elon Musk. Jack Dorsey rolled in his equity. Do you really think these people are different?? Anyway, see you on Twitter in a few weeks.

simonw 4y ago

Looks like this blew up on Hacker News right after I went to sleep. I would encourage people to read the first paragraph more carefully: > There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. That's not me saying "I quit because he fired the accessibility team". That's me saying "There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down" as a shorthand for how this has been one of the worst-handled layoffs I've ever heard of in my industry - see https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552 https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552 And then "For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation." - I'm using the accessibility team here as a single representative instance of how I feel about the decisions Elon has been making, but I disagree with practically every other decision he has made in the last 8 days. I'm sorry (OK, not sorry) I didn't write a detailed essay about the many reasons I was leaving Twitter. The goal for my post was to talk about the things I was liking about Mastodon so far. I'd also encourage people to read about the "trust thermocline", which really helped me understand why, at least for me, things were going downhill far too quickly to continue wanting to ride it out and see what happens: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433 https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433

gnuj3 4y ago

I dont really understand how Mastodon works. I tried to search for this guys profile (our of curiosity, I dont know who this is) and it doesnt come up in search results even if I search by his handle directly. Why is that? Do I need to be on the same server as him or something?

janandonly 4y ago

I’m waiting for the decentralised self hosting app to be on iOS for my iPhone. Then I’ll join. I know there are clients enough to use on iOS, but I mean servers to do my own hosting.

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 4y ago

'It looks like' - so the big headline already contains a 'maybe'? recent tweet of his: 'To clarify: I'll likely continue to post new stuff (blog posts, project releases etc) here, and I'll watch out for DMs and mentions, but I'm not going to be refreshing my timeline or actively seeking out conversations to engage in any more' - link for the curious: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568 reminds me of all the "Quitting Facebook" memes. I'm gladly going to be wrong, but Mastodon will never be mainstream _anywhere near_ to what Twitter was/still is for all the reasons that have been pointed out on every HN thread about it for days now... How about waiting to see what happens instead of an ideological knee-jerk 'pat myself on the back' half-quitting but not really reaction? Sigh... and the love it gets here, I can't understand it... It's going to come off as harsh but I can't read this and not think of a petulant child not getting what it wants. Maybe it's just because I don't have Twitter, Facebook or any of that crap so I guess I can't understand it because I don't have a stake in any of it... guess that kind of reaction is typical for someone living the messy life of hour by hour social media craze. (sorry I could not refuse to write this comment)

RickJWagner 4y ago

I've never been good at mob behavior or just doing what I'm told. I'm staying on Twitter until I see if it's significantly better or worse. IMHO, the current "I'm leaving" fad seems to be somewhat political, and I don't think political boycotts are constructive.