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If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering tr

If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will. It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.

colordrops 4y ago
Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
It is not for you, or a fair news organization, to decide what is an "overreaction".
Eji1700 4y ago
Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better. So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.
- sigmar 4y ago
  What specifically do you mean by "mostly just doesn't work"?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping up with the new traffic.
    - gpm 4y ago
      I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening. Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
      - Jnr 4y ago
        I wonder if Mastodon can even scale because of the federation. When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.
  - lambdaba 4y ago
    I couldn't finish sign-up because the servers seem overwhelmed (confirmation email) But I'm wondering how something like Mastodon could scale to people having millions of followers.
    - oynqr 4y ago
      Pleroma does what Mastodon't.
      - chx 4y ago
        "neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice. It’s just where the people who’ve always been stirring up shit go."
- bojan 4y ago
  Same here, and even better, I'm not sure if I'm not able to do what I want because I don't understand how it should be done, or because the site is broken due to the sudden spike in traffic it is experiencing.
raytube 4y ago
Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?
- ISL 4y ago
  I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction: If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV). Is the same true for toots?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter. They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.
      - LtWorf 4y ago
        Mute? They copy paste into printed newspaper.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Why can't it get enough reach? > What if each news outlet ran their own server? I think you answered your own question.
nimbius 4y ago
>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution. hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
  - addajones 4y ago
    Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
    - thedrbrian 4y ago
      none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay. See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
Laremere 4y ago
I really felt that there was an overreaction and we needed time to see what changes actually happened under Musk. Lots of very confident and different guesses about what was going on. Then Musk started to say he'd name and shame advertisers who have lowered/removed their spend on the platform. I don't know what the bar for advertisers deciding a platform is too risky to advertise on, but that has to cross it. There are a lot of different sites to advertise on, so it only really takes being riskier than the rest to lower/remove the amount you're willing to spend on the platform. But maybe that take is just as bad as the rest. Perhaps Twitter sometime soon finds a crowd that will pay enough to sustain it, and the crowds that fled from it slowly come back after becoming frustrated with overly technical alternatives.
grammers 4y ago
>It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails. >Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach. I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent replacement, much more civil as well.
- rapind 4y ago
  > much more civil as well. Unfortunately that’s about to change.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I don't see how. Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons: a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued to a screen like bad news c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of your follows). Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users and shoving ads at them.
mysterydip 4y ago
> Too much friction. So far that's all I've seen from the twitter users I follow. "which one are you on?" "why is this so complicated?" etc.
- alexfoo 4y ago
  Not unlike how email was until Hotmail, for example, came along.
xg15 4y ago
> Too much friction. Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?
- metadat 4y ago
  All you need to do is pick an instance and register an account on said instance. The friction is pretty low, in the same ballpark as friction encountered creating an account on any website. It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently under heavy load due to new users.
onion2k 4y ago
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach. You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough. What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful. Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)
- parineum 4y ago
  > You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. Someone should tell the journalists.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Ever been to the replies section of a journalist's post?
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  That was an odd way to agree that Mastodon isn't a replacement for Twitter...
collegeburner 4y ago
i'm pretty sure they know this, but i'm pretty sure they're intentionally trying to "make it a thing"/fake support for it because there's a lot of hate towards musk. i don't like him much but i do like the fact that all these types of blue check journalists are pissed about it.
andylynch 4y ago
I don’t know about that; for instance a number of lawyers I follow are now on Mastodon and enjoying figuring it out. The biggest problems seem to be that some popular servers are disabling signups for a bit, and secondly finding out who else is there too (but Debirdify helps with that)
coffeeblack 4y ago
Plus, there is no real reason to. All this hysteria is based on lies that have been spread over the past days.
rsynnott 4y ago
> Too hard for the average journalist. I don't think I buy that; it's not _that_ hard. Actually, I've noticed that there are a bunch of journalists (and not just tech journalists) showing up on Mastodon suddenly; this didn't really happen with the previous Twitter exoduses. > Not enough reach. That... depends. Not right now, no. But for the journalist use-case (low-latency access to what's happening right now, more or less a better news wire) it could be soon. And that journalism use-case is arguably what made Twitter important in the first place. To be clear, I don't think that journalists will _abandon_ Twitter in favour of Mastodon. But if I was a journalist I'd be getting established on it now, in case things go wrong with Twitter.
Siira 4y ago
> Too hard for the average journalist It’s definitely not “too hard” for a professional. If someone can’t even do this much, their reporting is not trustable in the first place.

colordrops 4y ago

Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

It is not for you, or a fair news organization, to decide what is an "overreaction".

Eji1700 4y ago

Having it brought to my attention, and as someone who never got into twitter, I figured I'd give it a shot and see if it fit my desires better. So far it mostly just doesn't work, so that's neat.

sigmar 4y ago
What specifically do you mean by "mostly just doesn't work"?
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Pretty much all instances are having massive issues keeping up with the new traffic.
  - gpm 4y ago
    I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening. Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
    - Jnr 4y ago
      I wonder if Mastodon can even scale because of the federation. When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.
- lambdaba 4y ago
  I couldn't finish sign-up because the servers seem overwhelmed (confirmation email) But I'm wondering how something like Mastodon could scale to people having millions of followers.
  - oynqr 4y ago
    Pleroma does what Mastodon't.
    - chx 4y ago
      "neither GS nor Pleroma itself was born out of malice. It’s just where the people who’ve always been stirring up shit go."
bojan 4y ago
Same here, and even better, I'm not sure if I'm not able to do what I want because I don't understand how it should be done, or because the site is broken due to the sudden spike in traffic it is experiencing.

raytube 4y ago

Why can't it get enough reach? What if each news outlet ran their own server? Or would this feel like bondage with people wishing for multiple personas/autonomy?

ISL 4y ago
I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction: If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV). Is the same true for toots?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Bah I wish journalists would stop using twitter. They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      Mute? They copy paste into printed newspaper.
godelski 4y ago
> Why can't it get enough reach? > What if each news outlet ran their own server? I think you answered your own question.

nimbius 4y ago

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution. hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
vorpalhex 4y ago
The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
- addajones 4y ago
  Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
  - thedrbrian 4y ago
    none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay. See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.

Laremere 4y ago

I really felt that there was an overreaction and we needed time to see what changes actually happened under Musk. Lots of very confident and different guesses about what was going on. Then Musk started to say he'd name and shame advertisers who have lowered/removed their spend on the platform. I don't know what the bar for advertisers deciding a platform is too risky to advertise on, but that has to cross it. There are a lot of different sites to advertise on, so it only really takes being riskier than the rest to lower/remove the amount you're willing to spend on the platform. But maybe that take is just as bad as the rest. Perhaps Twitter sometime soon finds a crowd that will pay enough to sustain it, and the crowds that fled from it slowly come back after becoming frustrated with overly technical alternatives.

grammers 4y ago

>It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it. Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails. >Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach. I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent replacement, much more civil as well.

rapind 4y ago
> much more civil as well. Unfortunately that’s about to change.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I don't see how. Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons: a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued to a screen like bad news c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of your follows). Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users and shoving ads at them.

mysterydip 4y ago

> Too much friction. So far that's all I've seen from the twitter users I follow. "which one are you on?" "why is this so complicated?" etc.

alexfoo 4y ago
Not unlike how email was until Hotmail, for example, came along.

xg15 4y ago

> Too much friction. Is there some way to reduce the friction, now that Mastodon has so much interest? Something like a "twitter importer" e.g.?

metadat 4y ago
All you need to do is pick an instance and register an account on said instance. The friction is pretty low, in the same ballpark as friction encountered creating an account on any website. It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently under heavy load due to new users.

onion2k 4y ago

Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach. You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough. What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful. Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)

parineum 4y ago
> You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. Someone should tell the journalists.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Ever been to the replies section of a journalist's post?
BurningFrog 4y ago
That was an odd way to agree that Mastodon isn't a replacement for Twitter...

collegeburner 4y ago

i'm pretty sure they know this, but i'm pretty sure they're intentionally trying to "make it a thing"/fake support for it because there's a lot of hate towards musk. i don't like him much but i do like the fact that all these types of blue check journalists are pissed about it.

andylynch 4y ago

I don’t know about that; for instance a number of lawyers I follow are now on Mastodon and enjoying figuring it out. The biggest problems seem to be that some popular servers are disabling signups for a bit, and secondly finding out who else is there too (but Debirdify helps with that)

coffeeblack 4y ago

Plus, there is no real reason to. All this hysteria is based on lies that have been spread over the past days.

rsynnott 4y ago

> Too hard for the average journalist. I don't think I buy that; it's not _that_ hard. Actually, I've noticed that there are a bunch of journalists (and not just tech journalists) showing up on Mastodon suddenly; this didn't really happen with the previous Twitter exoduses. > Not enough reach. That... depends. Not right now, no. But for the journalist use-case (low-latency access to what's happening right now, more or less a better news wire) it could be soon. And that journalism use-case is arguably what made Twitter important in the first place. To be clear, I don't think that journalists will _abandon_ Twitter in favour of Mastodon. But if I was a journalist I'd be getting established on it now, in case things go wrong with Twitter.

Siira 4y ago

> Too hard for the average journalist It’s definitely not “too hard” for a professional. If someone can’t even do this much, their reporting is not trustable in the first place.