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If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

jefftk 4y ago
Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.
- Levitz 4y ago
  Hopefully we at least learn that "build your own social network" was never a reasonable point.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.
- cm2187 4y ago
  If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long. I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.
Arubis 4y ago
It was a good idea two weeks ago as risk mitigation. Now the bad thing risk mitigation was meant to mitigate is happening. It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  > People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns. Thanks to Federal insurance programs that were implemented pre-climate crisis, they continue to build there after too, for the most part.
afavour 4y ago
> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future. > Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.
- illuminati1911 4y ago
  Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform. You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship. We'll see what happens in the long run.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- googlryas 4y ago
  Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
  - jimcsharp 4y ago
    Your brand will have lost 3 years of opportunity to build up its footprint on an alternative - for whatever that's worth.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
CJefferson 4y ago
Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
- mberning 4y ago
  You weren't worried about it going bankrupt when it was losing millions of dollars a day and running in the red for years on end?
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    Once again, self proclaimed rational thinkers and scientific and engineering minds can't see their glaring biases. As long as my team is winning all of the problems "aren't so bad", but as soon as it's the other team, everything is a firebrand. Metas preparing to have massive layoffs and yet here we are arguing over someone making obvious and I mean obvious business decisions to cut waste, bloat, and start turning some profitability. We've lamented some of these financial woes about Twitter here for years, and now someone finally has started walking the walk and all of a sudden the world is ending and its time to jump ship?
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    RocketMan bad.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    It was so poorly run that there's a chance Musk could have come in, fucked up pretty badly, and still maybe improved the books. However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > I don't see how it's salvageable. If Musk is so much of a shrewd, evil business shark it's been portrayed as in the last months, you can imagine he'll find some nasty underhanded way to attach Twitter to an IV with Starlink on the other end, and flood it with money until the blue bird is back on its feet.
disintegore 4y ago
Mastodon and ActivityPub in general have UX issues. I can't imagine trying to explain to non-technical users why they have to open a pop-up window to another website just to be able to follow someone, or why people keep changing handles, etc etc. For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.
- guelo 4y ago
  In the first week Musk has already shown that his Twitter will erratically push out poorly thought out policy changes on a whim. Definitely not giving "reliable" vibes.
  - disintegore 4y ago
    It's crazy how well this comment aged.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  In an alternate, saner universe we normalized running "apps" backed by email rather than only backed by the Web, and Twitter and Facebook are just special email readers made by companies worth low-tens-of-millions of dollars.
throwaway8682 4y ago
> it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans... What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"... Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.
- EricE 4y ago
  >He is tearing down moderation How? Indeed, he hasn't changed anything about moderation (except applying to to everyone universally) >crapping on verification By expanding it to anyone willing to pay instead of it being some exclusive club where people had to literally bribe twitter employees tens of thousands for the coveted blue check? Yup - he's totally going backwards! > and injecting itself on electoral politics. lol - Twitters whole reason to exist for the last six years was to be the amplifier for one particular political ideology. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't an injection into electoral politics?!? How rich!
kenjackson 4y ago
No one wants to do this. The HN type crowd always is willing (or says its willing) to do more work to get more privacy/freedom/etc... Almost everyone else will take convenience and cost over those things. That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.
- Arubis 4y ago
  "Thing Elon built-or-owns, without Elon" turns out to be an entire market segment. Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else. FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    >Thing Elon built Are we really going to act like Elon built Twitter now?
    - Arubis 4y ago
      Ah, fair. I'll edit-correct.
guelo 4y ago
Maybe the free speech activists who now run Twitter could charge Mastodon promoters with "tortious interference" for damaging Twitter
ricardo81 4y ago
Lack of an alternative, lack of marketing, laziness? Convenience of others being there, network effects? They don't seem like good answers, just happen-stance ones. The idea of decentralising isn't bad IMO, maybe that'll be the next main topic.
mola 4y ago
Wouldn't being the topic du jour exactly the right time to lean into promoting it? I mean Elon raised a massive PR storm for Twitter and alternatives. Mastodon have been trying to become mainstream since forever. Fowler believes it to be a good thing also, so he uses his media clout (blog readership) to lean in and push this message. Why is that a problem?
cm2187 4y ago
I don't have a twitter account (requires a mobile number that I won't give them), so I am a bit at a disadvantage here. But am I right to assume that twitter will only show you tweets from people you follow (or their own re-tweets)? If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place? If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?
judge2020 4y ago
This is what happened with GitHub after the MS acquisition announcement as well. Right after the announcement there was a HN post about repo creation/imports being up 1000% or something, but now we can tell that not too much has changed (and GitLab was free hosted as well; you have to run your own mastodon instance). Until mastodon itself brings some killer feature that makes it de-facto better than Twitter, or Twitter actively starts promoting hate speech to people who otherwise are only interested in the art / 'art' parts of the platform, then it'll still be relevant even if it's bleeding a lot more money than it used to.
- simongray 4y ago
  The killer feature is the fact that it is actually a nice place to visit and this is partly by design. The stream of negativity that pervades Twitter is not present to the same degree.
trs8080 4y ago
> After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.
orgasmicberries 4y ago
We hadn't heard of Mastodon before all the Twitter stuff went down. People simply hadn’t been aware of it
rhaway84773 4y ago
Cards on the table, I don’t think federated Twitter will be a thing. Or at least it’s not a replacement for Twitter, in the forms I’ve seen it so far. However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while. And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.
kornhole 4y ago
Very few people knew this was even an option before last week as there was next to zero mention of it in the corp media they see. Now every big media outlet is suddenly explaining it. People also tend to only act when on the precipice. This does not bade well for other problems around the corner.

jefftk 4y ago

Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.

Levitz 4y ago
Hopefully we at least learn that "build your own social network" was never a reasonable point.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.
cm2187 4y ago
If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long. I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.

Arubis 4y ago

It was a good idea two weeks ago as risk mitigation. Now the bad thing risk mitigation was meant to mitigate is happening. It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.

arrosenberg 4y ago
> People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns. Thanks to Federal insurance programs that were implemented pre-climate crisis, they continue to build there after too, for the most part.

afavour 4y ago

> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future. > Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.

illuminati1911 4y ago
Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform. You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship. We'll see what happens in the long run.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
googlryas 4y ago
Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?
- jimcsharp 4y ago
  Your brand will have lost 3 years of opportunity to build up its footprint on an alternative - for whatever that's worth.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

CJefferson 4y ago

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

mberning 4y ago
You weren't worried about it going bankrupt when it was losing millions of dollars a day and running in the red for years on end?
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  Once again, self proclaimed rational thinkers and scientific and engineering minds can't see their glaring biases. As long as my team is winning all of the problems "aren't so bad", but as soon as it's the other team, everything is a firebrand. Metas preparing to have massive layoffs and yet here we are arguing over someone making obvious and I mean obvious business decisions to cut waste, bloat, and start turning some profitability. We've lamented some of these financial woes about Twitter here for years, and now someone finally has started walking the walk and all of a sudden the world is ending and its time to jump ship?
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  RocketMan bad.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It was so poorly run that there's a chance Musk could have come in, fucked up pretty badly, and still maybe improved the books. However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > I don't see how it's salvageable. If Musk is so much of a shrewd, evil business shark it's been portrayed as in the last months, you can imagine he'll find some nasty underhanded way to attach Twitter to an IV with Starlink on the other end, and flood it with money until the blue bird is back on its feet.

disintegore 4y ago

Mastodon and ActivityPub in general have UX issues. I can't imagine trying to explain to non-technical users why they have to open a pop-up window to another website just to be able to follow someone, or why people keep changing handles, etc etc. For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.

guelo 4y ago
In the first week Musk has already shown that his Twitter will erratically push out poorly thought out policy changes on a whim. Definitely not giving "reliable" vibes.
- disintegore 4y ago
  It's crazy how well this comment aged.
yamtaddle 4y ago
In an alternate, saner universe we normalized running "apps" backed by email rather than only backed by the Web, and Twitter and Facebook are just special email readers made by companies worth low-tens-of-millions of dollars.

throwaway8682 4y ago

> it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans... What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"... Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.

EricE 4y ago
>He is tearing down moderation How? Indeed, he hasn't changed anything about moderation (except applying to to everyone universally) >crapping on verification By expanding it to anyone willing to pay instead of it being some exclusive club where people had to literally bribe twitter employees tens of thousands for the coveted blue check? Yup - he's totally going backwards! > and injecting itself on electoral politics. lol - Twitters whole reason to exist for the last six years was to be the amplifier for one particular political ideology. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn't an injection into electoral politics?!? How rich!

kenjackson 4y ago

No one wants to do this. The HN type crowd always is willing (or says its willing) to do more work to get more privacy/freedom/etc... Almost everyone else will take convenience and cost over those things. That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.

Arubis 4y ago
"Thing Elon built-or-owns, without Elon" turns out to be an entire market segment. Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else. FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  >Thing Elon built Are we really going to act like Elon built Twitter now?
  - Arubis 4y ago
    Ah, fair. I'll edit-correct.

guelo 4y ago

Maybe the free speech activists who now run Twitter could charge Mastodon promoters with "tortious interference" for damaging Twitter

ricardo81 4y ago

Lack of an alternative, lack of marketing, laziness? Convenience of others being there, network effects? They don't seem like good answers, just happen-stance ones. The idea of decentralising isn't bad IMO, maybe that'll be the next main topic.

mola 4y ago

Wouldn't being the topic du jour exactly the right time to lean into promoting it? I mean Elon raised a massive PR storm for Twitter and alternatives. Mastodon have been trying to become mainstream since forever. Fowler believes it to be a good thing also, so he uses his media clout (blog readership) to lean in and push this message. Why is that a problem?

cm2187 4y ago

I don't have a twitter account (requires a mobile number that I won't give them), so I am a bit at a disadvantage here. But am I right to assume that twitter will only show you tweets from people you follow (or their own re-tweets)? If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place? If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?

judge2020 4y ago

This is what happened with GitHub after the MS acquisition announcement as well. Right after the announcement there was a HN post about repo creation/imports being up 1000% or something, but now we can tell that not too much has changed (and GitLab was free hosted as well; you have to run your own mastodon instance). Until mastodon itself brings some killer feature that makes it de-facto better than Twitter, or Twitter actively starts promoting hate speech to people who otherwise are only interested in the art / 'art' parts of the platform, then it'll still be relevant even if it's bleeding a lot more money than it used to.

simongray 4y ago
The killer feature is the fact that it is actually a nice place to visit and this is partly by design. The stream of negativity that pervades Twitter is not present to the same degree.

trs8080 4y ago

> After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.

orgasmicberries 4y ago

We hadn't heard of Mastodon before all the Twitter stuff went down. People simply hadn’t been aware of it

rhaway84773 4y ago

Cards on the table, I don’t think federated Twitter will be a thing. Or at least it’s not a replacement for Twitter, in the forms I’ve seen it so far. However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while. And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.

kornhole 4y ago

Very few people knew this was even an option before last week as there was next to zero mention of it in the corp media they see. Now every big media outlet is suddenly explaining it. People also tend to only act when on the precipice. This does not bade well for other problems around the corner.