4 ms·

I honestly wonder if these various social networks / Twitter clones are solutions in search of a problem. Do most people really care to comunícate with each oth

I honestly wonder if these various social networks / Twitter clones are solutions in search of a problem. Do most people really care to comunícate with each other in this manner any more? What’s the point? It seems to me (anecdotal, so I’m interested in your views) that the use-case for reasoned argument has moved to podcasts and substack and the use-case for group comms has moved to discord. Meanwhile, feed-style networks, which were always junk food disguised as nutrition, have been displaced by TikTok, which is more like digital crack.

yogthos 4y ago
If you don't understand the internet was meant to be decentralized then what are you even doing here?
- TobyTheDog123 4y ago
  I agree in the decentralization mantra (though cryptocurrencies have not been a good public representative of the concept thus far), but this is the exact opposite of what you want to do to attract people to your cause. "What are you doing here, believing in centralization, on a centralized news site?"
  - ericd 4y ago
    I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      Could almost say the same thing about twitter. It’s mostly short quips and links to longer-form content.
      - robobro 4y ago
        If someone tries to argue that Twitter isn't centralized, I don't think they really understand what centralization means.
    - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
      Twitter links out to content all the time - is that decentralized? Where's the line? - It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc) - It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point) - Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized) - It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.
    - robobro 4y ago
      HN isn't just links. It's also discussion threads. It is centralized in that these links and discussions don't happen in some abstract cloud that's not strictly limited to this instance managed by our BDFL
      - ericd 4y ago
        Right, I mean more that it’s not actively trying to keep people on-site by eg hosting the content, it’s a jumping off point to the rest of the decentralized internet. But it’s not a federated service, its hosting is centralized. Two different aspects of centralization.
- spinningslate 4y ago
  Aside from pushing the boundaries of the posting guidelines[0], you've perhaps inadvertently raised an important point. OP's post is an observation of the real world: the inter-related evolution of technology and humanity's use of it. That use isn't primarily driven by system architecture. It's sociological, commercial, political, emotional. The conception of the fediverse was itself a sociological and commercial response to social media power being vested in too few commercial entities. The distributed nature of it isn't cost free: there is no single "Mastodon" that everyone signs up to. It remains to be seen whether federation is a net winner, or whether the incremental usability friction prevents large scale adoption. None of that is first-order technological. The underlying internet may well be federated, and it's eminently possible to create federated services on top of it. Email is perhaps the signiature example. But _just being_ federated is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful adoption. Witness the very centralisation that the fediverse is a response to. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - yogthos 4y ago
    Both social and technological aspects are ultimately intertwined. The way technology works necessarily shapes the way it's used, and users in turn shape the direction that technology evolves in. Fediverse architecture encourages different kind of usage from centralized platforms and it will evolve in a different way based on the direction the users take it in. One difference we see already is that Mastodon has instances focused on specific topics. There are instances focusing on art, news, tech, functional programming, and so on. Federated approach is showing itself to be much more conducive towards smaller communities focused on niche interests. Meanwhile, I contest the claim that Fediverse is being centralized. In fact, server admins actively ensure that this doesn't happen by closing registration when too many users end up flooding to a particular instance. Furthermore, the fact that servers are maintained by volunteers via donations means that there is a limit on how many users each instance can support in terms of cost. Once again, this creates incentives towards further federation to amortize costs. Finally, the terms of success need to be defined to talk about success in meaningful terms. I would argue that Fediverse is already successful because it has millions of users producing content, it has lots of developers working on the tech powering it, and a sustainable model for running servers. At this point the Fediverse has shown itself to be sustainable and will be around indefinitely. It will likely outlive every commercial social media platform that's around today.
smoldesu 4y ago
I like Mastodon. Twitter is a black-hole of influencers and hot-stuff personalities trying to eke out a follower or advertising dime. Mastodon is more focused on enriching interaction (rather than infinite scrolling) and it achieves this with a chronological timeline by-default, with zero random 'recommended' content. It sucks all of the ego-driven nastiness out of the equation and lets you return to a comfortable feed.
mrighele 4y ago
For me twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff. Twitter is my tool to do that. For example I follow a person that once a week write a post like “top 10 things that happened the week in china”. That is as much as I need to know about that. I follow 3-4 person that talk about the war in Ukraine. Sometime they post articles from MSM, sometimes translate stuff from telegram channels, sometimes they debunk some propaganda found online. I wouldn’t be able to do all of this by myself. This used to be the job of newspapers but it works only if the newspaper line is the one that you like
- Tao3300 4y ago
  > twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff. It's a terrible substitute for Google Reader.
  - robobro 4y ago
    It's a good enough replacement for IRC.
  - mrighele 4y ago
    I wouldn’t say terrible. In some thing is worse in others much better. For a number of reasons it is easier to find new account to follow, follow them for a while and unfollow if necessary. This makes my twitter account much more “fluid” than goggle reader was, allowing me to keep it more up to date and interesting. On the other side, twitter ha much more noise that you have to learn to ignore
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed. When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play. You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time. There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way. In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy. It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.
jasmer 4y ago
The primary use of Twitter is for leading voices to speak. It's the 'blue checks' speaking and everything else is just chaff. Researchers, CEOs, diplomats and some people with relevant information basically emit relevant information. That's quite a different use case then most that are offered. Twitter is not a P2P thing, it's a 1-N thing and many of those '1s' need the blue checkmark. In order for another network to gain value, they need to bring over a critical mass of popular voices.
egypturnash 4y ago
Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their halves of conversations they were having on Twitter. Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up. And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u". Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.
- adriand 4y ago
  Fair enough, and I’m glad you’re getting value out of the experience. But I’m talking about the broader culture. Where is it, and where is it going? It seems to me like it’s moved on, and that the things you like about Mastodon are niche. To put it another way, it seems like a lot of the energy being poured into decentralized alternatives are focused on the past.

yogthos 4y ago

If you don't understand the internet was meant to be decentralized then what are you even doing here?

TobyTheDog123 4y ago
I agree in the decentralization mantra (though cryptocurrencies have not been a good public representative of the concept thus far), but this is the exact opposite of what you want to do to attract people to your cause. "What are you doing here, believing in centralization, on a centralized news site?"
- ericd 4y ago
  I don’t think the parent’s tone was good for discussion, but HN is literally all links off to other sites with some meta-discussion, it’s not “centralized”.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    Could almost say the same thing about twitter. It’s mostly short quips and links to longer-form content.
    - robobro 4y ago
      If someone tries to argue that Twitter isn't centralized, I don't think they really understand what centralization means.
  - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
    Twitter links out to content all the time - is that decentralized? Where's the line? - It's hosted on servers presumably operated by a centralized entity (YCombinator/AWS/etc) - It has moderation centralized to a specific set of people (which is weird sentence construction but I had to fit centralized in there for the point) - Post content (even links), comments, accounts, etc, are stored in a centralized database (might be sharded or whatever, but you get the point, the control is centralized) - It has a domain name and DNS records that are centralized to ICANN/whoever-hosts-the-dns Centralization, to me at least, is about how content is delivered, not about how likely the product is to bounce you to an external source.
  - robobro 4y ago
    HN isn't just links. It's also discussion threads. It is centralized in that these links and discussions don't happen in some abstract cloud that's not strictly limited to this instance managed by our BDFL
    - ericd 4y ago
      Right, I mean more that it’s not actively trying to keep people on-site by eg hosting the content, it’s a jumping off point to the rest of the decentralized internet. But it’s not a federated service, its hosting is centralized. Two different aspects of centralization.
spinningslate 4y ago
Aside from pushing the boundaries of the posting guidelines[0], you've perhaps inadvertently raised an important point. OP's post is an observation of the real world: the inter-related evolution of technology and humanity's use of it. That use isn't primarily driven by system architecture. It's sociological, commercial, political, emotional. The conception of the fediverse was itself a sociological and commercial response to social media power being vested in too few commercial entities. The distributed nature of it isn't cost free: there is no single "Mastodon" that everyone signs up to. It remains to be seen whether federation is a net winner, or whether the incremental usability friction prevents large scale adoption. None of that is first-order technological. The underlying internet may well be federated, and it's eminently possible to create federated services on top of it. Email is perhaps the signiature example. But _just being_ federated is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful adoption. Witness the very centralisation that the fediverse is a response to. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yogthos 4y ago
  Both social and technological aspects are ultimately intertwined. The way technology works necessarily shapes the way it's used, and users in turn shape the direction that technology evolves in. Fediverse architecture encourages different kind of usage from centralized platforms and it will evolve in a different way based on the direction the users take it in. One difference we see already is that Mastodon has instances focused on specific topics. There are instances focusing on art, news, tech, functional programming, and so on. Federated approach is showing itself to be much more conducive towards smaller communities focused on niche interests. Meanwhile, I contest the claim that Fediverse is being centralized. In fact, server admins actively ensure that this doesn't happen by closing registration when too many users end up flooding to a particular instance. Furthermore, the fact that servers are maintained by volunteers via donations means that there is a limit on how many users each instance can support in terms of cost. Once again, this creates incentives towards further federation to amortize costs. Finally, the terms of success need to be defined to talk about success in meaningful terms. I would argue that Fediverse is already successful because it has millions of users producing content, it has lots of developers working on the tech powering it, and a sustainable model for running servers. At this point the Fediverse has shown itself to be sustainable and will be around indefinitely. It will likely outlive every commercial social media platform that's around today.

smoldesu 4y ago

I like Mastodon. Twitter is a black-hole of influencers and hot-stuff personalities trying to eke out a follower or advertising dime. Mastodon is more focused on enriching interaction (rather than infinite scrolling) and it achieves this with a chronological timeline by-default, with zero random 'recommended' content. It sucks all of the ego-driven nastiness out of the equation and lets you return to a comfortable feed.

mrighele 4y ago

For me twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff. Twitter is my tool to do that. For example I follow a person that once a week write a post like “top 10 things that happened the week in china”. That is as much as I need to know about that. I follow 3-4 person that talk about the war in Ukraine. Sometime they post articles from MSM, sometimes translate stuff from telegram channels, sometimes they debunk some propaganda found online. I wouldn’t be able to do all of this by myself. This used to be the job of newspapers but it works only if the newspaper line is the one that you like

Tao3300 4y ago
> twitter solve a very practical problem. I like to read stuff from everywhere, from substacks to YouTube channel to regular old mainstream media. But not everything they produce is of interest to me so I need a way to filter and get to read only relevant stuff. It's a terrible substitute for Google Reader.
- robobro 4y ago
  It's a good enough replacement for IRC.
- mrighele 4y ago
  I wouldn’t say terrible. In some thing is worse in others much better. For a number of reasons it is easier to find new account to follow, follow them for a while and unfollow if necessary. This makes my twitter account much more “fluid” than goggle reader was, allowing me to keep it more up to date and interesting. On the other side, twitter ha much more noise that you have to learn to ignore

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

I dislike Twitter, but I think it's more than junk food. Its merits are about speed. When something happens it's not a thing yet. It's mere phenomena. It takes processing by at least one human to be a thing, with associated words, that you can talk about. And when it comes to the collective consciousness, there's a similar dynamic at play. You have maybe 24 hours, maybe less, before the narratives settle down into "what happened" and "an alternative view of what happened". Twitter's design is such that it lets you watch and potentially participate in that process in real time. There are a lot of problems with letting it be your only source of news, but if you decide to do that anyway you'll notice that the rest of the news sources are two days behind you. Like you already heard about that thing, and you know how it got that way and saw glimmers of how it could've been a different way. In some sense, Twitter decides what makes it into the other information sources because information spreads across it faster than others. By the time somebody's bothering with a long form post on substack, Twitter has already decided that it's newsworthy. It's the quantum foam from which real news condenses. It's first-mover advantage for narratives.

jasmer 4y ago

The primary use of Twitter is for leading voices to speak. It's the 'blue checks' speaking and everything else is just chaff. Researchers, CEOs, diplomats and some people with relevant information basically emit relevant information. That's quite a different use case then most that are offered. Twitter is not a P2P thing, it's a 1-N thing and many of those '1s' need the blue checkmark. In order for another network to gain value, they need to bring over a critical mass of popular voices.

egypturnash 4y ago

Once upon a time, I was on Livejournal. So were all my friends. Then they started vanishing, leaving only auto-posted collections of cryptic fragments of their halves of conversations they were having on Twitter. Eventually I finally got on Twitter too. It was okay for keeping up with what my friends were doing. Not great, forcing everything into the arbitrary limit of 140 characters long after the "it fits in an SMS" requirement was dead was annoying. But it was okay. Kinda like having an IRC channel where you were the one who decided who showed up. And then it became a place for political argument, because that Increased Engagement, and Twitter was constantly chasing that as a way to serve more ads in between the conversations with my friends, even though the doubled post limit of 280 characters was still fucking horrible for any kind of discussion much beyond "u suck" "no u". Mastodon is a replacement for the reason I actually went to Twitter in the first place: I can go there and see a bit of what my friends are up to, with links to other projects. I would be happier if they were moving towards something longer-form but they are not. I've adjusted the post limit on my own instance to ~7 and it's pretty nice.

adriand 4y ago
Fair enough, and I’m glad you’re getting value out of the experience. But I’m talking about the broader culture. Where is it, and where is it going? It seems to me like it’s moved on, and that the things you like about Mastodon are niche. To put it another way, it seems like a lot of the energy being poured into decentralized alternatives are focused on the past.