3 ms·

About the same as I'd count on "alternative medicine" becoming mainstream, aka 0% chance outside of fringe groups. There's a reason why those alternative social

About the same as I'd count on "alternative medicine" becoming mainstream, aka 0% chance outside of fringe groups. There's a reason why those alternative social media platforms are considered "alternative". If you want your social media project to be successful you need to address what's wrong with the existing ones while not introducing new problems. All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems.

krapp 4y ago
> All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems. This seems like you simply disagree with certain platforms about what the relevant problems are. Most of the people moving from Twitter to Mastodon, etc, simply want to maintain their networks in what they perceive to be a stable environment (which Twitter no longer is.) And Mastodon in particular, being federated, solves the problem of ownership over data and decentralized moderation, which many people (particularly in marginalized groups) care about. And of course there are other alternatives that go in the opposite direction, eschewing identity and moderation altogether. What problems do you think they should be focusing on, that they aren't?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Outside of “tech Twitter”, it’s just as stable as ever. Most people who use it to socialise weren’t impacted at all by the recent changes. I can guarantee you that even with the worst possible management it’ll still be orders of magnitude more stable than Mastodon or whatever FOSS solution comes along. The problem with traditional, mainstream social media for normal people is ads, dark patterns, spam and the general adversarial environment where the platform is primarily there to serve the advertiser and not the user, thus the latter are treated like cattle. Those are the problems that an alternative solution needs to solve, while ideally not introducing its own. Mastodon, by virtue of not having a business model (which would also be a massive problem should it gain large amounts of users and they stick around), avoids the ads and dark patterns, but introduces many problems of its own. I’ve written my thoughts on Mastodon previously and they are just as valid nowadays: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%E2%80%9CNextgrid%E2%80%9D%20%E2%80%9Cmastodon&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... If you’re building a competitor to mainstream social media and call it Mastodon and the posts “toots” and refuse to see/acknowledge it even 6 years later, it’s dead on arrival and I’m not even talking about addressing the hard problems brought upon by decentralisation if you couldn’t even address that first.

krapp 4y ago

> All the "alternative" social media projects introduce more problems that they solve and even refuse to see them as problems. This seems like you simply disagree with certain platforms about what the relevant problems are. Most of the people moving from Twitter to Mastodon, etc, simply want to maintain their networks in what they perceive to be a stable environment (which Twitter no longer is.) And Mastodon in particular, being federated, solves the problem of ownership over data and decentralized moderation, which many people (particularly in marginalized groups) care about. And of course there are other alternatives that go in the opposite direction, eschewing identity and moderation altogether. What problems do you think they should be focusing on, that they aren't?

Nextgrid 4y ago
Outside of “tech Twitter”, it’s just as stable as ever. Most people who use it to socialise weren’t impacted at all by the recent changes. I can guarantee you that even with the worst possible management it’ll still be orders of magnitude more stable than Mastodon or whatever FOSS solution comes along. The problem with traditional, mainstream social media for normal people is ads, dark patterns, spam and the general adversarial environment where the platform is primarily there to serve the advertiser and not the user, thus the latter are treated like cattle. Those are the problems that an alternative solution needs to solve, while ideally not introducing its own. Mastodon, by virtue of not having a business model (which would also be a massive problem should it gain large amounts of users and they stick around), avoids the ads and dark patterns, but introduces many problems of its own. I’ve written my thoughts on Mastodon previously and they are just as valid nowadays: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%E2%80%9CNextgrid%E2%80%9D%20%E2%80%9Cmastodon&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... If you’re building a competitor to mainstream social media and call it Mastodon and the posts “toots” and refuse to see/acknowledge it even 6 years later, it’s dead on arrival and I’m not even talking about addressing the hard problems brought upon by decentralisation if you couldn’t even address that first.