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Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter trigge

Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $. Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade. Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.

warinukraine 4y ago
[flagged]
- leokennis 4y ago
  I imagine you believe the money you keep with the company known as your bank is yours as well right? Just because it’s a company doesn’t mean they get to behave like assholes and then put the blame on their users for being gullible or ignorant.
  - warinukraine 4y ago
    It's mine because the law says so.
  - kaashif 4y ago
    I disagree somewhat with what that guy said but your "counterpoint" is ridiculous. Bank deposits are yours! If the bank collapses and can't give them to you, there's FDIC insurance so the government will get you that money. This is nothing at all like Twitter and only weakens your argument.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Twitter is a bank and is stealing deposits? That's a crime.
  - ivalm 4y ago
    How does this example supposed to work? When you deposit money you get an asset (an IOU from the bank), while the bank gets money + liability (they are short the IOU). Your property after the deposit is the IOU, not the money (you gave the money away in exchange for the IOU!). There is contract + law that governs how the IOU can be redeemed for money (up to a limit the federal government guarantees some kinds of IOUs via FDIC/etc). Once the bank has your money (for which they gave you the IOU), they in fact can use the money at their own discretion (it is their money!) subject to some legal limitations. Those limitations are not about how banks use other people’s money (because normal banks aren’t custodial), they are limitations based on risk and collaterization of IOUs (the bank’s liabilities). These limitations are not expression of your property rights, they are in fact limitations on bank’s property rights (their freedom to deploy capital) since historically banks were not very responsible and blew up (in which case they failed to cover their liabilities, so IOUs were redeemed for less than their face value). Edit: as an aside, this money => money + IOU + IOU short Is exactly how most of “money” in circulation is produced. People take the IOU and spend it like money, banks take the money and lend it collaterized by houses/factories/etc. So you get people spending more than total cash in circulation (because they spend IOUs), while banks accumulate large IOU short position (again, collaterized through stuff like houses, factories, etc). Nothing bad about this, this is in fact working as intended.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  And you're defending the antics of a childish billionaire and blaming the damage on the people he hurt. That's on you.
  - warinukraine 4y ago
    I'm defending the right to own property, which is something really fundamental to the way we organize our society. ... and when you say "the people that were hurt"... If you leave your wallet on the street, it might be stolen and you might be hurt. I'm not blaming the victim; someone stealing your wallet is wrong even though you left it on the street. It's not your fault, I'm not blaming you, I blame the thief for the theft. On the other hand there's something that you could've done that would've avoided it - don't leave your wallet on the street.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      > I'm defending the right to own property, which is something really fundamental to the way we organize our society. No one is trying to "steal" twitter in this thread, we are saying he used his "property rights" to unnecessarily hurt others. You're the one who is saying this is just peachy keen and "that's on you". You're defending the harm.
      - xupybd 4y ago
        I feel for this guy. He worked on a product for 16 years. A lot goes into that and it becomes part of your identity. Then right at a time close to the loss of his mother it gets shutdown, with no warning. I'd be devastated. That said Elon is not doing this to anyone. He is not attacking anyone. He simply made a business decision. This happens all the time. Companies let suppliers go for financial reasons, they let staff go for similar reasons. People invest their lives into helping these businesses only to find they were let go for a few dollars. It sucks and it's can be super painful. Businesses mostly exist to make money and people should avoid investing their identity and loyalty into businesses as they probably won't reciprocate.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I’m not a Twitter user at all, but the people who have engaged with Twitter over the past few years are the ones who have provided Twitter with its value ($44 billion according to Musk). It’s not because of Elon or the previous shareholders, it’s because of the users. In return for this value, the users got a social ”backyard”. We like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it’s also true that the free lunch is an exchange. ISTM Elon is breaking this agreement.
hhh 4y ago
The ‘For You’ is the behavior i’ve had for a while. I’m happy to be able to go to the Following tab. I’m tired of seeing ‘X follow’ etc.
- greenie_beans 4y ago
  you've been able to switch for a while but it wasn't obvious, i kinda stumbled upon it one day. i find the new tabs at the top of the screen take up too much space and they scroll down when i go through my timeline. (i browse on my laptop via firefox, no idea what the mobile experience is like)
- input_sh 4y ago
  You were able to switch to "latest tweets" before as well. The control was top right next to "home" label, the icon looked like stars. The only thing that truly changed is "latest tweets" got renamed to "following" and it now takes up more vertical space (53 pixels to be exact) completely unnecessarily for something you're quite unlikely to click on on a regular basis. Change for the sake of change. Doesn't actually have an impact on anything.
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    Not that I want to defend Elon’s twitter, but a sliding menu is far better than a button you need to click on to see the options of what it does. It far easier to see tweets just from the people you follow with just a glance & swipe
    - input_sh 4y ago
      There's no sliding to be done on a desktop, and I'm pretty sure there's enough space to put "for you" and "following" next to "home" above it, where the icon used to be. Or better yet get rid of "home" above it completely as I fucking know when I'm on a homepage, plus there's three(!) additional ways of getting back to the top when you scroll down the timeline ("home" in the sidebar, Twitter logo in the sidebar, "see new tweets" popup), and there's your space for "for you"/"following". Still horrible, but at least as horrible as it was up until now instead of being twice as horrible. That vertical placement on a desktop is by far the biggest part of my complaint. It's half a two-line-long text-only tweet less on your screen at all times (spacing and controls below the tweet included), accurate to the pixel. It annoys me enough that I used inspect element to measure it. The implementation on a phone is way less horrible.
kome 4y ago
> "For You" appears as the default option The "for you" was already the default option, if anything they made easier to switch to the "following" that before was kinda hidden on top and hard to find. p.s.: i dislike musk since it was cool to like him.
postmeta 4y ago
I think he reached peak ad hominem: "a prick" "Space Karen" "King Shithead" "shitty person" "arrogant bastard" "billionaire bozo" "a clown"
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Insulting people who've done you harm is not an "ad hominem"; he's not debating Musk here.
- tptacek 4y ago
  None of these are ad hominem arguments.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    None of these are arguments.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Yes, one of several reasons they can't be ad hominem arguments.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  A billionaire attacking somebody else as "Pedo Guy" was peak hominem plus outrageous power imbalance, and the post you're replying to doesn't hold a candle to that. Plus Musk really is "a prick" "Space Karen" "King Shithead" "shitty person" "arrogant bastard" "billionaire bozo" "a clown". Truth is the best defense against libel.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    Thing is, that level of invective just makes me think he's got politically motivated brainworms. In terms of performance and features, Twitter is better than it's ever been.
    - 4y ago
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
What's wrong with Mastodon's UX? It's basically Twitter from ten years ago. The whole federated thing is a bit confusing but you can just use the default mastodon.social instance and not think about it.
- tptacek 4y ago
  You cannot in fact just use mastodon.social, because they haven't been accepting signups since the great Enmuskening.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Indeed. I got to that point of signup and playing with Mastodon and stopped. What, am I supposed to go hunting for some random server that'll allow me to join? Nah. I'll take my chances with getting kicked off or banned from Twitter, thanks. If I'm sent away from Twitter, I'll just stop consuming that content entirely. Probably a waste of time anyway.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      This notion of affiliating with specific servers with specific cultures is I think one of the first things that's going to go out the window as Mastodon/ActivityPub succeeds. It's not that hard to provision single-user instances, and the fabled moderation overhead issues are, as I understand from talking to operators, mostly a thing that follows from having lots of people in an instance following lots of other instances --- much less a big deal if you're personally choosing every follow on your own instance. Think Blogger, not Twitter or Facebook. In the meantime, there's lots of smaller servers that are taking signups. I ended up on infosec.exchange; it's been fine (thanks, infosec.exchange people!). I'll be on my own address sometime in the next month or so.
      - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        Mastodon was not made for p2p, which having a huge amoung of single-user instances basically is. The problem with Mastodon is that it ties your main account (and yes, most people just want a single account to represent their online persona) to a single instance which might have a very silly name and a very strong and unique culture (i.e. local timeline). The solution to this is not to self-host, because the infrastructure was not made for it. The solution would be to completely rethink the Mastodon experience, but that will never be done
mikenew 4y ago
I admit I don't use Twitter or Mastodon very much, but Mastodon's UX seems pretty decent these days. At least 50% of the time when I click on a Twitter link something breaks. Either the page doesn't load or a video won't play or whatever. And that's to say nothing of the "SIGN UP FOR TWITTER" bullshit that pops up whenever you click on anything.
- qwertox 4y ago
  I was just thinking about how every page I visit on mastodon is in a strong dark mode theme. About a week ago I was in Twitters web settings checking stuff like connected apps, just to see if there are some, and switched the theme to light, the default blue-white, which probably 90+% of the users see. I then noticed that Twitter looks nicer when not in dark mode (I have this same issue with IDEs, but yet I always stay with dark themes), that it looks friendlier. Does Mastodon have a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location, or is this something the owner of the server decides? because if 90+% of those light themed Twitter users are confronted with default black themed mastodon feeds, it might give them a bad association towards this dark web thing the news talk about, or some depressive mood. I wonder if it would help if Mastodon instances had a light theme by default.
  - aendruk 4y ago
    > a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10976 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10976
Spooky23 4y ago
I’m bullish on Mastodon with the influx of users. It’s different than Twitter, but it’s pretty awesome in its own right. Hopefully the different model will create something new and amazing. Twitter had amazing elements, but it’s sunset has arrived!
- aduitsis 4y ago
  At this point the signal to noise ratio on Mastodon is amazingly good. Who would have thought that just displaying the timeline would be so refreshing.
  - Kostchei 4y ago
    yep, I have to say, it (Mastodon - mostly infosec.exchange) has been ..nice.. and /tilts head .. effective in communicating what I wanted to communicate with people who I wanted reach. And I think for social media that is the bar you want to reach. Nice and works. refreshingly surprised after being scarred by years of facebook and twitter- I assumed that was a good as social media was going to get. Apparently not.
soheil 4y ago
> Well-written Really? So if you go on a rampage of profanities and spew never ending hate and be as ugly and rude as possible that's praiseworthy? > "For You" appears as the default option No, it had been the default for several years now and every time you disabled it, it would mysteriously re-enable itself after a while. > The "For You" timeline is only for Elon No, he even complained about this feature, shadow-banning, censoring, and basically brain washing the masses among other things, before he bought Twitter. > Mastodon is not great right now No, because it will never be great. We discussed de-federation when I was at Twitter in the early days. It was clear an archipelago of decentralized servers can never generate momentum to drive enough revenue to get the wheel of acceleration spinning fast enough. It was true then and it is true now, no matter how many hipster wanna be crypto bros who work on m7n tell you otherwise.
- wedn3sday 4y ago
  > "... drive enough revenue ..." Pretty clear where your values are here. Personally I quite like a system that's explicitly not being designed to drive revenue, and would like to interact with other people that also want to be in a place with a higher value then the dollar bill. Im perfectly happy to let people with your values stay on twitter away from me.
  - soheil 4y ago
    What do you think revenue does? It's a signal that something is of value to society so it can be used for growth to further increase value.
    - wedn3sday 4y ago
      Im saddened to hear that my community garden and local library dont provide any value to society, must be why I like spending time there so much.
      - soheil 4y ago
        I think you're confusing "if" with "if and only if". Revenue is one way to provide value, not the only.
api 4y ago
Anyone comparing ActivityPub to the web3 craze has no idea what they are taking about and probably knows nothing about both of these things. They have nothing in common.
dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
Twitter was really pretty solid for what it was, had lots of great accounts and even with the stock UI was pretty operable for me. Even advertising on Twitter was pretty fun. You could reach people all over the world at reasonable cost and get feedback on your product and messaging. Most recently I used Twitter pretty much exclusively for following the war in Ukraine, and it’s been a big loss for me—Telegram is a good source for primary content, Twitter was great as a human-driven social redux. I followed a person in Mariupol, some people in Russia and Belarus, lots of people in Ukraine and Europe. It was a great for keeping up with such a terrible thing. RIP Twitter.
- wyclif 4y ago
  > RIP Twitter Reports of Twitter's demise are greatly exaggerated by people with "Spaceman Bad" political brainworms.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Unfortunately it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, to overcome network effects when something like Twitter is involved. The only way it goes under is if they are losing revenue and they actually go bankrupt at some point. Elon has already been muzzled quite a bit and I haven't seen much out of him recently, so I imagine as long as that keeps being the case going forward we're going to see Twitter do just fine.
    - wyclif 4y ago
      >I haven't seen much out of him recently Ever heard of Space X, Tesla, and the Boring Company?
      - minimaxir 4y ago
        "much out of him" is a relative qualifier. At the least his tweets haven't been making news unlike the week where he was taking polls whether he should step down and unban journalists.
      - 4y ago
crispinb 4y ago
> the UX needs to vastly improve Which client? Elk (https://elk.zone https://elk.zone) seems pretty good to me, though I'm not particularly fussy about UX in this particular case (I only check social media a couple of times a week). But there's quite a range of clients to choose between.
chelical 4y ago
Dealbreaker for Mastodon (that I've seen multiple people mention) is that instance admins can view personal DMs. Yes, employees from major social media companies can view your private messages, but it's more likely there's an audit trail in those cases while Mastodon instances have minimal oversight.
- 98codes 4y ago
  Eh, if it’s that secret, use Signal or something.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Run your own instance.
- wedn3sday 4y ago
  I agree this is a pretty glaring issue, I disagree that its a deal breaker for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- acdha 4y ago
  Right now I’d be more worried about Elon Musk giving activists access to Twitter DMs than either of the admins for the Mastodon instances I’m on. What good is an audit trail when the auditor is part of the problem?
raydev 4y ago
> The "For You" timeline is only for Elon The "For You" timeline is a new name for the "Home" timeline that's been around forever. And now it's easier to get to the chronological feed ("Following"), the first actual UX improvement to the site since the acquisition.
- wyclif 4y ago
  Yeah, the "For You is only for Elon" thing isn't a smart take. Makes me think he hasn't been around Twitter very long. From my perch down here in southeast Asia, Twitter is better than it's ever been at this point. A lot snappier and faster for users outside of North America.
  - michelb 4y ago
    Maybe because it doesn't seem to be loading every tweet and mention from people I'm following. Quite a lot of threads are broken (at least for me) because a lot of tweets aren't being loaded anymore. The amount of posts on my timeline has been decimated, but if I go to the individuals I follow, I can see that they have tweeted, I just don't see them in my timeline.
- harmmonica 4y ago
  You can‘t default to the “following” tab anymore (every time you open the app it shows “for you” by default), which likely puts it in the “for Elon” camp. Or maybe there’s an even-more-buried setting to default to “following” than tapping the old (were they?) “stars”? But definitely not good UX when users have to tap “following” every time they want to only see, ya know, who they’re actually following (aka what they’re explicitly interested in).
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    It doesn't work that way for me (Mac/Chrome). Whatever tab I choose stays active, and persists through opening and closing tabs. Only goes back to "For You" when logging out and back in.
- 4y ago

warinukraine 4y ago

[flagged]

leokennis 4y ago
I imagine you believe the money you keep with the company known as your bank is yours as well right? Just because it’s a company doesn’t mean they get to behave like assholes and then put the blame on their users for being gullible or ignorant.
- warinukraine 4y ago
  It's mine because the law says so.
- kaashif 4y ago
  I disagree somewhat with what that guy said but your "counterpoint" is ridiculous. Bank deposits are yours! If the bank collapses and can't give them to you, there's FDIC insurance so the government will get you that money. This is nothing at all like Twitter and only weakens your argument.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Twitter is a bank and is stealing deposits? That's a crime.
- ivalm 4y ago
  How does this example supposed to work? When you deposit money you get an asset (an IOU from the bank), while the bank gets money + liability (they are short the IOU). Your property after the deposit is the IOU, not the money (you gave the money away in exchange for the IOU!). There is contract + law that governs how the IOU can be redeemed for money (up to a limit the federal government guarantees some kinds of IOUs via FDIC/etc). Once the bank has your money (for which they gave you the IOU), they in fact can use the money at their own discretion (it is their money!) subject to some legal limitations. Those limitations are not about how banks use other people’s money (because normal banks aren’t custodial), they are limitations based on risk and collaterization of IOUs (the bank’s liabilities). These limitations are not expression of your property rights, they are in fact limitations on bank’s property rights (their freedom to deploy capital) since historically banks were not very responsible and blew up (in which case they failed to cover their liabilities, so IOUs were redeemed for less than their face value). Edit: as an aside, this money => money + IOU + IOU short Is exactly how most of “money” in circulation is produced. People take the IOU and spend it like money, banks take the money and lend it collaterized by houses/factories/etc. So you get people spending more than total cash in circulation (because they spend IOUs), while banks accumulate large IOU short position (again, collaterized through stuff like houses, factories, etc). Nothing bad about this, this is in fact working as intended.
Ensorceled 4y ago
And you're defending the antics of a childish billionaire and blaming the damage on the people he hurt. That's on you.
- warinukraine 4y ago
  I'm defending the right to own property, which is something really fundamental to the way we organize our society. ... and when you say "the people that were hurt"... If you leave your wallet on the street, it might be stolen and you might be hurt. I'm not blaming the victim; someone stealing your wallet is wrong even though you left it on the street. It's not your fault, I'm not blaming you, I blame the thief for the theft. On the other hand there's something that you could've done that would've avoided it - don't leave your wallet on the street.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    > I'm defending the right to own property, which is something really fundamental to the way we organize our society. No one is trying to "steal" twitter in this thread, we are saying he used his "property rights" to unnecessarily hurt others. You're the one who is saying this is just peachy keen and "that's on you". You're defending the harm.
    - xupybd 4y ago
      I feel for this guy. He worked on a product for 16 years. A lot goes into that and it becomes part of your identity. Then right at a time close to the loss of his mother it gets shutdown, with no warning. I'd be devastated. That said Elon is not doing this to anyone. He is not attacking anyone. He simply made a business decision. This happens all the time. Companies let suppliers go for financial reasons, they let staff go for similar reasons. People invest their lives into helping these businesses only to find they were let go for a few dollars. It sucks and it's can be super painful. Businesses mostly exist to make money and people should avoid investing their identity and loyalty into businesses as they probably won't reciprocate.
doctor_eval 4y ago
I’m not a Twitter user at all, but the people who have engaged with Twitter over the past few years are the ones who have provided Twitter with its value ($44 billion according to Musk). It’s not because of Elon or the previous shareholders, it’s because of the users. In return for this value, the users got a social ”backyard”. We like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it’s also true that the free lunch is an exchange. ISTM Elon is breaking this agreement.

hhh 4y ago

The ‘For You’ is the behavior i’ve had for a while. I’m happy to be able to go to the Following tab. I’m tired of seeing ‘X follow’ etc.

greenie_beans 4y ago
you've been able to switch for a while but it wasn't obvious, i kinda stumbled upon it one day. i find the new tabs at the top of the screen take up too much space and they scroll down when i go through my timeline. (i browse on my laptop via firefox, no idea what the mobile experience is like)
input_sh 4y ago
You were able to switch to "latest tweets" before as well. The control was top right next to "home" label, the icon looked like stars. The only thing that truly changed is "latest tweets" got renamed to "following" and it now takes up more vertical space (53 pixels to be exact) completely unnecessarily for something you're quite unlikely to click on on a regular basis. Change for the sake of change. Doesn't actually have an impact on anything.
- Jcowell 4y ago
  Not that I want to defend Elon’s twitter, but a sliding menu is far better than a button you need to click on to see the options of what it does. It far easier to see tweets just from the people you follow with just a glance & swipe
  - input_sh 4y ago
    There's no sliding to be done on a desktop, and I'm pretty sure there's enough space to put "for you" and "following" next to "home" above it, where the icon used to be. Or better yet get rid of "home" above it completely as I fucking know when I'm on a homepage, plus there's three(!) additional ways of getting back to the top when you scroll down the timeline ("home" in the sidebar, Twitter logo in the sidebar, "see new tweets" popup), and there's your space for "for you"/"following". Still horrible, but at least as horrible as it was up until now instead of being twice as horrible. That vertical placement on a desktop is by far the biggest part of my complaint. It's half a two-line-long text-only tweet less on your screen at all times (spacing and controls below the tweet included), accurate to the pixel. It annoys me enough that I used inspect element to measure it. The implementation on a phone is way less horrible.

kome 4y ago

> "For You" appears as the default option The "for you" was already the default option, if anything they made easier to switch to the "following" that before was kinda hidden on top and hard to find. p.s.: i dislike musk since it was cool to like him.

postmeta 4y ago

I think he reached peak ad hominem: "a prick" "Space Karen" "King Shithead" "shitty person" "arrogant bastard" "billionaire bozo" "a clown"

Ensorceled 4y ago
Insulting people who've done you harm is not an "ad hominem"; he's not debating Musk here.
tptacek 4y ago
None of these are ad hominem arguments.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  None of these are arguments.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Yes, one of several reasons they can't be ad hominem arguments.
DonHopkins 4y ago
A billionaire attacking somebody else as "Pedo Guy" was peak hominem plus outrageous power imbalance, and the post you're replying to doesn't hold a candle to that. Plus Musk really is "a prick" "Space Karen" "King Shithead" "shitty person" "arrogant bastard" "billionaire bozo" "a clown". Truth is the best defense against libel.
- wyclif 4y ago
  Thing is, that level of invective just makes me think he's got politically motivated brainworms. In terms of performance and features, Twitter is better than it's ever been.
  - 4y ago

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

What's wrong with Mastodon's UX? It's basically Twitter from ten years ago. The whole federated thing is a bit confusing but you can just use the default mastodon.social instance and not think about it.

tptacek 4y ago
You cannot in fact just use mastodon.social, because they haven't been accepting signups since the great Enmuskening.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Indeed. I got to that point of signup and playing with Mastodon and stopped. What, am I supposed to go hunting for some random server that'll allow me to join? Nah. I'll take my chances with getting kicked off or banned from Twitter, thanks. If I'm sent away from Twitter, I'll just stop consuming that content entirely. Probably a waste of time anyway.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    This notion of affiliating with specific servers with specific cultures is I think one of the first things that's going to go out the window as Mastodon/ActivityPub succeeds. It's not that hard to provision single-user instances, and the fabled moderation overhead issues are, as I understand from talking to operators, mostly a thing that follows from having lots of people in an instance following lots of other instances --- much less a big deal if you're personally choosing every follow on your own instance. Think Blogger, not Twitter or Facebook. In the meantime, there's lots of smaller servers that are taking signups. I ended up on infosec.exchange; it's been fine (thanks, infosec.exchange people!). I'll be on my own address sometime in the next month or so.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      Mastodon was not made for p2p, which having a huge amoung of single-user instances basically is. The problem with Mastodon is that it ties your main account (and yes, most people just want a single account to represent their online persona) to a single instance which might have a very silly name and a very strong and unique culture (i.e. local timeline). The solution to this is not to self-host, because the infrastructure was not made for it. The solution would be to completely rethink the Mastodon experience, but that will never be done

mikenew 4y ago

I admit I don't use Twitter or Mastodon very much, but Mastodon's UX seems pretty decent these days. At least 50% of the time when I click on a Twitter link something breaks. Either the page doesn't load or a video won't play or whatever. And that's to say nothing of the "SIGN UP FOR TWITTER" bullshit that pops up whenever you click on anything.

qwertox 4y ago
I was just thinking about how every page I visit on mastodon is in a strong dark mode theme. About a week ago I was in Twitters web settings checking stuff like connected apps, just to see if there are some, and switched the theme to light, the default blue-white, which probably 90+% of the users see. I then noticed that Twitter looks nicer when not in dark mode (I have this same issue with IDEs, but yet I always stay with dark themes), that it looks friendlier. Does Mastodon have a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location, or is this something the owner of the server decides? because if 90+% of those light themed Twitter users are confronted with default black themed mastodon feeds, it might give them a bad association towards this dark web thing the news talk about, or some depressive mood. I wonder if it would help if Mastodon instances had a light theme by default.
- aendruk 4y ago
  > a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10976 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10976

Spooky23 4y ago

I’m bullish on Mastodon with the influx of users. It’s different than Twitter, but it’s pretty awesome in its own right. Hopefully the different model will create something new and amazing. Twitter had amazing elements, but it’s sunset has arrived!

aduitsis 4y ago
At this point the signal to noise ratio on Mastodon is amazingly good. Who would have thought that just displaying the timeline would be so refreshing.
- Kostchei 4y ago
  yep, I have to say, it (Mastodon - mostly infosec.exchange) has been ..nice.. and /tilts head .. effective in communicating what I wanted to communicate with people who I wanted reach. And I think for social media that is the bar you want to reach. Nice and works. refreshingly surprised after being scarred by years of facebook and twitter- I assumed that was a good as social media was going to get. Apparently not.

soheil 4y ago

> Well-written Really? So if you go on a rampage of profanities and spew never ending hate and be as ugly and rude as possible that's praiseworthy? > "For You" appears as the default option No, it had been the default for several years now and every time you disabled it, it would mysteriously re-enable itself after a while. > The "For You" timeline is only for Elon No, he even complained about this feature, shadow-banning, censoring, and basically brain washing the masses among other things, before he bought Twitter. > Mastodon is not great right now No, because it will never be great. We discussed de-federation when I was at Twitter in the early days. It was clear an archipelago of decentralized servers can never generate momentum to drive enough revenue to get the wheel of acceleration spinning fast enough. It was true then and it is true now, no matter how many hipster wanna be crypto bros who work on m7n tell you otherwise.

wedn3sday 4y ago
> "... drive enough revenue ..." Pretty clear where your values are here. Personally I quite like a system that's explicitly not being designed to drive revenue, and would like to interact with other people that also want to be in a place with a higher value then the dollar bill. Im perfectly happy to let people with your values stay on twitter away from me.
- soheil 4y ago
  What do you think revenue does? It's a signal that something is of value to society so it can be used for growth to further increase value.
  - wedn3sday 4y ago
    Im saddened to hear that my community garden and local library dont provide any value to society, must be why I like spending time there so much.
    - soheil 4y ago
      I think you're confusing "if" with "if and only if". Revenue is one way to provide value, not the only.

api 4y ago

Anyone comparing ActivityPub to the web3 craze has no idea what they are taking about and probably knows nothing about both of these things. They have nothing in common.

dmitryminkovsky 4y ago

Twitter was really pretty solid for what it was, had lots of great accounts and even with the stock UI was pretty operable for me. Even advertising on Twitter was pretty fun. You could reach people all over the world at reasonable cost and get feedback on your product and messaging. Most recently I used Twitter pretty much exclusively for following the war in Ukraine, and it’s been a big loss for me—Telegram is a good source for primary content, Twitter was great as a human-driven social redux. I followed a person in Mariupol, some people in Russia and Belarus, lots of people in Ukraine and Europe. It was a great for keeping up with such a terrible thing. RIP Twitter.

wyclif 4y ago
> RIP Twitter Reports of Twitter's demise are greatly exaggerated by people with "Spaceman Bad" political brainworms.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Unfortunately it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, to overcome network effects when something like Twitter is involved. The only way it goes under is if they are losing revenue and they actually go bankrupt at some point. Elon has already been muzzled quite a bit and I haven't seen much out of him recently, so I imagine as long as that keeps being the case going forward we're going to see Twitter do just fine.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    >I haven't seen much out of him recently Ever heard of Space X, Tesla, and the Boring Company?
    - minimaxir 4y ago
      "much out of him" is a relative qualifier. At the least his tweets haven't been making news unlike the week where he was taking polls whether he should step down and unban journalists.
    - 4y ago

crispinb 4y ago

> the UX needs to vastly improve Which client? Elk (https://elk.zone https://elk.zone) seems pretty good to me, though I'm not particularly fussy about UX in this particular case (I only check social media a couple of times a week). But there's quite a range of clients to choose between.

chelical 4y ago

Dealbreaker for Mastodon (that I've seen multiple people mention) is that instance admins can view personal DMs. Yes, employees from major social media companies can view your private messages, but it's more likely there's an audit trail in those cases while Mastodon instances have minimal oversight.

98codes 4y ago
Eh, if it’s that secret, use Signal or something.
Fatnino 4y ago
Run your own instance.
wedn3sday 4y ago
I agree this is a pretty glaring issue, I disagree that its a deal breaker for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
acdha 4y ago
Right now I’d be more worried about Elon Musk giving activists access to Twitter DMs than either of the admins for the Mastodon instances I’m on. What good is an audit trail when the auditor is part of the problem?

raydev 4y ago

> The "For You" timeline is only for Elon The "For You" timeline is a new name for the "Home" timeline that's been around forever. And now it's easier to get to the chronological feed ("Following"), the first actual UX improvement to the site since the acquisition.

wyclif 4y ago
Yeah, the "For You is only for Elon" thing isn't a smart take. Makes me think he hasn't been around Twitter very long. From my perch down here in southeast Asia, Twitter is better than it's ever been at this point. A lot snappier and faster for users outside of North America.
- michelb 4y ago
  Maybe because it doesn't seem to be loading every tweet and mention from people I'm following. Quite a lot of threads are broken (at least for me) because a lot of tweets aren't being loaded anymore. The amount of posts on my timeline has been decimated, but if I go to the individuals I follow, I can see that they have tweeted, I just don't see them in my timeline.
harmmonica 4y ago
You can‘t default to the “following” tab anymore (every time you open the app it shows “for you” by default), which likely puts it in the “for Elon” camp. Or maybe there’s an even-more-buried setting to default to “following” than tapping the old (were they?) “stars”? But definitely not good UX when users have to tap “following” every time they want to only see, ya know, who they’re actually following (aka what they’re explicitly interested in).
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  It doesn't work that way for me (Mac/Chrome). Whatever tab I choose stays active, and persists through opening and closing tabs. Only goes back to "For You" when logging out and back in.
4y ago