4 ms·

> What advantages does a mastodon feed provide? Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which requires a log in these days. ----------- Lets rever

> What advantages does a mastodon feed provide? Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which requires a log in these days. ----------- Lets reverse the discussion. What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not? Since Wikipedia's engagement is largely readers / followers with very little comments, the read-only experience is king, is it not? Mastodon therefore offers a better reading experience, as it doesn't have advertisements, it isn't going to randomly go down (stability of Mastodon has improved a lot while the stability of Twitter is declining), running your own Mastodon instance allows for any size posts (no need for Wikipedia to pay Twitter Blue to get 2000-character posts. Wikipedia can just configure Mastodon to allow 2000 or 20,000-character posts), etc. etc. Why should Wikipedia stick to 250-character posts on a website that can't be read by anonymous users that will shove ads into your face in between posts? > YouTube Does Wikipedia even have substantial video content to share on Youtube? > Instagram I guess you mean Threads, which is the closest analog to Mastodon and Twitter. I haven't used Threads though so I'll defer to other posters. > Facebook Way too closed and insular. Facebook is focused on smaller groups and smaller social networks. Its like the "login" problem for Twitter but a hundred-times worse.

orwin 3y ago
> Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which requires a log in these days. Now it allows you to read the linked tweet, but not the response/thread, so it's basically useless for stuff that interested me still on Twitter (and tbh, Nitter was 10 times better than Twitter UI for stuff that interest me)
LordDragonfang 3y ago
>What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not? Though it may not seem like it to the highly-technical terminally-online, twitter is still very much the Schelling point[1] for social media communication. People, by default, will look for communications from (and attempt to get the attention of) large entities on twitter (especially during events like the main website going down). This is a huge deal that needs to be accounted for when listing what the platform "has to offer". (Of course, the way things are going, this may change in the future. This is by no means a bad move by the WMF. The future is uncertain, though, and it's just worth being realistic about the value twitter still holds in the present.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. Someone like me, who has always relied upon nitter to get Twitter information (and now that API access is locked off and anonymous browsing is disabled... I'm no longer welcome to Twitter). Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora and thought... "We should copy that model". Closing off access to the website is the literal opposite direction, it will kill Twitter faster than any other decision made thusfar.
  - bboygravity 3y ago
    You do realize that you're one of many people (and large media outlets) in the past year or so who claimed that Twitter will die "very soon"?
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      Elon Musk is rich, he can keep this going as long as he wants. But we all know that Twitter's revenue is down from $5 Billion to maybe $2.5 Billion/year, and they got a $1.3 Billion / year interest payment due every year. It will not be profitable in any reasonable time period. Whether or not Elon Musk will want to keep it when its in such a sorry state, or whether or not Elon will waste even more money on it in vain hopes of saving his investment is whatever. I don't know the timing of things, but these things can take years (especially if Elon puts more of his money up to raise funds). But in any case, the money-losing aspect of Twitter is rather solid and publicly admitted. In general, businesses that constantly lose money (and loses $Billions when they only have low-single-digit Billions in revenue) makes the overall picture rather... obvious? I'm not surprised that many other people agree with me. If that's where you're going with this. Do you have a counterpoint to offer?
      - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
        Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount. It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.
blisterpeanuts 3y ago
I asked an innocent question, and got a lot of lengthy, technical responses. The platforms I mentioned service _billions_ of users. It seems to me regardless of your opinion of "closed" or "insular" or "shoves ads", they're the big players right now and it's pointless to say "Oh, we're idealistic and we don't want ads or outages so we'll go with a feed that no one's heard of". The reality is that the vast majority of Wikipedia users are _not_ tech savvy DIYers who know better than everyone else. They're ordinary people looking stuff up every minute of the day. I would think that Wikipedia, despite its own vast size, could leverage the existing large platforms to achieve its goals (presenting unusual news or interesting facts, as their Twitter feed currently does, or explaining to people how Wikipedia works, how to contribute & edit content, etc.). As for youtube, well, why not video content? It would be great.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  I literally can't access Twitter anymore dude. Its cut off to people like me, who never bothered to make an account. I also don't have a Facebook account, so I can't access anything on Facebook either. There's nothing "technical" about this issue. Its a simple issue of access. I can read the above Mastodon post just fine. I cannot do the same with a hypothetical Twitter post.
  - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what prevents you from creating a Twitter account? Does it enable tracking or some other undesirable side effect?
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      Haven't needed one yet. Twitter's always been open before, and I've never felt the need to chime into discussion over there. 250 characters sucks for discussion. As far as my personal habits go, its easier for me to cut out Twitter forever (if they're going the crappy Quora model) rather than me making an account. What does Twitter offer me? All it is is a bunch of crappy, one-or-two sentence long comments with the occasional person taking screenshots of text whenever they want to bypass the character-limits. (Alternatively, they make X/46 posts to link tweets together so that they can actually form a cohesive point, but such behavior is better suited for a proper blogpost + Twitter link anyway). Discussion is incredibly shallow and the bulk of the "usefulness" is top-level posts that get reposted to other locations on the internet anyway. Discussion is consistently bad and shallow. Why would I ever want to join Twitter? Reading for points was all I ever did, and only when other people posted Twitter links.

orwin 3y ago

> Allowing anonymous users to read posts, vs Twitter which requires a log in these days. Now it allows you to read the linked tweet, but not the response/thread, so it's basically useless for stuff that interested me still on Twitter (and tbh, Nitter was 10 times better than Twitter UI for stuff that interest me)

LordDragonfang 3y ago

>What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not? Though it may not seem like it to the highly-technical terminally-online, twitter is still very much the Schelling point[1] for social media communication. People, by default, will look for communications from (and attempt to get the attention of) large entities on twitter (especially during events like the main website going down). This is a huge deal that needs to be accounted for when listing what the platform "has to offer". (Of course, the way things are going, this may change in the future. This is by no means a bad move by the WMF. The future is uncertain, though, and it's just worth being realistic about the value twitter still holds in the present.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

dragontamer 3y ago
Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. Someone like me, who has always relied upon nitter to get Twitter information (and now that API access is locked off and anonymous browsing is disabled... I'm no longer welcome to Twitter). Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora and thought... "We should copy that model". Closing off access to the website is the literal opposite direction, it will kill Twitter faster than any other decision made thusfar.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  You do realize that you're one of many people (and large media outlets) in the past year or so who claimed that Twitter will die "very soon"?
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Elon Musk is rich, he can keep this going as long as he wants. But we all know that Twitter's revenue is down from $5 Billion to maybe $2.5 Billion/year, and they got a $1.3 Billion / year interest payment due every year. It will not be profitable in any reasonable time period. Whether or not Elon Musk will want to keep it when its in such a sorry state, or whether or not Elon will waste even more money on it in vain hopes of saving his investment is whatever. I don't know the timing of things, but these things can take years (especially if Elon puts more of his money up to raise funds). But in any case, the money-losing aspect of Twitter is rather solid and publicly admitted. In general, businesses that constantly lose money (and loses $Billions when they only have low-single-digit Billions in revenue) makes the overall picture rather... obvious? I'm not surprised that many other people agree with me. If that's where you're going with this. Do you have a counterpoint to offer?
    - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
      Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount. It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.

blisterpeanuts 3y ago

I asked an innocent question, and got a lot of lengthy, technical responses. The platforms I mentioned service _billions_ of users. It seems to me regardless of your opinion of "closed" or "insular" or "shoves ads", they're the big players right now and it's pointless to say "Oh, we're idealistic and we don't want ads or outages so we'll go with a feed that no one's heard of". The reality is that the vast majority of Wikipedia users are _not_ tech savvy DIYers who know better than everyone else. They're ordinary people looking stuff up every minute of the day. I would think that Wikipedia, despite its own vast size, could leverage the existing large platforms to achieve its goals (presenting unusual news or interesting facts, as their Twitter feed currently does, or explaining to people how Wikipedia works, how to contribute & edit content, etc.). As for youtube, well, why not video content? It would be great.

dragontamer 3y ago
I literally can't access Twitter anymore dude. Its cut off to people like me, who never bothered to make an account. I also don't have a Facebook account, so I can't access anything on Facebook either. There's nothing "technical" about this issue. Its a simple issue of access. I can read the above Mastodon post just fine. I cannot do the same with a hypothetical Twitter post.
- blisterpeanuts 3y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what prevents you from creating a Twitter account? Does it enable tracking or some other undesirable side effect?
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Haven't needed one yet. Twitter's always been open before, and I've never felt the need to chime into discussion over there. 250 characters sucks for discussion. As far as my personal habits go, its easier for me to cut out Twitter forever (if they're going the crappy Quora model) rather than me making an account. What does Twitter offer me? All it is is a bunch of crappy, one-or-two sentence long comments with the occasional person taking screenshots of text whenever they want to bypass the character-limits. (Alternatively, they make X/46 posts to link tweets together so that they can actually form a cohesive point, but such behavior is better suited for a proper blogpost + Twitter link anyway). Discussion is incredibly shallow and the bulk of the "usefulness" is top-level posts that get reposted to other locations on the internet anyway. Discussion is consistently bad and shallow. Why would I ever want to join Twitter? Reading for points was all I ever did, and only when other people posted Twitter links.