It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/5/mastodon/

by swyx • 4 years ago

258 419 4 years ago

roenxi• 4 years ago

It is fascinating that people feel justified ignoring the user experience on Twitter when talking about whether to use Twitter.

I don't know what it "really means" when all the motivations, incentives and goals are unpacked, but there are surely some fascinating lessons here to be learned. Previously I've only seen social networks come under pressure when the user experience changed markedly so this seems new.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

Surely no one felt more desperation for Mastodon to operate as an adequate substitute for Twitter than GOP leadership in the aftermath of Trump's Twitter ban and the 2020 election. If those people, the most motivated people in all of time to make Mastodon work, can't make Mastodon work, then I struggle to see how the Musk-haters plan to switch over successfully.

I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - if someone could have done it better than Twitter, then you'd better believe that the GOP would have already been all-in on that platform long before you got there.

throwaway-jim• 4 years ago

Anecdotal - I had a account in one of the largest english mastodon instances for a few years now and have seen multiple waves of twitter exodus into mastodon. Server becomes extra lively for a few weeks and then it returns to normal. None of these people last.

OscarCunningham2• 4 years ago

https://the-federation.info/mastodon

It looks to me like not all of them go away. There was a noticable step up after the spike in May.

mcv2• 4 years ago

But Mastodon works. If Trump's people can't make it work, it's possible that it's not Mastodon that's the problem.

(For the record, I'm not on Mastodon, but I follow a lot of people who are.)

polote• 4 years ago

The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?

TulliusCicero4• 4 years ago

This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.

buf• 4 years ago

People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.

But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.

PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.

zimpenfish• 4 years ago

Technically I use it (although I haven't had a legitimate message on there since ... 2016?) but I'll tell you what I don't use any more - WhatsApp. It's either iMessage, Telegram, or for a (dwindling) handful of annoying people, FB Messenger.

esrh• 4 years ago

Quite a lot of people, i think. The google play app alone has been downloaded over a 100 million times.

All my family and some friends use it as our primary platform for communication.

zaik2• 4 years ago

This was the event that pushed me to go XMPP only for messaging. Pulled in my family and some friends. Internet standards without vendor lock-in is now a requirement for me.

drdebug• 4 years ago

Can you recommend a good free open source android client that compares to signal or whatsapp in terms of functionality and ease of use?

inductive_magic2• 4 years ago

My only active chat in WhatsApp is the one with my father. Are HN-type folks seriously still using chat clients by meta? What?

blowski2• 4 years ago

Same problem. I have multiple groups on WhatsApp that I don’t want to leave, but don’t believe they’ll migrate. Three family groups, close friends, school parents, son’s football club.

A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.

radu_floricica2• 4 years ago

HN-tyke

Not sure if on purpose or just serendipitous misspell.

I use whatsapp because my clients use whatsapp. Which means the team uses whatsapp. Friends are spread on several apps.

missedthecue• 4 years ago

I use WhatsApp. Everyone in Latin America uses it. I don't believe that Zuckerberg is reading my chats, and not concerned enough about E2E encryption to bother evangelizing another app to everyone I know.

paganel• 4 years ago

Are HN-type folks seriously still using chat clients by meta?

Yes, we do, because our friends and acquaintances are not HN users.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

Yes, I only use Facebook Messenger.

cpach• 4 years ago

I use it quite a lot, even with people who doesn’t work in tech. I still use Whatsapp though.

nbk_2000• 4 years ago

All of my family and tech-based co-workers/associates. It's half my chat traffic and growing.

outime• 4 years ago

It's the typical anti-<whatever> hate waves that happen in HN. Outside of this bubble, people don't really lose sleep over it.

Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.

It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.

watwut4• 4 years ago

People I interact with did not claimed they will be moving to signal. The claims of leaving signal were comparatively quite rare actually.

dmak• 4 years ago

Many of my friends and family who moved over to Signal ended up using it permanently.

dnh442• 4 years ago

I just counted all of my signal chats that have had activity since the beginning of September and there’s 34 of them. On WhatsApp that number is 29 and on iMessages(not SMS) it’s 21.

The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.

gnuj32• 4 years ago

Or do what I had done - delete whatsapp and text them saying it’s either text messages or download Signal from here [link]. Everyone I gave a shit about had done that.

tluyben22• 4 years ago

The sad thing is that I jumped to Matrix (with Element) and waited for the influx; 2 people moved. The rest either stayed on WhatsApp or moved to Telegram (to be fair, almost all my contacts, including my mother, actually did move to Telegram from WhatsApp). No signal, no matrix.

Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.

We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.

Kiro2• 4 years ago

What's so great about the Telegram UI?

Arathorn• 4 years ago

This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really

We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.

NayamAmarshe3• 4 years ago

I don't use Signal, it was my first choice. Only 1 friend cared enough to move to it, most just didn't like it.

I then switched to Telegram and haven't used WhatscrApp ever since.

pera3• 4 years ago

All my family and about half of my friends are still using it. In, almost everyone who I know who joined during that time stayed, but most still use WhatsApp and Telegram as well.

FortiDude7• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it.

I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse

TulliusCicero4• 4 years ago

It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.

nathias2• 4 years ago

people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently

OscarCunningham2• 4 years ago

Yeah but you don't have to follow them. I'm sure some terrible people use email, but email is still good.

FortiDude7• 4 years ago

I also don't need to follow toxic people on Twitter, so I really don't know why I would use a badly programmed and infinitely smaller social network

haunter• 4 years ago

Neither on Twitter? I enjoy Twitter, I’m highly selective and I don’t see politics at all

If someone moves to Mastodon because there are so much politics on Twitter then they are in for a surprise

audessuscest2• 4 years ago

same for Twitter...

DoItToMe81• 4 years ago

For Mastodon to 'work' in a way I'd enjoy, it would need a culture that it just does not have, and that has never emerged from any microblogging platform. The Fediverse as a whole is filled with enraged culture warriors, going out of their own way to be upset and exclude others.

I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion. And I know for a fact that the large instances that operate in that way would immediately defederate for wrongthink.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion.

I'm pretty sure that this qualifies as an "island" - one that you would need pretty harsh moderation to maintain too, not unlike HN itself. And of course you'd likely want to defederate from the largest instances, to get away from their toxic attitudes.

firefoxkekw2• 4 years ago

Just wait until people start realizing the privacy problems that Mastodon have unless you make your own instance.

You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers.

Created your account in a random instance? oh well maybe all your messages end in doxbin because the 14 year old who made the instance have access to all your messages.

Tepix6• 4 years ago

That's not been my experience, so far i have seen less toxicity.

amatecha3• 4 years ago

I mean, what instance did you register on? Because I've been using it for a couple years and uhh, the toxicity is nearly non-existent for me. I see some stupid crap once in a while in a response to some highly-followed user, but then I just mute the person's entire instance (if I find that similarly-toxic crap is a common sort of output from there).

Simultaneously, I've had more meaningful communication on Mastodon in the past week than I've had on twitter in the past year. I have just over 200 followers and Mastodon, and nearly 1400 on Twitter.

So yeah, I've thoroughly explored it, and I am definitely investing myself into it -- and have no intention of going back.

I have already stopped checking Twitter for weeks at a time or longer. I only open it to see if I have a message from a friend (since I turn off email notifications for basically everything), or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier.

sshine4• 4 years ago

or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier

It's like something must stink before it goes on Twitter.

amatecha3• 4 years ago

Since I made the above post (two days ago) I now have 243 followers. All people who I'm in contact with on other platforms - I'm not even sure how they found me, but either way. The momentum is honestly accelerating. Sorry, 244 followers - just got another follow request.

glenstein4• 4 years ago

until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters,

Not even close to my experience as a Mastodon user and I've been on it for years. I guess this shows the limited predictive value of any single individuals experiences.

TulliusCicero4• 4 years ago

I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon.

I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.

Isinlor• 4 years ago

Even email is not really that decentralized - it's mostly Google + Microsoft.

ErikCorry2• 4 years ago

The reason why this happened is instructive. Fighting spam is really hard and the best way to do it is to be good at machine learning and to have access to a good percentage of worldwide mail, unencrypted.

Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.

inglor_cz6• 4 years ago

Not everywhere is America. Most institutions in European countries run their own e-mail servers and deliverability is OK.

gonehome4• 4 years ago

Email isn’t really an exception - it’s largely another federated system failure with most users on one centralized system (gmail).

You can’t even run an email server yourself without getting blacklisted these days. I doubt Twitter is going anywhere, I’m not even sure it can be replaced, it’s an unusual niche product of its time and network.

Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems that lead to centralization either so most users end up on one server. Back to the same issues, except the experience is also worse than a competent centralized system.

To solve this for real you have to solve spam (need IDs), there can’t be a distinction between a user account and a server, and the server needs to be trivial to run and manage with automatic updates.

Nasreddin_Hodja2• 4 years ago

Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems

Mastodon doesn't but standalone activitypub compatible blog does.

zekrioca• 4 years ago

I respect their line of though, only because it is their own opinion. I know projects such as Orca and give real praise to all of them.

But to me, leaving Twitter because Musk fired the accessibility team does not seem like the best argument for leaving. If anything, it just sped up what was already happening (internally) even before Musk bought Twitter.

Accessibility becomes ‘real’ (though not perfect) thanks to a wide range of technologies that work together and respect certain patterns, not just due to the UI interface. This, assuming Twitter represents a big chunk of the real world, which I doubt, though it reaches a great proportion of it.

However, what is it to say that Twitrer’s accessibility will get worse, or that Musk will not hire even more capable people later? This is why I think the person left Twitter not only because Musk fired the accessibility team, but also because Twitter itself does not represent anymore the philosophy they believe in.

tomcam3• 4 years ago

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk.

I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably.

I know nothing about the accessibility team there, but for all we know he has a better team lined up. The author and I both agree the reverse may also be true. Could be they get replaced by something worse. To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.

almost2• 4 years ago

I think you might in fact be a fanboy. Which is fine, fanboy all you like if it makes you happy!

Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with.

Maybe.

tomcam3• 4 years ago

A most interesting comment. Lots of words, no falsifiable assertions. Just a steaming pile of innuendo.

beachy• 4 years ago

To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.

Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth.

In fact this approach might even attract some more hungry and gung ho warrior types who are attracted by musk's style, and could be better suited to bringing about his vision than the existing team.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

That sounds very good as an approach for building a product, but for managing a communication platform, I’m not sure. The problem is that there is a kind of overgeneralized understanding (built out of prejudice, imho) that moderators are a bunch of left-wing power-thirsty bigots. However, moderating is a hard problem, one that has not (and never will have) any well-defined final solution. There will always be variance and noise in moderation, and people will always complain; it’s a trade-off.

blowski2• 4 years ago

My impression is that he has a unique way of building “Brand Elon” which seems to work because of the times we’re in.

He enters like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything regardless of quality or value. He then hands over day-to-day running to a team of competent people to build it back up as something new, but leveraging the original brand. Elon Musk then gets the credit because of legendary stories of all his hard work.

His social media presence causes competent people to underestimate him as a joke, not realising he’s playing by different rules to most businesses. On the other hand, it causes his personal army of fanboys to overestimate him as some kind of business genius. Really, he’s just a social media celebrity in an age when people give huge financial value to that status.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

I personally wouldn’t underestimate his courage and hard work as an engineering leader; he did reach places that were very hard to reach with this approach. The problem is that social media is not (solely) an engineering problem.

andsoitis4• 4 years ago

Interesting take. I guess the upcoming Walter Isaacson biography on Musk will reveal.

croes7• 4 years ago

But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails.

This works in small starting companies not in a Behemoth like Twitter.

And I doubt he fixed so much. The traffic problems he claimed to fix with the Boring Company are nowhere near fixed, same with FSD.

Thlom• 4 years ago

From an engineering standpoint traffic is really easy to fix. Just build more roads with as much “flow” as possible (tunnels). But it doesn’t work because traffic is a human problem, not a technical problem.

tomcam3• 4 years ago

And I doubt he fixed so much.

Do you think manufacturing cars and rockets happens without a lot of course correction, pun intended?

GrumpyNl• 4 years ago

I think, they are happy will all the attention https://www.mastodon.com/

Tepix6• 4 years ago

:-)

For those who are wondering, the page you are looking for is at https://joinmastodon.org/

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

I liked Mastodon when it first came out. But nowadays it’s seems to be more like a Left wing version of Gettr. Wouldn’t use either.

saboot• 4 years ago

We're more polarized now compared to when mastodon, and twitter, were first introduced. I'm convinced making a twitter clone is going to be impossible as most people are seeking to sort themselves into ideological buckets at the outset.

est2• 4 years ago

You mean Mastodon.social the instance not Mastodon the protocol right?

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

The dominant Mastodon instances all seem to align ideologically and ban any node that deviates from that ideology.

marceloabsousa• 4 years ago

I find mastodon a bit hard to navigate between the servers and how to engage in a particular server.

tga• 4 years ago

I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out

So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?

Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

MrDresden2• 4 years ago

There is a very strong signal being given right now about the trend Twitter will be on for a long time.

szundi2• 4 years ago

Musk talking for days is not a signal yet

polishdude202• 4 years ago

It's easier to rally against some foe when that foe is one person. When it's a bunch of shareholders, the hatred is diluted.

stefs2• 4 years ago

that's exactly elons problem now. every unpopular action will be pinned on him personally.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

jdub6• 4 years ago

Twitter was already under a cloud while Musk was grandstanding his acquisition stunt. Once he was forced to go through with it, his immediate actions and communication confirmed how much chaos we (users, staff, customers) were in for. Then after one week, awfully mishandled mass layoffs, demands to massively reduce infrastructure costs, etc.

Nothing's changed? Sure it has. Trust and confidence are hard to build, easy to torch.

One week.

pastacacioepepe• 4 years ago

Chaos? I haven't been subject to any on Twitter lately. Actually it seems it finally stopped forcing me to signup? That alone is a great improvement.

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

“How much chaos”

The only “chaos” I’m aware of is the /b/ N**r spam invasion that occurred one afternoon? The rest seems to just be Musk doing Musk and manufactured outrage (as I really do not understand how $8/mo is breaking the bank for popular celebrities and brands) over charging for validation.

Anyway, down with Habbo Hotel.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Twitter used to be run by progressives, so there was a modicum of "we are, or should be, doing good things here".

Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to hollow out its progressive cultural core.

luckylion5• 4 years ago

"I was happy to do free work for that billionaire, he's part of the same ideology I've been born into. But now that it's this other billionaire, I cannot continue."

dan-robertson• 4 years ago

What do you think the shareholders of a typical public company look like?

I think you’ll find a small percentage owned by rich private individuals/family offices, some owned by private investors like insurance companies, and the rest held by pension funds or mutual funds which look like big shares on paper but don’t really exercise control and correspond to lots of tiny holdings by people who range from poor to ordinary to a small number of quite wealthy people.

That is, I think the usual answer to “who are the shareholders of this public company?” is “ordinary people through their pensions or investment accounts, skewing a little bit older and richer”. Some companies have a relatively large stake owned by some private person or fund, and others have a big share owned by their original founders or their families, but in that case those people would be named instead of just saying ‘shareholders’.

lyschoening• 4 years ago

It's one thing to use a medium that is being abused by malicious actors; it's another to be on a medium that suffers constant drama fostered by an owner and CEO who spends his days vocalizing an imprecise understanding of civil rights and his contempt for his customers.

gonzo41• 4 years ago

I think it;s kind of screaming into the void to call people out on their inconsistent emotional decisions when that's all musk seems to do these days. Better to stand back and accept this is just humanity and enjoy the show.

kramerger• 4 years ago

He also gave you a specific non-political reason (accessibility) in the sentences right above what you quoted.

briantakita8• 4 years ago

After watching some interviews with some Twitter employees, I suspect that many in the accessibility team were very political & their politics influenced their decisions.

mcv2• 4 years ago

I've never been a fan of Twitter or any of the closed, private social networks, and Musk's takeover doesn't change anything about that, but I absolutely welcome the fact that many people are finally inspired to look at some alternatives.

They didn't do it before, but they're doing it now, and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. Even if Musk hasn't ruined Twitter yet, there's nothing wrong with him being the catalyst for this improvement.

hristov3• 4 years ago

The main difference isn't really who but how much money. One uses a lot of goods and services in ordinary life. Generally speaking one hopes that the provider of these goods and services uses their resources efficiently to provide them for a reasonable price including reasonable profit.

When a leveraged buyout happens (this is true for most leveraged buyouts) a large cost is put into the business that wasn't there before. And this cost does nothing to help make the good or service better. It merely exists so that person B may own the business instead of person A.

So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.

By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.

This is true of most leveraged buyouts and whenever a leveraged buyout happens to a company you use, it is always a good idea to look for alternatives. The official response of the leveraged buyout industry is that the new management is just so much better that it is worth to saddle the company with all this debt and all these costs to just change the management. And the customer will benefit from the better management.

It is yet to be seen whether Musk is such a great manager that he can run a social media company so much better than everybody else to make it worth taking the enormous debt, and do that without having any experience running a social media company and while running two (oh wait - three ) other companies simultaneously.

But generally speaking this is not the case. It might have been the case during the beginning of the LBO industry when there was some truly entrenched bad management in some US companies but not anymore. It is possible to change management of a publicly traded company without doing an LBO, and nowadays stockholders tend to be good about holding their managers to high standards.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

I’m afraid I don’t understand how Twitter can end up with debt from Musk buying it. How does that even work?

Twitter the company takes out a huge loan to pay the current shareholders a fortune (which is decided by those same shareholders, no conflict of interest there at all). But who the fuck would give them a loan like that (like you say, just to have Musk at the helm)?

andsoitis4• 4 years ago

So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.

It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.

I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).

parkingrift2• 4 years ago

Twitter was losing $360 million per year before Musk. These layoffs were going to happen whether Musk bought the company, or not.

simonw4• 4 years ago

Thank you, this comment is spot on.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

Accessibility is supposed to change and improve. It's fair to expect that to halt when the entire staff has been fired.

twohaibei• 4 years ago

In my opinion it's the opposite. The smaller the ship, the sharper the turn.

mritchie712• 4 years ago

isn't Accessibility one of those things that's "everyones job"? Why would you have a separate team working on it?

Not kicking up shit, genuinely curious why you'd have a separate team work on that, seems like something every engineer needs to know (at least on the frontend) for an app like Twitter.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

Twitter also used to be owned by average people. Like most publicly traded companies. So no, it's not from "many rich shareholders" to Elon. It's more nuanced than you're making it out to be.

briantakita8• 4 years ago

Twitter also used to be owned by average people

Then all public companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, & Northrop Grumman are owned with the money of "average people"...largely managed by fund advisors.

aizen89• 4 years ago

All those whiners that go to other platforms will be back. History shows that emotions take over, but then the person calms down and returns to the usual services, platforms, etc. How many whiners and alarmists were there when Microsoft acquired Github :) so what? everyone is back and happy.

asplake• 4 years ago

Question: If you run a Mastadon server, what legal liabilities does that expose you to? How might that vary by country?

BenGosub• 4 years ago

I don't see a valid reason to leave Twitter in his post. IMO laying off the accessibility team isn't a reason to leave. But, each to his own opinion.

The layoffs will have effect, but it doesn't have to be a bad one. Once they get leaner, they might have a clearer vison and know where to expand.

ealexhudson• 4 years ago

If Musk wants twitter to be the town square for the world, that town square needs to be accessible for all.

Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with your feet?

flyinglizard• 4 years ago

You don’t need a whole accessibility team for a product to be accessible. It can be handled by raising the awareness of other product teams plus some central auditing, for example (Twitter after all is a pretty basic product, UX wise).

exodust4• 4 years ago

You make it sound like the role of an accessibility team is to be the valve that prevents the floodgates of inaccessibility opening. That's one hell of an expensive valve.

Or that whatever the team has built up until this point, won't function unless they're in the office?

"incredibly valid"

At this point, many opinions about Twitter are ranging from invalid to pathetic whinging. Twitter is still Twitter, and not everybody there got fired. I think it will get better after dust settles.

luckylion5• 4 years ago

Have you ever actually looked at their website? You need to use a 3rd-party service like nitter to make twitter accessible.

It really feels like people have never used twitter and are reading the news and go "aha! they've canned the accessibility team! they're trying to exclude the blind!"

larsonnn• 4 years ago

His own opinion is a valid reason.

It’s also a valid reason to leave because space captain Musk is in control.

xvilo• 4 years ago

If you're not setting up your own instance, make sure to help fund the instance you are using. Maybe it's on the about page or DM/Mention the server admin! They can tell you where to donate

joeevans1000• 4 years ago

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.

vorticalbox• 4 years ago

there could be a number of reasons other than "Elon doesn't care about xyz"

other members of the dev team can/are already doing this

Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job

Maybe he has his own team to replace it

We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.

mechanical_bear2• 4 years ago

Jumping ship because of X at this point is just ideological flexing, we have zero indication how this will play out yet.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

we have zero knowledge

So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.

NZ_Matt• 4 years ago

One could argue the accessibility team wasn't doing a very good job if Mastodon have done it better without a dedicated team.

An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team

szundi2• 4 years ago

This. Even before Musk arrived there was a lot of debate about Twitter being overstaffed and departments are not producing any value at all. I don't know more or the details, but this is what sometimes I was reading years back.

LEDThereBeLight2• 4 years ago

The UX can be better and the accessibility worse.

extra884• 4 years ago

No one is moving from Twitter to Mastodon because the latter is more accessible to people with disabilities. It's not, definitely not the main Mastodon UI (vs. 3rd party UIs).

I think the article mentioned the dismissal of Twitter's whole accessibility team as a sign that Musk has no respect or understanding of what the fired people did or why it was important. Ditto for other dismissed teams, like those researching machine learning ethics.

An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team

I used to think that, I used to think that understanding accessibility was a part of doing a good job on front-end so people who care about doing a good job will address it. Now I think formal and informal education about is so bad about not including accessibility concerns as a part of creating interfaces that there's too much for people to unlearn. Everyone has some responsibility for the accessibility of the final product but few will give it enough time or consideration.

Additionally, if an application is big enough to have a team working on it, that means there are some specialists in a variety of areas. With sufficient team size, that should include accessibility specialists who know what the right thing to do is or conduct research to make a decision about what the right thing to do is.

empiko• 4 years ago

Did eliminating the accessibility team made the twitter worse for blind people somehow? Was twitter getting better for blind people over the years?

thinkingemote2• 4 years ago

In terms of web accessibility, it had improved the alt text / meta descriptions, etc of external websites through the "cards" when you share a page on twitter, over the years, encouraging web developers to put them in their own websites. (same with faceboook etc)

exodust4• 4 years ago

What would a team of "accessibility engineers" occupy themselves with every day anyway? Did they build features that will fail unless someone is there to handhold?

"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....

Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.

As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...

So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.

thinkingemote2• 4 years ago

It most likely needs a smaller team than they used to have, but some dedicated employees are necessary.

Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases complexity. It needs a few more people than just ticking boxes or building workarounds or ramps after a feature has been developed.

Additionally, Twitter also takes in external links from webpages and so can influence the meta markup of these via their API / open graph / social sharing. So it works on the wider web accessibility standards too.

I imagine bootstrap and all the other libraries twitter publishes are also part of the teams remit.

cokeandpepsi2• 4 years ago

I'd imagine there's some amount of work, I doubt it was a huge team but they probably needed a few people to focus on the various platforms and regions their apps support

it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions

oneeyedpigeon6• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think twitter still doesn't work at all without JavaScript functioning. That's not an easy fix after the event and sorting that alone could probably keep an accessibility team busy for the foreseeable future.

acdha5• 4 years ago

Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do

Okay, now see how well that wheelchair user can use the elevators and bathrooms. Do you have braille signs everywhere someone goes? Does your building have ambient features which are difficult for people with sensory processing issues? Are there controls which are hard for people with limited motor skills or only one hand? Did the market change and now people are using motorized wheelchairs which are larger than you designed the ramp for?

Accessibility is like performance or cost optimization: there isn’t a point where you’re done and everything you do affects it. An accessibility team should be working with the developers closely to make sure that their changes don’t impact accessibility and working with users to identify where they could be doing better. Some of that requires fairly deep skills (e.g. screen reader proficiency) where it makes sense to have dedicated specialists to help everyone else understand challenges and evaluate trade offs.

tylersmith• 4 years ago

How big is the Mastodon accessibility team? I'm having a hard time finding any information about it.

recuter• 4 years ago

The purge is of the specific individuals of that team not the concept of accessibility itself. Same goes with all these changes, it is a reboot.

If anything, you may end up with a higher quality of accessibility (and moderation, spam filtering, whatever) down the line. Or not. Who knows. The current iteration of the company has ossified - not making changes is arguably against the long term interests of your blind father.

Nican• 4 years ago

Mastodon may not have the better interface, or the better community, or it may not yet be the most intuitive to use.

But I want to invest my time to help Mastodon reach the critical mass it needs. I would love to have a social network not controlled by capitalistic needs, and let open source developers help evolve it.

nudpiedo• 4 years ago

I find Mastodon doomed by design, understanding design as a whole, not just software. It looks like the technical right choice, including all the bells and whistles: decentralized, own your instance, etc.

However twitter's issue, and most of social network issues are the human factor. And by that design Mastodon is not inmune to any of it, it even encourages larger echo chambers, and reduces audiences.

I would say, very tech savvy people used their hammer to something they believed to be a nail.

stanislavb• 4 years ago

I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim.

This

quixoticelixer-• 4 years ago

Who did you think you were working for before?

schipplock• 4 years ago

   I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline!

I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithmic timeline "easier" to consume, I don't have to invest time to find the perfect user to follow, I don't have to fiddle with lists etc..., just open Twitter and consume).

(btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))

watwut4• 4 years ago

I think that it is case of preference or just different use case. If you follow few people that tweet sparsly, you want chronological. If you follow many people who tweet a lot, you want algoritmus.

xmprt• 4 years ago

That just sounds like algorithmic with extra steps. An algorithm can take information about your follows tweeting patterns and adjust the amount of chronological timeline you see.

swyx• 4 years ago

stated vs revealed preference. many people say they want chron, but actually end up using algo a lot more (figures)

oneeyedpigeon6• 4 years ago

When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.

nells• 4 years ago

Algorithmic makes no sense to me. Imagine being in a group chat with friends where an algorithm decides which messages you can see and the way the messages are sorted. It would be absolute nonsense.

nirui• 4 years ago

I must've set it up wrong. My Twitter home page is filled with posts that I don't care from people I don't watch, Twitter repeatedly recycles and then pushes those content to me because it thinks I'll be interested. How arrogant.

In my case, Twitter already has an algorithmic timeline.

Now I read my daily news update from few subscribed newsletters, websites as well as r/worldnews. These are far better sources of information than Twitter.

Don't get me wrong, other platforms that I enjoy such as YouTube and Reddit also has algorithmic timeline, but I've never seen such bad implementation before straight to the level of annoying and begging for uninstall.

oneeyedpigeon6• 4 years ago

It sounds like you'd be better off with the chronological view or just following more accounts.

tescocles2• 4 years ago

I never disliked the algorithmic timeline, I just disliked the fact Twitter did everything it could to get you use it, including switching back to it after a while without telling you. The second I notice a platform not only being manipulative, but thinking I'm stupid and wouldn't notice, I start to resent it.

oefrha• 4 years ago

You just discovered that happy people aren’t complaining on social media. 99% of people can be perfectly happy with something that’s constantly dumped upon.

Kye3• 4 years ago

You see this with chain restaurant reviews. A great one can have endless bad reviews on Google, Yelp, etc because by and large only people who had trouble bother to review.

But sometimes the reviews are accurate. Sometimes the critics and audience concur on a movie. Sometimes the people yelling on Twitter really are in the fire they're yelling about.

davedx• 4 years ago

I constantly switch Twitter back to chronological and immediately notice when it pushes me onto the algo timeline.

Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me.

I think the only site I use where algos actually add value is YouTube, after many years of sending people down weird/wrong paths their algos actually seem pretty solid now in terms of suggesting content relevant to me.

Andrew_nenakhov10• 4 years ago

After Youtube stopped displaying the number of downvotes for a video, algos is the only thing left that you can rely upon to understand if the video is good. But I'd prefer being able to rely on downvotes number.

the_mitsuhiko• 4 years ago

I haven’t been pushed to algorithmic timeline in months. I think they are just sticky user choices now.

shannifin• 4 years ago

The availability of the chronological timeline is what's kept me on Twitter; hate the algorithmic. If they ever do away with the chronological, I'm gone.

buckaroot• 4 years ago

If Twitter and Mastodon were taken permanently offline tomorrow, would this be of any significant loss to the world?

When I see people like the author getting so publicly and verbosely upset about a social media website, I wonder about their perspective. There are surely much more important things going on than preening to the crowds.

mongol2• 4 years ago

It is not what would happen if Twitter disappears that is worrying, it is what it might become if steward unwisely.

oneeyedpigeon6• 4 years ago

There are more important things happening on twitter than preening to the crowds. It's easy to dismiss if you don't find utility in it yourself, of course, but many people clearly find it very useful. Twitter is a very simple tool - it's what you make of it. That can be preening or organising revolutions or anything in between.

jbreckmckye2• 4 years ago

Twitter is a great place to read work by scientists, researchers and other academics. There aren’t many places to tap into that world if you’re not already working in academia.

Tepix6• 4 years ago

Is there a stable mature lightweight mastodon/PubSub server (ideally with sqlite storage) that's easy to maintain to serve a handful of users?

ghostDancer• 4 years ago

Can't give opinion as I don't use it but you can take a look at https://masto.host/

Tepix6• 4 years ago

I meant software, not service

kmlx• 4 years ago

if there’s just a handful of users can’t you just share a note from the notes app, or is that too personal?

Tepix6• 4 years ago

I don't see how a note from the notes app will serve as a maston server.

panic• 4 years ago

It's exciting to see a truly open social network getting so many users.

mrweasel2• 4 years ago

Is it really getting all that many users. If so: What kind of users?

From Musks perspective Twitter isn't about the HN crowd or personal interaction between lower and middle- class people. It's all about the real influencers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, C-suite class, investors, millionairs and billionairs. Sure if you follow these people, boosting their follower count and their ego, you're welcome on the platform, but you're only there to read the messages from the upper echelons of society. If your yearly income isn't measured in the millions of dollars you're not really part of Elon Musks vision for Twitter.

pera3• 4 years ago

Academics, scientists, and engineers. Almost every non-institutional account I used to follow in Twitter is now actively using Mastodon. The only "category" of people I haven't seen migrating yet is independent journalists, and I can understand why.

rambambram• 4 years ago

Uh, I don't know about Mastodon, can't judge about it, but I'm following your website's own RSS feed. Website + RSS feed does the job for me. And as long as you keep publishing a feed, I'm able to read your content just fine.

The web is already 'social media'!

Edit: oh, by the way, my homegrown newsreader only shows the first x amount of characters, so I always have to click through to your website if I want to read more.

fazfq• 4 years ago

Twitter has always been a cesspool of hate but it may be worth signing up if people who bitch about Musk owning it keep leaving.

mechanical_bear2• 4 years ago

The fake consternation and lament over Twitter has been tiring. Really, most of the world does not care.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

Please don’t get me wrong; I also don’t care (never used Twitter) and this is an honest question. Why does it bother you that people are consternated? I mean, Twitter is one of the leading communication platforms internationally, and LOTS of people use it intensively both for business and personal stuff. I guess it’s understandable that it affects them deeply. It is at minimal weird that half the staff has been fired in less than a week. If you ask me it sounds much more like a hit job than an honest attempt to improve it.

monstertank• 4 years ago

And I'm finally going to try Twitter!

angrycontrarian• 4 years ago

Same, just signed up for a paid account today. Looks like the full $8 blue checkmark experience hasn't been released yet though.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I have to say that I’m too removed from this to care (I guess decisions like this happen invisibly in every company all the time). However, the true intentions about this acquisition do make me curious. Does he really think that patting the backs of a handful of conservative extremists will make Twitter better? (An already global leader in its segment?) can anyone give me a concrete analysis of the scenario? As far as I know there were a couple of attempts to create such “free” networks and it never really goes anywhere. I really appreciate his work as an engineer but I have a feeling he overreached here.

cokeandpepsi2• 4 years ago

Who know's Musk is one of the wealthiest people on the planet who tends to take big gambles he uses twitter a lot and probably sees value though that

it's like the more modern version of buying a vanity newspaper and looks to be following the same pattern

ksidudwbw• 4 years ago

Stop whining jesus

ChildOfChaos3• 4 years ago

'Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.'

Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them.

This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for example the post says that 'the entire accessibility team' has been laid off then points to a tweet about someone saying there team had been laid off, firstly there is no indication that this is the 'entire accessibility team', just that the team this person was head off, secondly, the author has no idea about twitters accessibility plans in the future, for example, accessibility could have been given an even higher priority and given to a more competent team. Now i know this is likely not the case, but the real thing, is basically we don't know.

To make a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of assumptions is crazy.

sshine4• 4 years ago

It certainly is a knee-jerk- reaction.

tl;dr: "I don't like Elon Musk either!"

Nothing but virtue signalling.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

Not liking Elon Musk and moving to a different platform is taking an action. Taking action is the opposite of virtue signaling.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

basically we don't know

Yes, it has been grossly mismanaged from a PR perspective. Expecting no fallout from that is naive.

concordDance5• 4 years ago

Honestly there was no way to get good PR out of this. Musk is disliked by those who form "public opinion" and he's been threatening to make their home (twitter) no longer their home (by making it no longer reflect progressive values).

There is no universe where Musk takes over twitter and gets good PR.

kcplate8• 4 years ago

crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines

This has been my perspective. I’m a neutral observer in regards to Musk the person. Obviously some folks have a pretty strong feelings towards him for a lot of reasons, but watching the knee-jerk reactions to every rumor and all the assumption analysis that follows on HN is entertaining.

I am not neutral on Twitter though, I think it’s a bloody cancer. If it implodes or improves under Musk. I am good either way. I can’t see it getting any worse.

simonw4• 4 years ago

I've been using Twitter for 16 years. I've known many people who work or have worked for the company - heck, they tried to hire me when the company was less than 20 people.

I have a friend who worked ON that accessibility team who I have known since university.

I know a fair amount about Twitter.

timeon• 4 years ago

Since when were they?
> particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.

Since you have ignored those sentences - you had to make "crazy" assumptions.

ChildOfChaos3• 4 years ago

I didn't ignore those words, I directly addressed them in my comment.

tescocles2• 4 years ago

Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.

cryptoaquinas• 4 years ago

A year ago nobody would have thought free speech/open platforms are going to be adopted by censorship-loving left wingers.

This is actually excellent for open platform technology improvement, as most engineers tend to lean left.

dmix8• 4 years ago

Like everything on social media the most important thing is not the rationale or outcome of actions, it's first and foremost about virtue signalling.

Although it's always a good thing when outrage drives people to open-source and federated platforms.

petesergeant• 4 years ago

FFS. Fine. Dear Lazy Web:

* I am happy to pay for an account on an instance and have to never worry about that side of it again: where should I sign up?

* What’s the quickest way to import people I follow on Twitter?

* What’s the least annoying iOS app?

Andrew_nenakhov10• 4 years ago

I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'.

Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.

cloutchaser• 4 years ago

Neil young is back on Spotify. Nuff said.

oktoberpaard• 4 years ago

Not in my country, except for songs that appear on albums that are outside of his control. I do expect him to eventually return, though.

atoav2• 4 years ago

For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform.

If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there.

I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.

newaccount2021• 4 years ago

For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform.

Maybe you should invest your time productively instead

jbreckmckye2• 4 years ago

This is how I feel as well: I’ve been pretty ambivalent about twitter for a while (seems like a good machine for getting into arguments online), but network effects have kept me on it. That network effect might be now be breaking.

Kye3• 4 years ago

It's the Trust Thermocline: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433

monsecchris• 4 years ago

Over the last week I've favourited every single person claiming to leave Twitter. In a few weeks I intend to do some analysis and see how many stop posting. So far the answer is none out of 200, but it's early days.

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

You're not even approaching what would be considered a scientific and somewhat useful study.

You can move away from a platform without a complete stop. I've seen people who used to post on Facebook on a daily basis claim to leave, and then they use the platform less and less until you rarely see them. What also matters is the nature of their posts. If people who used to put effort into thoughtful engaging posts start to post trivial and unengaging content, that has a similar effect to no longer using the platform.

If this happens in large numbers, it would of course impact your advertising revenue.

hristov3• 4 years ago

Yeah, I like living in a democracy, so I appreciated when twitter silenced certain people that tried to use it to violently overthrow my democratically elected government. Donald Trump tweeted all the time, many of his tweets were of a very different political opinion than mine (when they were coherent), yet he was not silenced. Not until he tried to violently overthrow the US government.

Andrew_nenakhov10• 4 years ago

This is a brilliant example of a selective memory. What you have forgotten is that long before Jan6, Twitter blocked retweets of Trump's tweets, attached various warnings to his tweets, was selectively 'fact-checking' him, how that notebook story was banned on Twitter right before the elections. If that is not silencing, then what is? Can you name some other person on Twitter that had undergone a similar treatment?

concordDance5• 4 years ago

Not until he tried to violently overthrow the US government.

Try rereading twitters ban post: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

He got banned for tweets that require reading with an extra crinkly tin foil hat on to get "tried to overthrow the government".

tchaffee48• 4 years ago

Or the simpler answer that doesn't fit your narrative is that lots of folks don't like Musk and his actions and his approach to running businesses. Lots of people find Musk repulsive. It shouldn't be a surprise that those people want to leave.

dools2• 4 years ago

That’s why I deleted my account. Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia are hardcore neofeudalist libertarians, a movement that has gradually infected more and more of the tech world.

pie_flavor2• 4 years ago

This simpler answer never seems to be the correct one, every[0] single[1] time[2]. It's much easier to say you're going to move than move.

[0] https://www.mattmaldre.com/2017/08/02/people-leave-reddit/

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/trump-fans-leave-twitter-after...

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/facebook-ou...

kcplate8• 4 years ago

Wanting to leave on principle, but unable to leave because of your own impulses and needs are two different things. Personally I bet most folks come back after the dust settles, and I bet Musk is banking on that.

Case in point: I still see the “coexist” and lefty bumper stickers in the cars ahead of me at chick-fil-a drive through line pretty regularly. Everybody wants to protest and boycott products until you have that itch that only a spicy chicken biscuit can scratch.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

You could be right, assuming he manages to indeed keep the platform running smoothly. I think that will be the most important factor. And while I honestly can’t be bothered to care whether people are banned or not from Twitter, it just sounds to me like the idea that less moderation is always good could be an oversimplification of the problem. If I am not mistaken there were attempts to create “free speech” platforms that never went anywhere. Also, from the point of view of the survival of the platform itself, banning a few people to please many more others seems to be more reasonable than taking some kind of ideological stand (in one way or another). So, the question is, can the platform survive (smoothly) supported mainly by the happy attitude of so-called freedom fighters?

pera3• 4 years ago

It seems that your prediction was too bold: he has accumulated ~1100 followers so far

maelito• 4 years ago

this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers

Mastodon is way more active than what you pretend, at least in France. Some 40k influencers already have thousands of followers on mastodon.

Andrew_nenakhov10• 4 years ago

As someone who has maintained a personal mastodon instance since ~2017, I'm quite sceptical of your hopes that this sudden influx of users will remain active.

qwertox• 4 years ago

but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team

How accessible is Twitter's website? As a normal user I already find it to be an utter chaos, a horrible UX, which is why I rarely go there.

Are the apps better? Doesn't some third party offer a more accessible interface?

mrweasel2• 4 years ago

Maybe they were fired because the Twitter UI is so horrible? Given that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, I doubt accessibility was ever that high on Twitters list of priorities. If the team has not managed to show any real work or progress, I can see some one like Musk just dropping the entire team.

But yes, it would be great to hear from people who depend on accessibility feature: How good is Twitter really.

4dregress• 4 years ago

Why do people care so much about twitter?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 4 years ago

Is it possible to create a program that would create timelines/filters for me individually and locally, based on my clicks maybe, not sending anything to the net? Like a personal AI.

valeg• 4 years ago

I feel like there is a massive branding issue with Masto. Derives its name from an extinct animal (often misspelled or confused with the band), toots sound funny. Twitter got this right from the get-go.

pie_flavor2• 4 years ago

I find it comedic whenever someone talks about how they're a truly longtime user of Twitter but they can't stomach staying on now that the owner doesn't share their values. Elon's values are extraordinarily similar to Jack's! If you were going to leave when someone's values diverged hard, you'd have left when Parag joined, because his did, and that's the entire reason Elon bought it! In reality it is some combination of personal association and public persona. And these are not the worst reasons to refuse to use a service, most of us have been guilty of the same at one point or another, but at least admit that that's why.

hrbf2• 4 years ago

Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance.

The alternatives appear to be

* paying around $9/month for a managed instance

* hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service)

* signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest)

None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service.

From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances).

For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.

est2• 4 years ago

I keep saying that ActivityPub should be a static protocol to begin with, then people can host their profile on some Github Page easily. Effectively zero cost.

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

Mastodon doesn't require you to host an instance. You can sign up for an account on any instance of your choosing.

Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent.

The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers.

Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers.

Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route.

There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish.

I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions.

Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.

hrbf2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the details, of which most I already figured. However, your response does not address the issue of solving content disappearing once the instance goes away. It doesn’t matter if the network itself is alive when the content itself can disappear at any time without warning.

If I am correct in this assessment, I can really see no upside besides minutiae regarding an illusion of control to established social media. In this regard, a website with a comment section would serve much the same purpose.

low_tech_love9• 4 years ago

Judging by the top responses to the accessibility guy’s tweet, things look pretty grim right now. I never used Twitter so I don’t know if it’s always like that, but those people are really angry and negative. That is kinda depressing.

concordDance5• 4 years ago

Top responses to his tweet are a very extreme sampling of twitter users. It'd be like going to a D&D convention in New York and judging Americans by what people say there.

mabcat2• 4 years ago

It looks like the Mastodon instance host Simon is using, masto.host, closed for new sign-ups 8 hours ago. Is there another recommended alternative? I don't think I have the energy to maintain a self-hosted Mastodon instance. I sure haven't missed running a mail server...

Nasreddin_Hodja2• 4 years ago

Biggest instances are https://mastodon.online and https://mastodon.social but there are a lot of it https://joinmastodon.org/en/servers

Also Mastodon isn't the only platform, there are some other activitypub compatible engines which are able to federate with Mastodon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://fediverse.party/

mabcat2• 4 years ago

Thank you, against my better judgement I've set up a self-hosted Pleroma

kelsolaar• 4 years ago

Toot! is a great (paying) iOS client, it can have multiple servers compared to the official Mastodon application: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toot/id1229021451

concordDance5• 4 years ago

It's great that more people are moving to the properly federated FOSS alternative! Even if they are doing so due to unreal fears.

neals• 4 years ago

Mastodon is too difficult to understand for the average user. I got on some page where I needed to select a room of some sort, most of it was in german and I couldn't find Trump or anybody I wanted to listen to. Is anybody actually believing that there will be some mass migration?

glenstein4• 4 years ago

There's been numerous mass migrations to Mastodon since 2016, from different individual communities. The furry community, lgbtq+ individuals who wanted to leave twitter, comic book artists who overlapped with the two prior groups, political news junkies from India, and every year there's a couple more.

I don't think that all of Twitter is going to migrate but just some slice of the user base, just like all the previous times.

parkingrift2• 4 years ago

Loved Twitter under Jack Dorsey. Hates Twitter under Elon Musk.

Jack Dorsey rolled in his equity. Do you really think these people are different??

Anyway, see you on Twitter in a few weeks.

simonw4• 4 years ago

Looks like this blew up on Hacker News right after I went to sleep.

I would encourage people to read the first paragraph more carefully:

There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation.

That's not me saying "I quit because he fired the accessibility team".

That's me saying "There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down" as a shorthand for how this has been one of the worst-handled layoffs I've ever heard of in my industry - see https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552

And then "For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation." - I'm using the accessibility team here as a single representative instance of how I feel about the decisions Elon has been making, but I disagree with practically every other decision he has made in the last 8 days.

I'm sorry (OK, not sorry) I didn't write a detailed essay about the many reasons I was leaving Twitter.

The goal for my post was to talk about the things I was liking about Mastodon so far.

I'd also encourage people to read about the "trust thermocline", which really helped me understand why, at least for me, things were going downhill far too quickly to continue wanting to ride it out and see what happens: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433

gnuj32• 4 years ago

I dont really understand how Mastodon works. I tried to search for this guys profile (our of curiosity, I dont know who this is) and it doesnt come up in search results even if I search by his handle directly. Why is that? Do I need to be on the same server as him or something?

janandonly• 4 years ago

I’m waiting for the decentralised self hosting app to be on iOS for my iPhone. Then I’ll join.

I know there are clients enough to use on iOS, but I mean servers to do my own hosting.

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL• 4 years ago

'It looks like' - so the big headline already contains a 'maybe'?

recent tweet of his: 'To clarify: I'll likely continue to post new stuff (blog posts, project releases etc) here, and I'll watch out for DMs and mentions, but I'm not going to be refreshing my timeline or actively seeking out conversations to engage in any more' - link for the curious: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568

reminds me of all the "Quitting Facebook" memes.

I'm gladly going to be wrong, but Mastodon will never be mainstream _anywhere near_ to what Twitter was/still is for all the reasons that have been pointed out on every HN thread about it for days now... How about waiting to see what happens instead of an ideological knee-jerk 'pat myself on the back' half-quitting but not really reaction? Sigh... and the love it gets here, I can't understand it...

It's going to come off as harsh but I can't read this and not think of a petulant child not getting what it wants.

Maybe it's just because I don't have Twitter, Facebook or any of that crap so I guess I can't understand it because I don't have a stake in any of it... guess that kind of reaction is typical for someone living the messy life of hour by hour social media craze.

(sorry I could not refuse to write this comment)

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

I've never been good at mob behavior or just doing what I'm told.

I'm staying on Twitter until I see if it's significantly better or worse. IMHO, the current "I'm leaving" fad seems to be somewhat political, and I don't think political boycotts are constructive.

It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

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