Those 100 alternatives, if they had settled on a protocol, that protocol could have become the standard and could have motivated Twitter and Facebook to join. Each alternative could have coexisted in that environment.
I would like to know why neither ActivityPub nor the Matrix protocol were adopted. Maybe https://atproto.com/ will gain the necessary momentum.
People are still using twitter…? Steve Inskeep of NPR nailed it on Up First when he started his report “Hard to say what the media mogul [Musk] will do with the site that most people do not use but which has a huge influence over news coverage.” (Fri, Oct 28). My bet is on TikTok, where millions of people already prefer to spend their time.
Yes, I am aware. But at the end of the day, Musk and Biden and just about anyone with power or money you can actually name have Twitter accounts, not TikToks.
“On Friday, the theater publication Playbill also said it would stop posting to its Twitter account, which has 412,000 followers. It said it would focus its social media efforts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.” -Nyt. I suspect others will be joining this trend…
Twitter might be dead in few years. But it doesn't mean some other Twitter clone would have replaced Twitter. People like novelty. People would migrate to other venues which will be novel rather than to Twitter clones. In current scenario, nothing is going to 'replace' Twitter. Think about TikTok. It is sort of killing FB. But is it FB replacement? No.
Conversely, maybe some Twitter clone does replace Twitter! Using TikTok as your example, it killed Triller which was (and still is) moderately popular. Even further, Triller was mostly just an iteration of Vine. Vine was definitely the first of line though, I can't think of any earlier mobile-first video sharing social media platforms.
But that’s feature. The problem is it’s Facebook. It’s not built/centered around the feature as the core of the platform the way Twitter is.
Something like Mastodon is closer, but I don’t think it will replace twitter for a number of reasons (including the scattering of the Twitter diaspora to the winds as it dies).
For me the biggest value of Twitter is that some celebrities are using it. So, media they choose will be a new big thing. But I would like them to use some kind of Blockchain-powered source because what celebrities publish is history sometimes.
I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts.
Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a software company, and just being honest I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far. If I do, maybe I become someone important in my field or part of launching some important project/company, then maybe I could be invited to Twitter. Kind of like those high end credit cards that one has to be invited to based on their income/asset level.
Then again, I have no idea how that would make money (besides showing ads to followers like me) so I'm back to just following those important people for now lol. No way I'm paying money to view twitter, I'm cutting down on how much I spend on these monthly subscription services.
check marks look tied to popularity, leading one to wonder why arbitrarily less popular accounts have check marks. "it couldn't be anything besides connections could it?" its natural to wonder that way.
the reason exceptions to popularity resulted in blue checkmarks is because the popularity was only a correlation. the likelihood of your account being impersonated is a primary driver of verification.
so impersonation is the cause, this is correlated to a desire to want to impersonate which is tied to popularity, but nobody needs to be popular to be impersonated.
there is also a way to game that by... causing the impersonation yourself.
I would say that its coincidence people place any desire and covet on verification. Without that, the 'controversy' disappears and it is replaced by utility and consumer protection.
You care about what you have to say, and this phenomena at scale is why Twitter succeeds. The "important people" came after Twitter succeeded. And I'd argue that "their thoughts" amount to little more than a mixture self promotion, virtue signaling, and an occasional hot take. Twitter is likely more valuable to them than they are to Twitter, which is probably the driving factor behind the recent change.
Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. Seems like a reasonable and simple idea that can quickly chip into overhead costs while, itself, having near zero overhead. A million people being verified would be a quarter billion $ gross per year. And while a million may seem like a lot, it just circles back to where we began. They're monetizing narcissism, and that's a very safe bet.
I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society?
> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.
A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation.
B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind.
It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.
>These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.
This is still Twitter you're talking about. Blue checkmarks are overwhelmingly associated with 'woke' narcissists stoking the flames of the culture war
> I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.
Accusations of virtue signalling get misused a lot, especially by people opposed to those important issues. But it's absolutely a real thing. I think the most notable form of virtue signalling is public prayer on TV by politicians. They want to display their piety in public for all to see. They're not raising any kind of awareness by doing so, they're just fishing for approval from the right crowd. (And of course this is exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus condemned.)
It’s impossible to know people’s intentions, because we even can’t really explain 100% the things we do ourselves. So, it’s a bad starter for an argument…
It’s better to judge people for their actions, rather, because even if someone does something involuntarily they should be responsible for it.
Of course it's better to judge people for their actions, but that doesn't mean you can't know people's intentions. Sometimes they're really incredibly clear about their intentions. Intentions and actions aren't separate things.
Absolutely no one who uses "virtue signalling" on the internet is talking about prayer - from TV preachers or politicians.
It's a word typically used associated with a whole set of vocabulary including "woke" and "social justice warrior/SJW".
It's meant to deride people talking about diversity initiatives, systemic inequalities, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.
The explicit implication of the term is that nobody actually genuinely cares about these issues, they just speak about them to virtue signal to their in-group (progressive/left/urban/etc) that they have permissible opinions and that they are not problematic.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 says "We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?" in a reply to Stephen King saying he'll leave if it's $20/month.
It's not that reasonable once you consider who the current verified state is actually assigned to:
- People with huge fanbases like popstars - sure, they'll pay.
- "Normal" people who are verified and known in a community? Unlikely - they're who twitter wants stay and write on the platform to keep others there. People should be paying to read them, not the other way around.
- Journalists / others verified because of their work - depends. But someone did a quick calculation for keeping everyone from a single publication verified (from WaPo I think) and the cost of that was basically unrealistic. (can't find the tweet, I'll link for specific numbers if I find it)
So if they want to destroy the "verified" brand and tax pop stars - that will bring money and alienate users.
> if your handle has blue check and you are not banned from Twitter, it basically means you are promoting Twitter allowed leftist/progressive agenda and everything you write should be taken with big grain of salt
false sense of opposition views and diverse opinions thanks to self censorship to avoid bans, they are allowed only because they tread lightly with their words. they claim to be different but in the end they are pretty much same, the left is now extreme left and right is now center/left
I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts.
Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens your heuristic for quality is going to break down very quickly.
This isn't a criticism of Elon's idea. Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. As a business strategy selling them makes a lot of sense; even more so if people believe they're buying credibility.
That is true _at the moment_, but do you think that when Elon starts charging money for the check mark, he's going to leave money at the table for something as small as authenticity?
> Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter.
It might have started out that way, but over the years Twitter also added behavioral requirements primarily aimed at undesirables. Most prominent case I can recall is Richard Spencer.
We have solved this problem in a much better way on Mastodon.
Do you want your account to be verified? Do you have a personal or business website or blog that is associated to you? Then just add an <a rel="me" href="my social account"> to the page, add the link to your profile, and the connection is done - you have proved that you are the owner of that website.
> Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example
This hasn't been my experience of twitter at all, I follow far more unverified people than I do verified and I know I'm not the only one that does. Communities like football (soccer) twitter aren't built on a few large verified accounts but, as far as I can tell, by mass participation more akin to reddit.
> I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset.
That seems like a business idea. A mastodon instance without public registration, requiring manual verification, making crossposts to other platforms built-in and trivial. Once established, charging the rich for verification/access, while inviting the known and worthy for free to keep the standards up.
Well, I personally would rather read your thoughts than those of the "important" people you mentioned. You aren't trying to sell me something or gain attention, you probably have no agenda other than sharing what you think. If I reply you might actually read my reply, consider my words and write back.
>The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts.
So like TV, circa 1980. Funny how a lot of us are kinda pining for something like that to come back. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, by the way, but I am very amused, in a gallows kinda way, cause it seems to me that we have smashed that bottle real good. Someone wished for an M80 and blew the bottle up with it while the genie laughed.
That whole idea of "important" people is looking pretty ragged right now. I can't think of anyone I trust to (a) know what's actually going on in any sort of expansive, globalized way, and (b) report that truth to me honestly, or even in a way that earnestly considers my real best interests. I have intellectual figures I trust to interpret the facts that come before them in a way I agree with and consider sound, some of whom do have public profile enough to disseminate those interpretations, but what facts are they interpreting, and are they actually facts?
Problem is Mastodon has been around since 2016. It's got some attention, but never to the level that it could challenge Twitter. Reminds me of challengers to YouTube. Some YouTube challengers like Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, etc... have got some media attention and hype, and have done OK, but just not at the level where it can be seen as a replacement. Get the feeling that Mastodon is in the same category, in comparison to Twitter.
Arguably Twitter still doesn’t have mass-market culture fit outside a few bubbles. User growth has long been stuck. Their recent study shows that active users drop off at an alarming rate.
I find it difficult to get my head around mastodon and federated messaging in general.
It seems like a lot of effort to go to when all I want is a social messaging app. I want to make an account once and be able to message anyone else on whatever app I'm using, not have to worry about whether my chosen node happens to be connected to theirs, not to mention that something like this [0] can happen and then apparently you need to personally handle migrating your data to another instance. These are technical details, not things that users should need to think about.
I don't see any federated messaging platform becoming popular until it reaches the point where users don't even have to understand what "federated messaging" means.
Mastodon prompts (forces?) you think differently about what it means to be social on the internet. Do you want to have every message you write broadcast out to the entire planet? Do you want to receive messages FROM the entire planet? The scope of Twitter is "every single person on the service all in a room". To me, that's nightmarish and stopped being a good model like, 10 years ago.
I think it's about time people in general started to learn about what it means to entrust the entirety of their communication on singular entities that don't have a shred of respect for them, their agency, their rights, or their well-being in any way whatsoever.
My personal belief is the ignorant trust of the tech world is on its way out, without severe legislation to protect the rights of the public. The right to own the data they produce (and prevent it from being held hostage), the right to privacy, the right to agency over what kind of communications and solicitations they are subjected to on the now-essential Internet. Dunno, just my thoughts but I see Mastodon (and similar federated networks) as absolutely crucial examples of the way forward.
People are definitely going there. Like, people who have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. William Gibson, Leo Laporte, Jordan Mechner, Martin Fowler, just to name a few I noticed having recently joined up.
If Instagram had better text post support, I think everyone would just go there. They basically are already. Bands and companies promote them selves there already more frequently. Stories let people already share their stupid political hot tales. Honestly not sure what Twitter has over Instagram.
Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made
Maybe reddit, but seeing how their new ui is going I doubt they have the right people to make decisions there
Also, Twitter was is already dieing naturally. I don't think people actually want more Twitter
Maybe soft porn is a bit of a reach or possibly not the best way to describe it, but it does seem people come for the visuals, not the text. Instagram comes off as much more sexualized (even if indirectly) and female oriented.
Ig already ripped off snap chat and tiktok somewhat successfully. I'm sure they could figure it out. Unless meta totally implodes taking Instagram with it
Instagram is practically anti-text. The app doesn't linkify URs because they don't want users to escape the app. Users worked around this with "see link in bio" to access Linktree pages. The app won't even let users select text in posts because they might copy a URL and escape the app.
It's not neglect though; as the person you're replying to stated, its outright hostile by design. It was _designed_ to keep you _off_ the web, and only in the app.
All these centralised, privatised social networks are basically anti-web.
I think most of Big Tech has betrayed the goal of the Web. The only really big, popular site that's true to the original goals of the Web is Wikipedia. Everybody else just tries to lock people up in their own walled gardens again.
I wonder if Instagram adding text would push some people away who want it for the original use of photos? It already feels extremely bloated and unusable with latest shopping stuff (to me).
>TikTok is most likely to become the first mega app
Why is this likely? Seems like it just does one thing well, and even that one thing now has serious competition from Youtube shorts (which are kinda better). Plus it's not cool anymore. Facebook seems to want to be a mega app but no one cares and it's just not happening because Facebook is a dinosaur.
Twitter very likely won't become Elon's X app, but I think TikTok is even less likely.
Elon has experience with Paypal. Payment and identity management is the core ingredient for an X app. Twitter gives him the user base, and he has overspent enough that everybody is aware of Twitter to easily acquire new users.
Somehow it became normal that big companies don't role out new features very often. That's not a given. Elon can reshape Twitter and turn its NASA-like development structure into a SpaceX structure. If Twitter runs like a startup it could be reshaped within months.
However, Elon could also create something like the Vegas tunnel which supposedly doesn't have the safety features to handle a fire very well. [1]
I highly highly doubt this. TikTok was a new idea and targeted young people. It has no brand value or widespread cultural support for it to be able to expand into other types of social media.
Pretty much every TikTok creator hates the monetization and many are shifting focus to YouTube.
Interesting. I was under the impression that YouTube creators hate the lack of transparent moderation and have been moving to other platforms - often, like TikTok.
Almost certainly not. Nobody can match Youtube's payout of 55% of revenue to creators, or come anywhere close to it; Tiktok's monetization model is both worse at the outset and destined to continue to get worse still over time (creators are paid fractions of a fixed pie, so with more creators, each creator's share diminishes). Tiktok also has a notoriously opaque moderation process that has a reputation for censoring much more aggressively than youtube (doing things like banning profanity, which has never been a problem on Youtube).
Mastodon needs a patron to host & manage the site. but somebody who can avoid mission creep and the strong lure of tracking & ad dollars. maybe if craigslist folks can do a bare minimal version with just good enough content discovery algos they may be able to. but you do need a big name for people to start gravitating towards it when twitter screws up (& screw up it will!).
I don't remember twitter having a serious vibe. It's a mess of vibes. Tumblr is also a big mess, but more on the goofy side. I don't think it would change much even with a twitter diaspora.
It does feel like that but I also have noticed breaking news sources being posted from Wechat, FB and tiktok recently. Some of that is through twitter though, so you might be right.
I am trying to remember what happened with the switch between myspace and facebook, that felt like nothing could change where the attention was until all of the sudden it felt inevitable.
In the early days Facebook was invite only as select colleges were onboarded so it had an allure to it. Kind of like Clubhouse did.
I remember kids had two profiles, MySpace and Facebook and you’d qualify wether you saw a post or messaged someone on which platform. Eventually, the center of gravity switched to Facebook and people stopped maintaining their MySpace accounts.
Twitter is now too big to fail and paid verification is a very smart business move. Those displaced by the changes will just move to platforms that are a better fit. I don't see what the problem is.
I'm hoping it would not get replaced. There are no mannerisms at all. For example: HN tries to cultivate intelligent posts full of information, fosstodon looks for kind, easygoing posts. Twitter looks for (and finds) the worst kind of sarcasm and toxicity. Self-moderation is discouraged, because it is not a site-wide rule.
Every network is unique, I don't think you could ever replace Twitter. Anything not Twitter is going to be different. Twitter itself is constantly changing.
A better question might be, what are you CURRENTLY using as a place to find communities (if this is what you're looking for) outside of Twitter? Answers to this question are going to be the most useful.
Every community is unique. FB is useless to me for most things, but there are some communities which thrive in FB groups. Some communities have a thriving Discord, other communities in adjacent domains might be more into Slack. Finding the right spots requires a bit of hunting. Reddit is great for some communities, dead to others.
What I like about Twitter vs any other network tool, is the random interesting stuff I can come across which is still somewhat related to people I follow. I don't see that replaced by any other platform. Niche places have more utility in some ways, but less randomness.
You can have a blog anywhere, but to promote it to people who aren’t subscribers, you’ll likely still want to post links to Twitter, and maybe other places too. It may make sense to treat Twitter solely as a way of advertising content hosted elsewhere.
Thinking about where you might post a link, Hacker News and Facebook and Reddit can sometimes work, when appropriate. It seems unlikely that Twitter will stop being a good place to do this?
That makes no sense. Posting on a site only makes sense if people who are interested in your content are reading it. If no one is reading Twitter (eg everyone has left) then posting links there won't drive any traffic to your blog.
It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist. Corporations should need to pay to be identified as such, and we should know when a person vs a corporation says something. Does this exist... not that I've seen. Vanity metrics like number of users have become real metrics for valuation... until that's broken we can't have these discussions. But my biggest problem with Twitter is it's easily manipulated. Small groups of people can pretend to be large groups by making a small topic tend.
We act like likes are votes, but anyone can create multiple accounts .... Imagine if we did democracy this way ....
The way the Internet is built, it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to ever tell if a client app is being operated by a human or a bot. There are various ways to make automation harder, and there are heuristics to guess if the operator might be a bot, but neither are absolute.
The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost certainly not true. (Think about Snapchat's "no screenshot implementation" as a real-world parallel.) The only bots on the platform would be the most nefarious actors who are willing to invest in the arms race.
Any platform that solves this problem will have to take a different approach - probably assuming there are bots and then providing tools to allow humans to only interact with other humans they can reasonably trust.
You have a very "positive/optimistic" outlook on how this would go down;
My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion.
This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn't imagine a social platform holding the crown jewels like this ever not being a disaster.
You don't have to have the social networking site handle the privacy information. You could integrate eId as identity providers and for a site like Twitter only provide guarantee that this is a human and this identity is unique for this human on this service.
You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.
Good point, I had totally forgotten about identity providers. I've only had to use one, which I totally disagree with; I can't remember which one, but some government site here in the UK required an IDP and the options were things like the "Post Office"; Not the sort of organisation I want to be trusting with my identity/login for any government site.
That’s not completely true; you would be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers and any government or organization powerful enough to wield influence over the identity providers. Which completely defeats the most important reason people choose to remain anonymous.
Right, but the identity providers being government owned exacerbates the problem I'm talking about.
I don't personally care if Joe the random person has access to an anonymous account*, but I do care if Joe the Russian dissident—whose entire ability to safely post points of view which disagree with his government relies upon it—has access to an anonymous account.
* I am not saying there aren't other valid reasons, including entertainment reasons, to have an anonymous account. But those aren't part of my main point
The only thing legal identification proves is that a human created the account. It does not prove that a human is posting or reading/scraping content.
And even then, what does a photo of ID from some foreign country prove? That the person signing up had something that looked like legit ID? Or do we start building a global database of IDs of every human that is "government approved" and somehow not subject to corruption in certain countries?
> The way the Internet is built, it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to ever tell if a client app is being operated by a human or a bot.
Indeed, I'm leaning towards it's not possible:
- Even if you required government id, you'd get a market of people selling their unused accounts, or access to them.
- You can use end-to-end DRM, like iMessage, to rate limit and complicate access to accounts, but it prevents access to legitimate actors.
- Even if you magically solve it, it still prevents legitimate bot access, such as those that keep track of when Elon musks private jet is being used.
The older I get, the more I think we're all just holding it wrong. Like the war on drugs, you can't just hunt down the bad actors. Instead, social networks simply become what they incentivize. If you make "followers" and "influence" your inofficial currency, the spam and impersonation isn't exactly a mystery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that engagement optimization contributes to making spam much worse (think clickbait).
I don't think our current generation of social networks was designed with a solid understanding of game theory. Or perhaps it was, but the important findings were ignored because it tends to interfere with growth.
> If you make "followers" and "influence" your inofficial currency, the spam and impersonation isn't exactly a mystery.
How would that translate to, e.g., email where spam and impersonation is a huge decades-long problem but there's no "followers" or "influence" to be gamed?
> It'd be nice if there was a platform that was specifically designed for People, not bots / propagandist.
I don't know how you can say this, when they were/are one of the main drivers? Did anyone ban Hillary Clinton from speaking? No. But, nevermind characters such as Alex Jones etc, they banned the sitting president from speaking on their platform!
Whatever your political position, I find it amazing that banning opinions that you disagree with seems to be acceptable or even desired. It used to be that people would say: I don't agree with you, but I'll fight for your right to say what you want.
Instead, it seems everyone wants to live in a comfortable echo chamber, parroting the apparent consensus opinions. So it comes as a shock to them when someone says something different.
People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions, rather than insisting on an imagined right to fragile homogeneity.
> People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions
Why is it hard to accept the "diverse opinion" that children were shot and killed at a school shooting, and that their parents were not actors trying to steal your guns from you? Does it trigger you that you didnt need to form a crew and go round and set them straight?
Here is a diverse opinion for you - not everything that happens in the world is done by crisis actors trying to force you to have interracial gay sex while taking your gun from you and giving it to an illegal immigrant.
Who has the truth? Is it the government and the media, or are they the worst of the worst? How would you know what the truth is? Is the truth a consensus, or can everyone be wrong? In this technological age, it is easy to conceive how a false message can be disseminated widely. How can you discern truth from reality?
In the absence of certainty, you have to allow the free flow of information. You might think that people are screening/filtering information for you, but it is surely evident that they can also be doing this for their own benefit?
Information is power, as it drives your beliefs, and then your actions.
Trump and friends were attempting to weaponize social media, and they were successful. They were causing harm in the real world. That’s why they were banned.
That's your opinion. And I'd argue that you can have it. I'd argue for your right to say what you like, even though I disagree.
In reverse, can you see how for others, the weaponisation has already occurred, and that they (trump etc) are already feeling the sharp end? Actions were taken to ban them after all.
Btw, I don't vote or care about the political charade at all, I'm not red or blue. My point is that if it is acceptable that the mainstream media marginalises certain voices and you don't complain when your side is winning, you are actually legitimising the loss of freedom of speech. And, in the end, everyone is a loser of we are unable to speak freely.
But I don't see them banning anyone from speaking.
The idea is that people are able to say whatever they like. Their unpopular opinion may enlighten you to some salient information that you were unaware of.
Banning, imprisonment, fines, etc, should be reserved for actions. Speaking your mind should be free. Even on privately owned platforms.
Wanting to ban something is different to actually banning people from speaking.
But, no doubt, there are republicans who would do this too. I would say the exact same thing to them, as and when they start actually banning something or someone.
Freedom of speech is not a political position; try not to drag me into the gutter, please!
You have to ban hate propagandists or you get people attacking the husband of a senior politician with a hammer, based on whatever weird combination of conspiracy garbage they participated in.
I was genuinely surprised the Brazilian election went as well as it did: there were reports of pre-election violence, but once all the votes were counted the losing candidate just conceded properly.
But America won't see or understand how terrorism works in the 2020s until it has another 9/11. At which point it will conduct reprisals against the wrong targets again.
Exactly. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better from a technological standpoint than other open social media protocols [0], but the fact that it's somehow tied to Twitter changes things. If Twitter chooses to switch to an open protocol, it will likely be Blue Sky. And based on my understanding of the texts between Elon and Jack, Elon is open to the open protocol idea [1].
Btw, you can sign up for their own client for Blue Sky here (beta waitlist): https://bsky.app/
360 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] threadI would like to know why neither ActivityPub nor the Matrix protocol were adopted. Maybe https://atproto.com/ will gain the necessary momentum.
If people leave Twitter, they’re not all going to go to the same place. They’ll go to different places or give up on the concept all together.
It’s irreplaceable. It’s an artifact of a very different time. I don’t think it can ever be recreated.
Twitter may shrink and even disappear in 5 years.
But that doesn't mean it will be ever be replaced by any 1 thing.
I think Twitter is a dead man walking. Maybe 6 months. Maybe 3 years. I don’t think it will survive.
Wanted to add that clarification.
Something like Mastodon is closer, but I don’t think it will replace twitter for a number of reasons (including the scattering of the Twitter diaspora to the winds as it dies).
Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example. I'm just some random guy who works at a software company, and just being honest I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far. If I do, maybe I become someone important in my field or part of launching some important project/company, then maybe I could be invited to Twitter. Kind of like those high end credit cards that one has to be invited to based on their income/asset level.
Then again, I have no idea how that would make money (besides showing ads to followers like me) so I'm back to just following those important people for now lol. No way I'm paying money to view twitter, I'm cutting down on how much I spend on these monthly subscription services.
check marks look tied to popularity, leading one to wonder why arbitrarily less popular accounts have check marks. "it couldn't be anything besides connections could it?" its natural to wonder that way.
the reason exceptions to popularity resulted in blue checkmarks is because the popularity was only a correlation. the likelihood of your account being impersonated is a primary driver of verification.
so impersonation is the cause, this is correlated to a desire to want to impersonate which is tied to popularity, but nobody needs to be popular to be impersonated.
there is also a way to game that by... causing the impersonation yourself.
I would say that its coincidence people place any desire and covet on verification. Without that, the 'controversy' disappears and it is replaced by utility and consumer protection.
Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. Seems like a reasonable and simple idea that can quickly chip into overhead costs while, itself, having near zero overhead. A million people being verified would be a quarter billion $ gross per year. And while a million may seem like a lot, it just circles back to where we began. They're monetizing narcissism, and that's a very safe bet.
I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society?
> Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month.
A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation.
B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind.
It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.
This is still Twitter you're talking about. Blue checkmarks are overwhelmingly associated with 'woke' narcissists stoking the flames of the culture war
No surprise Godwin disparages the use of 'woke', when he is most likely a 'woke-ist' himself.
> I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote.
Accusations of virtue signalling get misused a lot, especially by people opposed to those important issues. But it's absolutely a real thing. I think the most notable form of virtue signalling is public prayer on TV by politicians. They want to display their piety in public for all to see. They're not raising any kind of awareness by doing so, they're just fishing for approval from the right crowd. (And of course this is exactly the kind of behaviour that Jesus condemned.)
It's a word typically used associated with a whole set of vocabulary including "woke" and "social justice warrior/SJW".
It's meant to deride people talking about diversity initiatives, systemic inequalities, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.
The explicit implication of the term is that nobody actually genuinely cares about these issues, they just speak about them to virtue signal to their in-group (progressive/left/urban/etc) that they have permissible opinions and that they are not problematic.
Has Twitter said so on the record? AFAIK the only reportage comes from unnamed sources in an article from The Verge.
It's not that reasonable once you consider who the current verified state is actually assigned to:
- People with huge fanbases like popstars - sure, they'll pay.
- "Normal" people who are verified and known in a community? Unlikely - they're who twitter wants stay and write on the platform to keep others there. People should be paying to read them, not the other way around.
- Journalists / others verified because of their work - depends. But someone did a quick calculation for keeping everyone from a single publication verified (from WaPo I think) and the cost of that was basically unrealistic. (can't find the tweet, I'll link for specific numbers if I find it)
So if they want to destroy the "verified" brand and tax pop stars - that will bring money and alienate users.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GOPLeader
https://mobile.twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell
Have we just left reality behind entirely, or what?
Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens your heuristic for quality is going to break down very quickly.
This isn't a criticism of Elon's idea. Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. As a business strategy selling them makes a lot of sense; even more so if people believe they're buying credibility.
That's false, the owner has to be notable enough to get a blue check mark. Authenticity is just one of the requirements
That's false, you just have to know/bribe someone who works there.
It might have started out that way, but over the years Twitter also added behavioral requirements primarily aimed at undesirables. Most prominent case I can recall is Richard Spencer.
Neither have most of the blue checkmarks. Many of them cause more pain if anything.
Do you want your account to be verified? Do you have a personal or business website or blog that is associated to you? Then just add an <a rel="me" href="my social account"> to the page, add the link to your profile, and the connection is done - you have proved that you are the owner of that website.
Do we really need anything more than this?
Probably more useful with how many sites these days are JavaScript blobs that don't really transmit over static HTML anymore.
Reaching 3 - 5 friends who care is enough for me.
This hasn't been my experience of twitter at all, I follow far more unverified people than I do verified and I know I'm not the only one that does. Communities like football (soccer) twitter aren't built on a few large verified accounts but, as far as I can tell, by mass participation more akin to reddit.
That seems like a business idea. A mastodon instance without public registration, requiring manual verification, making crossposts to other platforms built-in and trivial. Once established, charging the rich for verification/access, while inviting the known and worthy for free to keep the standards up.
So like TV, circa 1980. Funny how a lot of us are kinda pining for something like that to come back. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, by the way, but I am very amused, in a gallows kinda way, cause it seems to me that we have smashed that bottle real good. Someone wished for an M80 and blew the bottle up with it while the genie laughed.
That whole idea of "important" people is looking pretty ragged right now. I can't think of anyone I trust to (a) know what's actually going on in any sort of expansive, globalized way, and (b) report that truth to me honestly, or even in a way that earnestly considers my real best interests. I have intellectual figures I trust to interpret the facts that come before them in a way I agree with and consider sound, some of whom do have public profile enough to disseminate those interpretations, but what facts are they interpreting, and are they actually facts?
https://joinmastodon.org/
But people go where people are, so we’ll see if it gets traction.
It seems like a lot of effort to go to when all I want is a social messaging app. I want to make an account once and be able to message anyone else on whatever app I'm using, not have to worry about whether my chosen node happens to be connected to theirs, not to mention that something like this [0] can happen and then apparently you need to personally handle migrating your data to another instance. These are technical details, not things that users should need to think about.
I don't see any federated messaging platform becoming popular until it reaches the point where users don't even have to understand what "federated messaging" means.
[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/
I think it's about time people in general started to learn about what it means to entrust the entirety of their communication on singular entities that don't have a shred of respect for them, their agency, their rights, or their well-being in any way whatsoever.
My personal belief is the ignorant trust of the tech world is on its way out, without severe legislation to protect the rights of the public. The right to own the data they produce (and prevent it from being held hostage), the right to privacy, the right to agency over what kind of communications and solicitations they are subjected to on the now-essential Internet. Dunno, just my thoughts but I see Mastodon (and similar federated networks) as absolutely crucial examples of the way forward.
Instagram starting from scratch for small text posts would allow them to fix a lot of mistakes Twitter made
Maybe reddit, but seeing how their new ui is going I doubt they have the right people to make decisions there
Also, Twitter was is already dieing naturally. I don't think people actually want more Twitter
It's an image/video sharing site...
IG is really images-first, and would be a horrible platform for blogging or conversation without major changes.
links are the pillars of the web and these apps neglect them
I think most of Big Tech has betrayed the goal of the Web. The only really big, popular site that's true to the original goals of the Web is Wikipedia. Everybody else just tries to lock people up in their own walled gardens again.
There will come along something more usable and interesting than Mastodon but talking the same standardized language for interoperability.
Momentum is important, Musk irrumped now. Lots of minds are -thinking- about change. One could leverage that into springbooting something new
Why is this likely? Seems like it just does one thing well, and even that one thing now has serious competition from Youtube shorts (which are kinda better). Plus it's not cool anymore. Facebook seems to want to be a mega app but no one cares and it's just not happening because Facebook is a dinosaur.
Twitter very likely won't become Elon's X app, but I think TikTok is even less likely.
Elon has experience with Paypal. Payment and identity management is the core ingredient for an X app. Twitter gives him the user base, and he has overspent enough that everybody is aware of Twitter to easily acquire new users.
Somehow it became normal that big companies don't role out new features very often. That's not a given. Elon can reshape Twitter and turn its NASA-like development structure into a SpaceX structure. If Twitter runs like a startup it could be reshaped within months.
However, Elon could also create something like the Vegas tunnel which supposedly doesn't have the safety features to handle a fire very well. [1]
[1] https://reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/yeni5w/elons_boring_t...
Pretty much every TikTok creator hates the monetization and many are shifting focus to YouTube.
I think it'll be TikTok
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog
Twitter's only power was "eyeballs" and now there are going to be a dozen sites trying to take a cut of that.
(how on earth Twitter is going to make $1 Billion/year to pay financing is beyond my grasp)
you can get the latest news/tweet from on the ground reporters.
i don't know which social media platform can give me this type of update.
I remember kids had two profiles, MySpace and Facebook and you’d qualify wether you saw a post or messaged someone on which platform. Eventually, the center of gravity switched to Facebook and people stopped maintaining their MySpace accounts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10628494
A better question might be, what are you CURRENTLY using as a place to find communities (if this is what you're looking for) outside of Twitter? Answers to this question are going to be the most useful.
Every community is unique. FB is useless to me for most things, but there are some communities which thrive in FB groups. Some communities have a thriving Discord, other communities in adjacent domains might be more into Slack. Finding the right spots requires a bit of hunting. Reddit is great for some communities, dead to others.
What I like about Twitter vs any other network tool, is the random interesting stuff I can come across which is still somewhat related to people I follow. I don't see that replaced by any other platform. Niche places have more utility in some ways, but less randomness.
Thinking about where you might post a link, Hacker News and Facebook and Reddit can sometimes work, when appropriate. It seems unlikely that Twitter will stop being a good place to do this?
We act like likes are votes, but anyone can create multiple accounts .... Imagine if we did democracy this way ....
The best we can build today is an environment that "feels" like everyone is human but where we don't actually know and where that's almost certainly not true. (Think about Snapchat's "no screenshot implementation" as a real-world parallel.) The only bots on the platform would be the most nefarious actors who are willing to invest in the arms race.
Any platform that solves this problem will have to take a different approach - probably assuming there are bots and then providing tools to allow humans to only interact with other humans they can reasonably trust.
My immediate thought was that an implementation of this platform would be using legal identification to prove humans, allowing for one a huge depository of highly-accurate personally identifying information; a security and privacy nightmare in my opinion.
This already happens in many places, but those are regulated companies, banks etc, I couldn't imagine a social platform holding the crown jewels like this ever not being a disaster.
You wouldn't be anonymous but you could be anonymous towards everyone but the identity providers.
I don't really see a way around this if the aim is to prove human-ness though.
I don't personally care if Joe the random person has access to an anonymous account*, but I do care if Joe the Russian dissident—whose entire ability to safely post points of view which disagree with his government relies upon it—has access to an anonymous account.
* I am not saying there aren't other valid reasons, including entertainment reasons, to have an anonymous account. But those aren't part of my main point
And even then, what does a photo of ID from some foreign country prove? That the person signing up had something that looked like legit ID? Or do we start building a global database of IDs of every human that is "government approved" and somehow not subject to corruption in certain countries?
Indeed, I'm leaning towards it's not possible:
- Even if you required government id, you'd get a market of people selling their unused accounts, or access to them.
- You can use end-to-end DRM, like iMessage, to rate limit and complicate access to accounts, but it prevents access to legitimate actors.
- Even if you magically solve it, it still prevents legitimate bot access, such as those that keep track of when Elon musks private jet is being used.
The older I get, the more I think we're all just holding it wrong. Like the war on drugs, you can't just hunt down the bad actors. Instead, social networks simply become what they incentivize. If you make "followers" and "influence" your inofficial currency, the spam and impersonation isn't exactly a mystery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that engagement optimization contributes to making spam much worse (think clickbait).
I don't think our current generation of social networks was designed with a solid understanding of game theory. Or perhaps it was, but the important findings were ignored because it tends to interfere with growth.
How would that translate to, e.g., email where spam and impersonation is a huge decades-long problem but there's no "followers" or "influence" to be gamed?
Remember when key exchange parties were supposed to be a thing ad we would build a network of trust and so on?
I don't know how you can say this, when they were/are one of the main drivers? Did anyone ban Hillary Clinton from speaking? No. But, nevermind characters such as Alex Jones etc, they banned the sitting president from speaking on their platform!
Whatever your political position, I find it amazing that banning opinions that you disagree with seems to be acceptable or even desired. It used to be that people would say: I don't agree with you, but I'll fight for your right to say what you want.
Instead, it seems everyone wants to live in a comfortable echo chamber, parroting the apparent consensus opinions. So it comes as a shock to them when someone says something different.
People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions, rather than insisting on an imagined right to fragile homogeneity.
> People should try to become a bit more resilient of diverse opinions
Why is it hard to accept the "diverse opinion" that children were shot and killed at a school shooting, and that their parents were not actors trying to steal your guns from you? Does it trigger you that you didnt need to form a crew and go round and set them straight?
Here is a diverse opinion for you - not everything that happens in the world is done by crisis actors trying to force you to have interracial gay sex while taking your gun from you and giving it to an illegal immigrant.
Is it ok not to believe that the government there to help?
Can having an unpopular opinion (opinion, not an action) be hateful? Does it demand action from self-appointed custodians of morality?
Do you know the truth? Do you know the difference between right and wrong? Is it ok to act against someone who says 'wrong things'?
Holding an opinion is not an action.
Going on twitter and banging on about your opinion is an action.
Expressing your opinion, even on twitter, is an act of (written, typed) speech.
Preventing someone from expressing themselves, when they have done no wrong, is an action.
Preventing someone from expressing themselves is an action.
This is as per the golden rule, do no harm. If you speak, you are doing no harm. If you prevent someone speaking, you are.
Who has the truth? Is it the government and the media, or are they the worst of the worst? How would you know what the truth is? Is the truth a consensus, or can everyone be wrong? In this technological age, it is easy to conceive how a false message can be disseminated widely. How can you discern truth from reality?
In the absence of certainty, you have to allow the free flow of information. You might think that people are screening/filtering information for you, but it is surely evident that they can also be doing this for their own benefit?
Information is power, as it drives your beliefs, and then your actions.
In reverse, can you see how for others, the weaponisation has already occurred, and that they (trump etc) are already feeling the sharp end? Actions were taken to ban them after all.
Btw, I don't vote or care about the political charade at all, I'm not red or blue. My point is that if it is acceptable that the mainstream media marginalises certain voices and you don't complain when your side is winning, you are actually legitimising the loss of freedom of speech. And, in the end, everyone is a loser of we are unable to speak freely.
Thinking that everything is, is a symptom of consuming certain types of agitprop.
Isn’t exactly this happening on the other side of the fence as well?
But I don't see them banning anyone from speaking.
The idea is that people are able to say whatever they like. Their unpopular opinion may enlighten you to some salient information that you were unaware of.
Banning, imprisonment, fines, etc, should be reserved for actions. Speaking your mind should be free. Even on privately owned platforms.
[1] disagrees. [2] disagrees. [3] disagrees. etc.etc.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-o...
[2] https://jezebel.com/republicans-are-trying-to-ban-speech-abo...
[3] https://truthout.org/articles/gops-banning-of-books-and-atta...
But, no doubt, there are republicans who would do this too. I would say the exact same thing to them, as and when they start actually banning something or someone.
Freedom of speech is not a political position; try not to drag me into the gutter, please!
I was genuinely surprised the Brazilian election went as well as it did: there were reports of pre-election violence, but once all the votes were counted the losing candidate just conceded properly.
But America won't see or understand how terrorism works in the 2020s until it has another 9/11. At which point it will conduct reprisals against the wrong targets again.
Btw, you can sign up for their own client for Blue Sky here (beta waitlist): https://bsky.app/
0: https://atproto.com
1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-t...