I clicked hoping the w3c mastodon site would have HTML. But nope, just another mastodon v3+ that only does anything if you run javascript. The w3c should try to do better. It wasn't possible with twitter but it is with mastodon.
I don't think there is - it's specifically designed to be a user frontend.
Although it should be possible to whip up a text-friendly view of a server you're not logged into assuming they allow non-authenticated access to the API.
Your comment was worded poorly so you're getting downvoted, but I too share the disappointment that Mastodon is shamlessly promoting itself while lacking a JS-free way to even view public posts.
Since mastodon posts are generally very small most posts are split up into multiple so looking at the /embed will only give you say, 1 of 4, like in that Polish/German train DRM story on HN earlier, https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/111528162462505087/embed
Does the W3C have any priorities to promote HTML-only sites? Otherwise, what's the problem? There are (of course) many good reasons to not require Javascript, but just because the W3C oversees the HTML standard doesn't mean they can't also use complementary technologies.
The problem isn't that the website is not HTML-only, but rather that it is JavaScript-only (practically-speaking). If you're using NoScript, or otherwise have JavaScript disabled, you get an empty page with nothing but an error message.
At least we had nitter for viewing tweets without the need to allow JS. AFAIK there's no nitter for mastodon (nastodon?) although you can get some data by looking at the RSS feed.
I use nitter a lot now that most links on the Internet are to tweets. It provides an experience vastly superior to that of actual Twitter. It takes Twitter from an unreadable cesspool to a readable cesspool.
But sarcasm aside, JS is a web standard, just like HTML and CSS. While I understand the opinion of people who don't want to execute JS in their browser, I'm also highly sympathetic to devs who want to use things that are enabled by default in all modern browsers.
Ironically, the wiki page you linked shows how to use JavaScript to show meaningful error messages to users.
And in any case, graceful degradation is a good thing to shoot for, but far from a requirement. Mastodon is Free Software. If someone wants to fork it and make a version that replaces frontend JS with server side rendering, that's legal and fine.
Looking through other server software[1], I totally agree that the majority of servers require JavaScript. However, there are a few that don't, such as Smithereen[2]. Picking a random Smithereen instance[3] lets us mirror the content without JavaScript (although it still doesn't seem to like being viewed through w3m).
So, I think there's potential, but it's definitely not ideal.
It's very strange. "If you don't like it, leave." people leave "You don't matter, go!"
If you tell people to vote with their feet and attention, and they do, don't be mad at the outcome. I totally support Elon running Twitter however he wants, it's his to do as he pleases, but he is unable to hold participants hostage on the platform (which both he [1] [2] and some cohort of people who support him in some measure find unpleasant).
Never understood this take. Telling companies to stop pressuring them with ad dollars is ideologically consistent. He's saying if you can't handle freedom of expression on the platform then don't use the platform. He's not forcing them to do anything, it's the other way around.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant by "hostage". Not sure who is being held hostage.
Being pro-mega corporations moderating what conversations on the internet is allowable is a weird thing to be in vogue. Telling companies that don't want to be associated with the content to just walk away is the right choice, even if it hurts the business. I'd also rather see Twitter die than Disney and Co being the arbiters of discussion. We already have Facebook and Reddit for that, and neither are any better for generating healthy societal discourse.
He calls them not spending their add money on Twitter "blackmail" and goes on to say they will kill the company.
That doesn't sound like "if you can't handle freedom of expression on the platform then don't use the platform." To me. They AREN'T using the platform and he's mad about it.
This is silly. He obviously wants money from major advertisers. Why wouldn't he? He still runs a business and has employees to pay. That motivation is enough for him to want them to stay, yet he is clearly making a major sacrifice for his values.
The stretches people to through to get upset about him is bizarre. He did enough real shit to dislike him, no need to obsessively twist everything into what it isn't just to have new things to get upset about.
>He obviously wants money from major advertisers. Why wouldn't he? He still runs a business and has employees to pay. That motivation is enough for him to want them to stay, yet he is clearly making a major sacrifice for his values.
yes, we call that hypocrisy. Spouting one sentiment ("you are free to do whatever and I respect that") and then the opposite when it works againt you ("you are blackmailing me by leaving the platform and pulling your ad money. This is an invasion of speech"). It's not the worst thing he's done, but the most relevant thing to the post submitted here.
The comment I'm replying to (your comment) says this:
> He's saying if you can't handle freedom of expression on the platform then don't use the platform.
Sounds like we are in agreement he is not saying that. He wants advertisers to use the platform regardless of if they can "handle it". And is indeed upset they are not.
Oh come on. He made headlines last week for telling advertisers to go fuck themselves, then a few minutes later complained that they were doing ot bankrupt/destroy the company and saying he would put out detailed documentation on how they did it. If he does not actually want or care about their money then stop whining about bankruptcy and making sad accusations of blackmail and so on.
I don't see how any of that is being inconsistent. Wanting companies to remain advertisers without bullying him into censoring users (or his own speech) is a valid position and obviously something he wants. But he doesn't have to bend over to make it happen.
I highly doubt Disney etc would suddenly start coming back if he was simply polite in response to them making a very public statement about leaving. Obviously they want him to make concessions in censorship that he finds untenable and his response was to fuck off if that's their demands.
He didn't buy Twitter just to run it the same way as @jack and say yes to whatever powerful company/gov agency demands of them.
Nobody owes him advertising $. If he wants to tell advertisers to go fuck themselves because they don't want to appear next to nazis that's his prerogative, but whining about how it's hurting his company is his problem.
> He didn't buy Twitter just to run it the same way as @jack and say yes to whatever powerful company/gov agency demands of them
One of the many ironies is, of course, that musk's twitter says "yes" to government requests far more frequently than jack's did.
In case you're wondering, this is one of the many reasons people dislike him in relation to twitter, he talks a lot about "free speech" but his actions are consistently about supporting only the speech he himself makes.
Musk has been having temper tantrums for the last few weeks about people not advertising on his platform, Rockstar not hosting a GTA video on his platform, etc etc. He seems unhappy when people _actually_ stop using the platform.
I observed Twitter/X was recently loosening previous owner's restrictions and censorship. I'm apparently misinformed, so how is enabling previously banned accounts hurting free speech?
> I'm apparently misinformed, so how is enabling previously banned accounts hurting free speech?
I never said it was. That is a choice. Elon doesn't like advertisers pulling their spend (free speech) and the general public leaving (free speech and association). He wants to demand an audience under his terms (participants must stay, advertisers must continue to spend under his terms), leading to this natural experiment. I apologize if that wasn't clear from my turn of phrase with regards to being held hostage.
Twitter will die, Elon will take the L (but probably not learn from it until some future wealth destruction event), and everyone will move on to other forums and digital third spaces. Enjoy the show.
Of course, criticizing advertisers for pulling their spend because they do not like the free speech of other users is also free speech. It's quite reasonable to name and shame companies that take actions that try to restrict other peoples' free speech.
(I'm using 'free speech' outside of the governmental context - the government can't abridge free speech, but outside of that free speech is simply a good idea.)
Let's be honest here. It isn't some objective definition free speech, it is whatever Elon believes to be free speech at the time [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. It is absolutely silly to expect any company to financially support a platform with a dynamic and fluid version of "absolute free speech." I certainly don't want my consumer dollars flowing through companies to Twitter/X as marketing spend based on how it operates.
If you have speech others don't like, be prepared to get your wallet out and pay for it yourself. No one is obligated to financially support speech they don't agree with. You might believe that to "name and shame companies that take actions that try to restrict other peoples' free speech" is going to result in some backlash against these companies; it won't except in some small, immaterial population. Let Elon put comms out and say, "If you don't directly pay for Twitter, Twitter will die" and lets see how many people show up to pay their expenses and fiat behind their belief system.
> but outside of that free speech is simply a good idea.
This is an opinion, and other takes are going to be based on the limits involved [6].
> 65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018.
> Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
> Democrats are more supportive than Republicans of tech companies and the U.S. government restricting extremely violent content and false information online. The partisan gap in support for restricting false information has grown substantially since 2018.
If it was actually about free speech, the Elon Jet Tracker account wouldn’t be banned. It’s actually about being able to say bigoted things without consequences.
Also if it was actually about free speech, he wouldn’t immediately capitulate every time a foreign government asks him to remove content they deem inappropriate.
w3c.social is a friendly and respectful instance for people involved in the activities of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The instance is run on a volunteer basis by a few of the W3C team
The alternative is having a random selection of highly liked (and, often, very old) posts show up on their profile for logged-out users. Setting their account to protected is an easy and effective way of making that go away -- and it also prevents users from following an account that's no longer in use.
The other thing I’d be worried about is deleting an account and then having Twitter give it out to some spammer who’d see traffic from the millions of links out in the wild.
Legally, X management can do whatever they please, because it isn't illegal to be jerks. No one is disputing that. But if sites use the power to do this in an abusive way, people should know about it, and adjust their expectations about whether people are who they say they are.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone can predict his whims accurately but I do think that’s more likely to happen with usernames which have more mainstream value than the W3C.
I did the same thing with my main account a few weeks back. I have a gaming Twitter and two business ones. I kinda need those (the illustrators and indie game devs I follow aren't anywhere else and I need the network effects and community for my business).
I'm hoping Elon gets kicked out like at PayPal and Twitter is able to become less cringe.
Community notes is the replacement for s/moderation/censorship. It's far more truthful and accurate than any s/moderation/censorship committee. This has been repeatedly demonstrated.
It would help if they sent a notification to everyone who liked or interacted with such a tweet, to give them the community notes update. And or resurface it in the timeline.
Community notes are great and should be copied. That they have to be used on a shitload of mundane topics cause the fascist in chief thinks "muh, free speech" is not. Hopefully, sooner or later one of the alternatives gets enough traction and this saga is over.
Who knows what he personally believes but he has no trouble offering them free service, promoting them, or targeting many of the same people they dislike (journalists; groups opposed to disinformation, anti-semitism, etc.; supporters of fair elections). Perhaps that doesn’t make him a fascist but at the very least he doesn’t mind hanging out with them and laughing at their memes.
>Even the most vocal Spaceman haters come back whenever something big is happening.
they aren't coming back because it's twitter, they come back because they need to reach a lot of people. That isn't unique to twitter in the grand scheme of things, it's just the current crown bearer.
I make this assumption because there are plenty of services that can post to multiple social media accounts, and even cross-posting really wouldn't take that much effort- maybe an additional minute per post if you have to log in each time.
They're purposely limiting their reach, and I see no reasoning listed so I assume not everyone there is proud of their "why".
Possibly unrelated, but I've had a good dozen holocaust deniers show up in my feed today. And the report options no longer include a specific option for that.
It seems to me that it was Twitter that got political.
That leaves everyone using it with no non-political options -- there are political implications whether you stay or go.
Leaving it now (when a bunch of others are going too and the front man has recently been dropping bombs) is probably the less political option -- especially in the long term if you think the site is going to get more radical.
Bonus points for moving to a federated alternative, since you can move away from big tech (which is more of a principled stand and/or tactical move than a political statement, IMO.)
Twitter was the canonical radical/activist political tech co before the new owner, featuring all sorts of suppression and biasing. It’s not any more or less now, probably less overall since it seems to be avoiding more suppression, it’s just that one side is generally upset and the other generally happy that it changed teams.
This announcement does tell us w3c is a politically motivated org that disagrees with the new regime.
I keep seeing these claims on HN despite the fact that it's been widely reported that Twitter has complied with more government take down requests since Musk took over than it ever did before.
> This announcement does tell us w3c is a politically motivated org that disagrees with the new regime.
Yes, with the "Musk regime". He often likes to claim that he fights for freedom of speech, but even his authorized biography (from Isaacson) is pretty open about him not having a coherent concept of it, and after the acquisition he reinstated / banned accounts depending on his mood of the day. Musk doesn't like to bind himself by rules, but that turns out to be a pretty important thing for journalism.
Twitter as a reaction to more restrictive moderation policies doesn't really surprise me. Like I see little reason in censoring some of the comments to this submission:
2/3 comments are readable, one isn't even downvoted.
In addition, flags are generally user imposed. a Mod can flag whatever they desire, but enough users with enough karma can flag a comment, and enough flags will auto-flag until/unless a mod overrules it.
Neither of these are "censorship", even in the colloquial sense. One means someone disagrees with a comment, another means that it doesn't adhere to the spirit of the site.
In many ways, the nail is already in the coffin: navigating to the homepage no longer gives me relevant content.
From loading it just now: my top feed items are over 60% "interaction bait," i.e. ranked posts from accounts that I don't follow. When I turn off my adblocking rules, these are interspersed with bottom-barrel advertisements.
In other words: it's dead, but the corpse is still warm.
On the opposite end, I've never used Twitter before Musk's takeover. Now it's my #1 used social app. Incredibly funny, interesting and relevant tweets are on my timeline.
What surprised me was how QUICKLY tiktok died for me! It's so vanilla and boring these days, every second video is some ad of a chinese dude selling me some trinket. It's very strange. Instagram caught up with their reel tech, and instagram is just a wild west of content and comments, love it!
> On the opposite end, I've never used Twitter before Musk's takeover. Now it's my #1 used social app. Incredibly funny, interesting and relevant tweets are on my timeline.
This is consumption-side growth, not production-side. A similar thing happened with Facebook when it went all-in on algorithmic feeds: engagement went up, but actual organic content production went down.
Ultimately, whether or not you find that distinction interesting depends on how you use the Internet. But much of the demographic that found Twitter fun and useful before 2022 isn't interested in a reskinned Facebook or Instagram, which is what the current site is.
By organic, if you mean people close to me then yes. But I get that in whatsapp. Also normal people are boring af. There is power law distribution in people's interestingness as well, basically in every aspect, whether it be creativity, expertise and so on. These are skills which very few people work on and very few pursue it.
i only visit twitter because somebody's linked to it. i'm not interested in opting out of a large number of discussions just because they take place in part on twitter.
Not really. Twitter is where the influential people are, and where the day's narratives and news are shaped. That's why it was so important to Elon.
Even if you personally don't use Twitter, virtually all the contemporary media you consume is being molded by it. Even today. It'll take a lot more influential people to drop it or move elsewhere before it won't be significantly impacting your life.
In the US, at least. I don't know how seriously it's taken in other countries.
> My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.
How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter?
People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.
The influencers are the key, and unless you are a big influencer, leaving twitter as an individual will have negligible impact. The former is big enough that the latter will stay even when all this is happening. It is indeed a medium, but it's a medium becoming more and more compromised, as we've seen over the months
So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture.
It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.
Twitter is made up of people like you. It's entertainment, just like these comments were using now. Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level.
Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways.
It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion.
>Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level.
I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site.
I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
Tweets are what determines what ends up in the news, on Saturday Night Live, what you can safely say or not say at your job, what the late night shows are talking about, what questions get asked in debates, what gets printed in the newspapers in the morning, and what's included (or excluded) from popular movies and TV shows.
It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself.
And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
The main real world impacts I've seen from twitter are people being canceled after social media outrage and twitter as a backdoor to getting customer service.
Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters.
Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change.
Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform.
Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.
Either you believe these influential people are only so because of Twitter, or that Twitter is just a communication medium which is used by some people you seem influential.
I see more influential people posting on LinkedIn than Twitter, for example.
I don't think there is any one account other than Musk. Twitter is unique to each user and what matters may not matter to you. I'm sure for some people Taylor Swift leaving would be the nail in the coffin, but personally, I couldn't care less (I actually just had to check if she even had a Twitter account before posting).
If Twitter is going to be declared dead, I think it will likely be an avalanche type thing. It won't be any individual account that kills it, but rather a large amount of prominent accounts across multiple parts of our culture.
As I understand, people should be exposed to the stuff which they disagree with. This creates friction which platforms like Instagram, Tiktok don't like because people hop on to relax and not get their blood boiled. Negative feedback is good. It's a simple reasoning. Even in our brains, we have inhibitory neurons to put breaks on, otherwise we would all be in epileptic storms of neuronal firing. The world is not a utopia which reflects in digital interactions and should be used as data to correct everyone's behaviour rather than impose one viewpoint.
A product which does things that users don't like "for their own good" isn't a product that is going to attract as many users as one that "does stuff the users like".
The problem isn't nuanced debate isn't happening on the platform which will benefit everyone but metrics like "likes" which lead to gaming the metrics and race to the bottom. Facebook realized it too late. It is possible for people to benefit from listening to both sides and come out better informed but it is totally impossible to resurface those with primitive metrics like "likes". Hopefully LLMs will allow us to do that better. There should be some top-down handcrafting to steer in better directions. Apparently our brain has both top-down and bottom-up processes which meet at the middle to figure out ground truth.
I disagree with paleo-Republican fiscal policy, but in an academic "I see what you're getting at but don't think it's correct" way. It's interesting and instructive to have that debate, though. Even if I'm not persuaded, afterward I can appreciate the other person's viewpoints and respect that smart people might come to different conclusions than I do.
Some rando spouting that "Jews are taking over the world" or something else ridiculous isn't worth engaging or hearing out. I have no interest in a service exposing me to idiotic opinions like that against my will.
> This creates friction which platforms like Instagram, Tiktok don't like
All evidence seems to contradict this. People love viewing content that makes them mad (ref: fox news) and companies love the engagement they get from mad people.
My point more was on what kind of platfrom Instagram and Tiktok want themselves to be. Do they see themselves as a way to increase positive feedback of memes and interesting stuff or do they want people to fight within their walled garden. I have found lot of accounts making funny memes about serious topics and the comments are hilarious as well. So maybe these accounts are trying to be Colbert Report or Jon Stewart's Daily Show.
I can't speak for the world in general. But from the French perspective (surely at least 90% of French consume 90% of French content), politics and journalists hold the platform. Institutions are already starting to leave.
E.g, you can be sure that if Macron starts tweeting from mastodon (the gov has an official instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr), thousands of journalists and politics will switch.
Twitter was the closest thing we had to a centralized, yet "distributed", one-stop shop for news.
If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.
It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.
Unfortunately that didn't last for long.
What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.
The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.
Why not? The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see. It's Twitter reframed as a regression back towards RSS and the blogosphere, which people here should be into; it's like that scene in High Fidelity, Mastodon picked up where your precious Google Reader left off.
The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!
> The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see.
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
I read this thread and it's not really clear what it's about. It seems to be about the need to mute and block people explicitly. I haven't had to do that much with Mastodon. I had to do it a lot on Twitter, and by all accounts it has gotten much, much worse.
I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.
My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
Personally I couldn't stand to use Mastodon without a lot of keyword blocks and blocked users.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.
There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem
and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.
I have never had that problem, nor have I personally seen anyone have that problem.
The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.
I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.
>I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.
I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.
we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.
It's funny. We yearn for the days when everybody had a quirky website at ~username on their university server, but all those sites disappeared when you graduated.
Single-user instances, maybe not. But running a Mastodon instance for a couple of thousand people is a lot more resource intensive than running a blog or a XMPP server for the same amount of users.
>my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.
And why is your instance shutting down?
-----
from link:
>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people
I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.
>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.
Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.
> I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub?
To allow others to see your posts, yes.
But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).
Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.
> And why is your instance shutting down?
This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.
> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.
I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.
> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.
I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.
I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.
But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.
Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.
>I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum.
On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.
I don't understand why it should be the one or the other.
RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter.
And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing).
Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
>I don't understand why it should be the one or the other.
In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue.
RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0]
>Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics
The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform.
But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this.
> I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.
Yes, it's just a firehose, it doesn't curate or boost anything. I want interesting things to be surfaced. Twitter/X is still pretty good at this and it's why millions continue to use it.
>What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.
That makes Threads probably a much closer approximation of what the average person cares about. You have to be like five levels deep into bizarre internet drama to be glued to your phone to get live updates about Sam Altman's and Helen Toner's employment status.
> What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is
I'm not sure that twitter added much other than allowing us to spectate the whole thing in realtime. I don't think it impacted the outcome in any meaningful way or provided us a ton of useful context. I actually worry that the endless speculation (and intentional misinformation at times) can be a bit dangerous. Kind of like when news stations went 24/7 and then grasped for anything at all to put on the screen to fill all that airtime.
Twitter/X is still the de facto global real-time news platform.
If 5% of X's top users exited to a different platform, X users would just screenshot and redistribute their noteworthy content on X and it would be business as usual.
Probably, but at that point it means there is a new competitor and some people may jump closer to where the content is being made. Worst case, it means you don't have to stay on Twitter.
I say that's a huge win, when you shift your lens away from "the destructon of twitter" and instead "options outside of twitter"
Your argument might apply if the owner of the site formerly known as Twitter respected the concept of calling people by their preferred names, but he doesn't, not even in the case of his own child. So, nice try.
Wow. The "offense" of calling a site that uses the domain "twitter.com" Twitter is just as bad as refusing to call a person by their preferred name? This is "an eye for an eye"?
> Why is it that when people change names, calling them by their old name is near a crime. But when a service renames, and some rebellious part of the world doesn't feel like going with that, misnaming a service for months is totally fine?
> I know, the service doesn't have any feelings to hurt, but...
Well, imagine the alternative: "W3C Leaves X". I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to figure out that X, the social network, is what is meant here. X can be interpreted in different ways and there's not enough context available.
It turns out that punching up and punching down really are opposites: at first glance they may look categorically similar, but the direction makes a huge difference.
I don't think it's even that. Despite the rhetoric, corporations aren't people. They are made of people you should (mostly) be polite to, but the entity currently known by X is not a person.
It's a matter of respect. No one is expected to respect a corporation.
Seeing these news right after deactivating your Twitter account. :)
Twitter is not a platform any more it used to be, a lot of fake accounts with blue ticks and ads after ads.
I just wonder what was Elon's original idea with Twitter, buy big social network, rename it to "X", show to the world that "Yes, I can", then destroy it gradually from inside?
My personal little conspiracy theory with zero proof: he wanted to destroy Twitter all along. But he cannot just shut it down, I think that would make him vulnerable to some legal battles. Much better and much more sadistic to gradually destroy the good name of Twitter.
It’s a silly theory not simply because he’s ruining his own image and he will never be able to get another loan again, and investors will not trust him, nor the public, but also because he’s personally dependent on Twitter. Twitter dying would hurt him more than losing a child. Or a few.
Woooow. Have you lost credit worthiness and a child and can do such a comparison? It feels like trolling, making such insensitive comparisons. I hope this is not based on your personal experience... That would suck on multiple levels.
Secondly, my theory is, it's all worth it to him. (It's called an obsession, or being crazy.)
No way. Elon has, for a long time, relied heavily on Twitter to drum up interest. He basically has no advertising budget at Tesla and SpaceX. My guess is that he saw his lack of control of Twitter as a liability. after all, things he or others have posted have increased or decreased the stock price of Tesla by billions. not to mention that if he owns the platform, he can juice his own posts which he started doing immediately. so I think it was that mixed with some ego and stupidity and impulsivity and maybe some drugs mixed in there.
Free speech is truly under attack. I am glad Elon has a platform that allows controversial ideas to be heard. Every other platform is in lockstep with the woke and politically correct crowd. You can't have science without truly dissenting opinions. You can't have a democracy without free speech and ideas that are very unpopular. I hope people continue using Twitter just to support free speech.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] thread[1] https://brutaldon.org/about
Although it should be possible to whip up a text-friendly view of a server you're not logged into assuming they allow non-authenticated access to the API.
Unfortunately /embed is not very useful.
But sarcasm aside, JS is a web standard, just like HTML and CSS. While I understand the opinion of people who don't want to execute JS in their browser, I'm also highly sympathetic to devs who want to use things that are enabled by default in all modern browsers.
... and this is neither.
And in any case, graceful degradation is a good thing to shoot for, but far from a requirement. Mastodon is Free Software. If someone wants to fork it and make a version that replaces frontend JS with server side rendering, that's legal and fine.
So, I think there's potential, but it's definitely not ideal.
[1] https://fedidb.org/software [2] https://fedidb.org/software/smithereen [3] https://friends.grishka.me/w3c@w3c.social
If you tell people to vote with their feet and attention, and they do, don't be mad at the outcome. I totally support Elon running Twitter however he wants, it's his to do as he pleases, but he is unable to hold participants hostage on the platform (which both he [1] [2] and some cohort of people who support him in some measure find unpleasant).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38470762
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981928/elon-musk-ad-bo...
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant by "hostage". Not sure who is being held hostage.
Being pro-mega corporations moderating what conversations on the internet is allowable is a weird thing to be in vogue. Telling companies that don't want to be associated with the content to just walk away is the right choice, even if it hurts the business. I'd also rather see Twitter die than Disney and Co being the arbiters of discussion. We already have Facebook and Reddit for that, and neither are any better for generating healthy societal discourse.
That doesn't sound like "if you can't handle freedom of expression on the platform then don't use the platform." To me. They AREN'T using the platform and he's mad about it.
The stretches people to through to get upset about him is bizarre. He did enough real shit to dislike him, no need to obsessively twist everything into what it isn't just to have new things to get upset about.
yes, we call that hypocrisy. Spouting one sentiment ("you are free to do whatever and I respect that") and then the opposite when it works againt you ("you are blackmailing me by leaving the platform and pulling your ad money. This is an invasion of speech"). It's not the worst thing he's done, but the most relevant thing to the post submitted here.
> He's saying if you can't handle freedom of expression on the platform then don't use the platform.
Sounds like we are in agreement he is not saying that. He wants advertisers to use the platform regardless of if they can "handle it". And is indeed upset they are not.
I highly doubt Disney etc would suddenly start coming back if he was simply polite in response to them making a very public statement about leaving. Obviously they want him to make concessions in censorship that he finds untenable and his response was to fuck off if that's their demands.
He didn't buy Twitter just to run it the same way as @jack and say yes to whatever powerful company/gov agency demands of them.
One of the many ironies is, of course, that musk's twitter says "yes" to government requests far more frequently than jack's did.
In case you're wondering, this is one of the many reasons people dislike him in relation to twitter, he talks a lot about "free speech" but his actions are consistently about supporting only the speech he himself makes.
I observed Twitter/X was recently loosening previous owner's restrictions and censorship. I'm apparently misinformed, so how is enabling previously banned accounts hurting free speech?
I never said it was. That is a choice. Elon doesn't like advertisers pulling their spend (free speech) and the general public leaving (free speech and association). He wants to demand an audience under his terms (participants must stay, advertisers must continue to spend under his terms), leading to this natural experiment. I apologize if that wasn't clear from my turn of phrase with regards to being held hostage.
Twitter will die, Elon will take the L (but probably not learn from it until some future wealth destruction event), and everyone will move on to other forums and digital third spaces. Enjoy the show.
(I'm using 'free speech' outside of the governmental context - the government can't abridge free speech, but outside of that free speech is simply a good idea.)
If you have speech others don't like, be prepared to get your wallet out and pay for it yourself. No one is obligated to financially support speech they don't agree with. You might believe that to "name and shame companies that take actions that try to restrict other peoples' free speech" is going to result in some backlash against these companies; it won't except in some small, immaterial population. Let Elon put comms out and say, "If you don't directly pay for Twitter, Twitter will die" and lets see how many people show up to pay their expenses and fiat behind their belief system.
> but outside of that free speech is simply a good idea.
This is an opinion, and other takes are going to be based on the limits involved [6].
> 65% of Americans support tech companies moderating false information online and 55% support the U.S. government taking these steps. These shares have increased since 2018.
> Americans are even more supportive of tech companies (71%) and the U.S. government (60%) restricting extremely violent content online.
> Democrats are more supportive than Republicans of tech companies and the U.S. government restricting extremely violent content and false information online. The partisan gap in support for restricting false information has grown substantially since 2018.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/media/twitter-musk-journalist...
[2] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/twitter-elon-musk...
[4] https://time.com/6229960/twitter-bans-accounts-elon-musk-imp...
[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-suspends-user...
[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/20/most-amer...
The alternative is having a random selection of highly liked (and, often, very old) posts show up on their profile for logged-out users. Setting their account to protected is an easy and effective way of making that go away -- and it also prevents users from following an account that's no longer in use.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90933866/elon-musk-x-stealing-mo...
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twit...
I'm hoping Elon gets kicked out like at PayPal and Twitter is able to become less cringe.
It's like opting out of the genepool. Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com
Even the most vocal Spaceman haters come back whenever something big is happening. This was reaffirmed again recently with the entire OpenAI CEO saga.
Add to that community notes, the single best social media innovation.
And community notes is a nice addition but it isn't a replacement for moderation.
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
Which it makes it unsuitable for fast paced topics. This has been repeatedly demonstrated.
It would help if they sent a notification to everyone who liked or interacted with such a tweet, to give them the community notes update. And or resurface it in the timeline.
At the very least, he's an enabler.
And sometimes that's a perfectly fine thing to do.
>Twitter/X is still where everything happens and where you get closest to the source.
Please explain why this concept would be vital for W3C, and how it might be detrimental to their existence to opt out.
It's not where the W3C happens, clearly. That statement becomes less true by the day as more and more accounts leave.
You misspelled cesspool.
they aren't coming back because it's twitter, they come back because they need to reach a lot of people. That isn't unique to twitter in the grand scheme of things, it's just the current crown bearer.
I make this assumption because there are plenty of services that can post to multiple social media accounts, and even cross-posting really wouldn't take that much effort- maybe an additional minute per post if you have to log in each time.
They're purposely limiting their reach, and I see no reasoning listed so I assume not everyone there is proud of their "why".
And they should feel no obligation to support a private, closed source company.
And most people smart enough to know what the W3C is are also smart enough to know that antisemitism isn't political.
That leaves everyone using it with no non-political options -- there are political implications whether you stay or go.
Leaving it now (when a bunch of others are going too and the front man has recently been dropping bombs) is probably the less political option -- especially in the long term if you think the site is going to get more radical.
Bonus points for moving to a federated alternative, since you can move away from big tech (which is more of a principled stand and/or tactical move than a political statement, IMO.)
This announcement does tell us w3c is a politically motivated org that disagrees with the new regime.
Yes, with the "Musk regime". He often likes to claim that he fights for freedom of speech, but even his authorized biography (from Isaacson) is pretty open about him not having a coherent concept of it, and after the acquisition he reinstated / banned accounts depending on his mood of the day. Musk doesn't like to bind himself by rules, but that turns out to be a pretty important thing for journalism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548128
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548531
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548342
This looks more like people making views they don't like or agree with invisible rather than the posts breaking specific guidelines.
In addition, flags are generally user imposed. a Mod can flag whatever they desire, but enough users with enough karma can flag a comment, and enough flags will auto-flag until/unless a mod overrules it.
Neither of these are "censorship", even in the colloquial sense. One means someone disagrees with a comment, another means that it doesn't adhere to the spirit of the site.
Anyone who is posting just on Twitter is limiting reach. Twitter is closed internet.
W3C posting to open platform is not limiting reach.
Being on the platform is considered political to some and leaving the platform is considered political to others.
All things considered, I think they did fine by not making a big fuss about it. They don't seem to be looking for pats on the back.
Please quote the part of W3C's announcement that discusses their political views with regards to Twitter.
From loading it just now: my top feed items are over 60% "interaction bait," i.e. ranked posts from accounts that I don't follow. When I turn off my adblocking rules, these are interspersed with bottom-barrel advertisements.
In other words: it's dead, but the corpse is still warm.
What surprised me was how QUICKLY tiktok died for me! It's so vanilla and boring these days, every second video is some ad of a chinese dude selling me some trinket. It's very strange. Instagram caught up with their reel tech, and instagram is just a wild west of content and comments, love it!
This is consumption-side growth, not production-side. A similar thing happened with Facebook when it went all-in on algorithmic feeds: engagement went up, but actual organic content production went down.
Ultimately, whether or not you find that distinction interesting depends on how you use the Internet. But much of the demographic that found Twitter fun and useful before 2022 isn't interested in a reskinned Facebook or Instagram, which is what the current site is.
Even if you personally don't use Twitter, virtually all the contemporary media you consume is being molded by it. Even today. It'll take a lot more influential people to drop it or move elsewhere before it won't be significantly impacting your life.
In the US, at least. I don't know how seriously it's taken in other countries.
Take two weeks off, you'll realize that it really isn't that important. Most people don't use it.
My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.
How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter?
People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.
So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture.
It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.
Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways.
It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion.
Tweets are just entertaining noise
I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site.
I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself.
And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters.
Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change.
Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform.
Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.
Either you believe these influential people are only so because of Twitter, or that Twitter is just a communication medium which is used by some people you seem influential.
I see more influential people posting on LinkedIn than Twitter, for example.
If Twitter is going to be declared dead, I think it will likely be an avalanche type thing. It won't be any individual account that kills it, but rather a large amount of prominent accounts across multiple parts of our culture.
I disagree with paleo-Republican fiscal policy, but in an academic "I see what you're getting at but don't think it's correct" way. It's interesting and instructive to have that debate, though. Even if I'm not persuaded, afterward I can appreciate the other person's viewpoints and respect that smart people might come to different conclusions than I do.
Some rando spouting that "Jews are taking over the world" or something else ridiculous isn't worth engaging or hearing out. I have no interest in a service exposing me to idiotic opinions like that against my will.
absolutely not. See Michael B. Tager's quote about the nazi bar:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
All evidence seems to contradict this. People love viewing content that makes them mad (ref: fox news) and companies love the engagement they get from mad people.
E.g, you can be sure that if Macron starts tweeting from mastodon (the gov has an official instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr), thousands of journalists and politics will switch.
But maybe there are more nails, any will do
If you wanted to keep up with what's happening around you, either in general or in a specific topic, it was the place to be.
It was possible to hear directly from the people who are reporting on the news you care about, but also from the people the news were about. And INTERACT with them directly.
Unfortunately that didn't last for long.
What the openai debacle showed us very clearly is how important the platform still is despite all the damage. Threads was as if it didn't even exist.
The thing is, none of the fediverse networks who try to replace Twitter would be able to accomplish that same mission.
The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437
I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.
I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.
My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.
There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...
and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.
The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.
I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.
lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.
I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.
we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.
Are you paying for it? I've been using omg.lol for some time and I'm not concerned about that mastodon instance disappearing anytime soon.
I've been donating to the instance, yes. Although the reason this time is to do with UK's new laws on social media sites.
This will keep happening until people realize that:
- there is a significant cost to properly manage an instance
- there is a significant cost to develop sustainably the software
- there is a significant cost to deal with moderation
and that these costs can not be covered by donations from a small minority.
I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.
And why is your instance shutting down?
-----
from link:
>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people
I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.
>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.
Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.
To allow others to see your posts, yes.
But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).
Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.
> And why is your instance shutting down?
This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.
> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.
I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.
> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.
I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.
I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.
But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.
Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.
nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum.
On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.
RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter.
And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing).
Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue.
RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0]
>Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics
The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform.
But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this.
0: https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed
EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/
Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.
That makes Threads probably a much closer approximation of what the average person cares about. You have to be like five levels deep into bizarre internet drama to be glued to your phone to get live updates about Sam Altman's and Helen Toner's employment status.
Key people covering OpenAI e.g. Alex Heath, Kara Swisher, Casey Newton were all posting on Threads first.
It was then re-posted on X.
I apparently missed this. What important role did Twitter play there?
I'm not sure that twitter added much other than allowing us to spectate the whole thing in realtime. I don't think it impacted the outcome in any meaningful way or provided us a ton of useful context. I actually worry that the endless speculation (and intentional misinformation at times) can be a bit dangerous. Kind of like when news stations went 24/7 and then grasped for anything at all to put on the screen to fill all that airtime.
Twitter/X is still the de facto global real-time news platform.
If 5% of X's top users exited to a different platform, X users would just screenshot and redistribute their noteworthy content on X and it would be business as usual.
You can't beat the network effects.
I say that's a huge win, when you shift your lens away from "the destructon of twitter" and instead "options outside of twitter"
> I know, the service doesn't have any feelings to hurt, but...
But what? You answered your own question.
It's a matter of respect. No one is expected to respect a corporation.
Twitter is not a platform any more it used to be, a lot of fake accounts with blue ticks and ads after ads.
I just wonder what was Elon's original idea with Twitter, buy big social network, rename it to "X", show to the world that "Yes, I can", then destroy it gradually from inside?
Secondly, my theory is, it's all worth it to him. (It's called an obsession, or being crazy.)