Contrast this with another story on the first page this morning: "Google are deliberately breaking YouTube when it detects you're running Firefox" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388983).
Open-source content on the Fediverse will become more critical as corporate oligarchs continue to exert their influence.
That's just a 6 month old reddit post by a random dude. If they're blocking firefox, they're doing it very badly, because I just spent all morning watching football highlight videos running firefox on linux, adblocked, sponsorblocked (https://sponsor.ajay.app/), forging my referer, blocking cookies, with userscripts to unlock private and age-restricted videos, without being logged in.
With my setup, youtube can be broken for months on end. It's running like silk right now.
Of course. How does the quality of life for us plebes protect or enhance the wealth of these people? It doesn't, therefore it's not worth mentioning (and may even be worth fighting).
Nothing, it's Musk drones rushing to defend their god. The parent leaves out that Musk fired an engineer in a meeting where he demanded to know why his tweets weren't getting enough engagement.
Why do you guys get so vitriolic? The parent is attempting to logically explain. What is the need for making intense moral characterizations? Don't you see the dichotomy here?
Well, the author of the article presumes to know his intent in asking for that change. Could be narcissism, or it could be an engineer running a test. The truth is the author doesn't know what his intent was.
The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.
In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.
Your numbers are a bit off. It's 7m total up from ~5.6m before all this, not active. The active count historically drops back down to ~100k after booms, but this one does seem different and sustained due to the different circumstances. It's usually a small burp in a specific community. It's never been all of Twitter's most active users from across all communities considering alternatives.
It's one thing to get users. It's another to keep them. Mastodon's user experience is godawful. It might be an IRC replacement for nerds, but it'll never be Twitter.
The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.
The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user.
Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
> have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
Excluding or severely limiting virality is the essential criterion for any Twitter replacement.
That said, though I like and use Mastodon (as I do Linux), it is just not going to get Twitter-scale mass adoption. It is not, and believing to the contrary is just obvious delusion.
Maybe post.news will. It's worth a try. But if it doesn't attenuate virality, it won't improve on Twitter enough to be worth the trouble.
Twitter became Twitter by branding functionality that everyone with an email address already had access to, and slapping a simpler interface on it. Could that be replicated? The historical success of innumerable chat startups suggest it could be.
The successor to Twitter has an advantage that Twitter didn't have, which is an existing social graph ready to migrate. If a critical mass of the Twitter graph moves to Mastodon, and the interface and experience can be made as simple as Twitter, it has a chance.
I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example:
You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.
Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.
The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.
Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.
Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.
Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out.
How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
And, once you have completed that section, i invite you to click around the different sections available at the top nav of the above website. I have no affiliation, but have found it handy to give out to newcomers to the Fediverse - regardless if such newcomers are using the Mastodon *software*, or pixelfed, or funkwhale instances, etc. The "Beginners Start Here" area of the website is a section i highly suggest you and all newcomers to spend time reviewing.
> ...How much time will the average twitter user invest into this?
I'm detecting in your statement that there is an assumption that the commercial socials (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the Fediverse have the same goals....but i believe they differ. Most instances on the Fedi are cool with being village-sized communities that can easily interconnect with all/many other village-sized communities...The Fedi's goal is not to have a single, massive commercializable silo. There is no such overacrhing goial to scale up at all cost, as might exist for commercial services. While, there are no doubt paid Fedi instances that legitimately are commercial by their definiton and operation, their goals are not as audacious as the entities coming out of Silicon Valley. So, if some newcomers struggle during onboarding, while i never want to see people struggle, maybe its not the end of the world if newcomers have to invest a little time in learning the ways and customs of what amounts to a new world for them.
> ...I'm just...skeptical it can take off...
You have every right to your opinion of course! That being said, as I noted above, the Fedi cares less if it "takes off". Its goals are more about quality of connections rather than numbers of connections. Richer and more fulfilling interactions are sought after, while brazen increases of follower counts are not.
I should also clarify facts here: Mastodon - the software and initial instance/server - only started life late 2016. While the greater Fediverse (that mastodon is only one part of) has been in existence since around 2008. Yes, that's right, none of this is new! Not the networks, nor the latest wave of newcomers. So, while you (and some other newcomers) doubt this will take off - well before this latest wave of newcomers - there have been already millions of active users interacting with each other for almost a decade and a half.
If you're willing to invest a little time/effort, then please by all means do participate on the Fediverse, and enjoy. But, if you don't think it is worth it, that's fine too; no harm, no foul.
Thanks for the kind reply and pointers to information. But if the Fediverse is not trying to take off, how can you you describe it as “mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.”? This new thing has ambitions at Twitter scale and beyond.
The Fediverse en masse - and most participants that i have met on the Fedi in my 13 or so years on this thing - are not trying to "take off". However, the beauty of the freedom of the underlying protocols and other mechanisms like the software employed (with mastodon being only one example), offer the ability to scale up *if so desired*...But, again, my experience tells me that the vast majority like it as-is. For Mr. Bardin, while he might wish to scale his effort up to Twitter-like scale, i merely wished that he used some of the open source software already used and developed on the Fedi....with the benefit of more and continued universal interaction. There is already precedent, such that the mastodon.social instance is maybe one of the biggest if not the biggest instance on the Fedi (Of course, i know its not twitter scale, but its still pretty huge relatively speaking)....but the size of a big instance doesn't stop other instances from happlily staying small, but while still allowing for interaction among all. That's all i'm saying.
Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown.
Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed.
Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
IMHO, Bluesky is nothing more than Dorsey's attempt to clone what Matrix was set out to do. And truthfully, Matrix already has already achieved a great deal; namely passing the 60 million user mark back in June of 2022, 70 million by October. Some major names have adopted it as well, including Mozilla, KDE and several organizations in the German and French governments, including a large German Healthcare org.
Matrix's code is independently audited, and they just completed the 2nd of those earlier this year. They did have some Cryptographic issue several months ago, but it was fixed quickly, and was on an old code base. The replacement is apparently close to completion, at which point that system will be submitted for an independent cryptographic audit.
I will admit that BlueSky does seem to incorporate the recently announced decentralized identifier (DID) spec from the W3C. The DID Method specs are still a hot mess, and there's no guarantee that the W3C is even capable of navigating that corporate 'I was here first' minefield. But I still have to tip my hat to BlueSky for doing it though. Given identity is so fundamental to these types of things, I suspect it'll be a damn mess incorporating it into existing protocols.
A lot of people, not nearly all of whom are technical users, which pretty clearly goes against the narrative that Mastodon is too difficult to use. Although to be fair a lot of people are also complaining about it, but the lesson here seems to be that people are more willing to put up with complexity and inconvenience than they're given credit for.
That it's still a minority of Twitter users doesn't make it a failure for Mastodon. This isn't a zero-sum game.
It kiiiind of is a zero sum game, since if you’re signed up for both, you’ll naturally use the one that gives you better results for your chosen metric. For twitter it’s usually engagement, so if you get a lot of engagement on twitter and little on the fediverse, you’ll end up focusing on twitter.
Assuming that Twitter doesn't crash and burn in the next week or so, and assuming Mastodon doesn't draw enough users to create its own network effect, sure. But then, people don't always act according to a single metric. Mastodon doesn't have ads and it doesn't follow a single moderation policy. I can see people sticking with both for different reasons.
If you think that Mastodon cannot be bought and ruined by billionaires, you are wrong.
It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
Sure, there are embrace-and-extinguish scenarios with decentralized protocols. But the alternative is that you’re always in the grip of some billionaire’s fever dream right from the start. Mastodon is live and resilient right now. The future is up to the users.
It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.
Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.
Well, what IS needed is a straightforward registration process you can point EVERYONE to, and they just go do it in two minutes and get on with their lives without spending 30 minutes learning about instances and fediverses and activitypubs.
Maybe that’s what we need but it’s definitely not what people want and it will never succeed in its current form. The whole motivation for a lot of people is to get their voice out to as many people as possible, not to indulge their interests in specific niches.
Only former Twitter employees can join that server, it's not meant to be a place for users who want to emulate the Twitter biases or something. It's meant to be a community of Twitter alumni.
