what is the incentive for anyone but the technology adopter or politically inclined to move from Twitter to Mastodon? For almost all users, Twitter is free, and has all the users?
The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
Most of the interesting data mining happens at the client, not the server.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
At the server level, nothing. What they're not getting though is the tracker data from all the _other_ places that the users of that instance go to. It really is refreshing to pull up uBlock, and see... zero. Just nothing at all that needs to be blocked.
Nothing, really, except that there's less data to mine. And, of course, if it's not part of the base software, they have to do all the coding themselves. And to what end? If they run ads, users will bail to another server, because they can.
They could also show ads in some fashion I suppose. Only thing you could do is move to another server - but at least you can do something other than leave the whole platform.
The new owner has a lot to say about Twitter being a "public square". Not just a public square, but the public square. In the real world, a public square works (in general) because it is owned and operated by the public, not by a single private, for-profit corporation run by a megalomaniac. Twitter was terrible to begin with and we should never have allowed it to happen, and I do kind of disagree with the idea that Musk's takeover has changed all that much at this point (beyond abusing thousands of employees and somehow politicizing the myth of the 10x developer). I think what it has done is provided a big enough spark that a lot of people noticed this is kind of a problem.
For people that use Twitter but care about their public square on the internet being slightly more sustainable and human-scale, Mastodon's model makes a lot of sense. Mastodon provides the tool for building your networks, making it possible for small organizations to run instances basically as utilities. I'm particularly excited for the co-ops I've seen in this space.
a single private, for-profit corporation run by a megalomaniac
Can you be a bit more specific? This literally applies to the top 6 media corporations, Amazon, several banks, and pretty much every other large corporation.
I moved to Mastodon for political / philosophical reasons (I favor decentralized infrastructure, grass-roots initiatives, libre software, etc.) but I'm staying ... because the content is better. On Twitter I get memes, drama, crypto scams, politics, tons of content from people that I'm not following, and, did I mention memes? On Mastodon I find precisely the stuff that I was hoping to find on Twitter when I joined 10 years ago: information from experts about the things they are experts on. Is Mastodon going to replace Twitter? I hope not! I see Twitter's role as giving a home to junk content, so that people in other places like Mastodon can have a some fun.
Gab is the sink for junk content and eye-bleach-worthy content. Twitter is a distant second. Thank the lord for Gab and Twitter for taking the hit to spare the other online communities a bit.
I think the new owner has certainly been the spark here but there are real benefits to moving too that people are starting to notice. Replies here already cover a bunch of them but I’d like to echo the “algorithm” point too: so far my experience has been substantially less toxic and I put that in large part down to not being fire-hosed with content designed to enrage me every time I log in.
So far my experience is reminding me of 1990’s style connecting and chatting with interesting random people from around the world who are friendly and quirky, and I find being there a “nice” experience.
twitter is almost completely hollowed out for me already, so that's all the incentive i need. additionally, i don't want to participate in a social network where the only moderating philosophy is "is it legal or not". that's just bad community management.
Because Twitter has all the users, it is the pool that politicians, marketing consultants, and scammers can most efficiently piss in.
If they have to split their efforts among 10,000 independent groups, maybe the EV-chasers will go away and people will talk about things other than the latest scandal or movie.
With automation, targeting micro-communities is easy enough, especially when they all speak the same protocol. At the same time, you don't have a massive anti-spam team defending the platform, but instances can probably introduce small variations (like a honey-pot url-field in a contact form that immediately cuts spam frequency by 99% for most sites).
Twitter is heavily in debt. It's losing more money to interest than it has been earning, even before Elon shat on advertisers.
I don't expect Twitter to go bankrupt, but it will need desperate measures to stay afloat. When it'll come to "either we do this or we go bust", they won't stop at anything. It's likely going to be a massive sell-off of user privacy on a scale that will make people run to Facebook for safety.
For a long time, Twitter/Reddit/FB have been echo chambers of one view and banning everyone questioning even a little bit. At this point, I think everything is better than those, small communities of real people focused on intesrests. G+ had a lot of inspiring REAL people and communities and I see that Mastodon taking that place while it is not yet infected by the mass-trolling campaigns yet.
Has it still? A lot of interesting people I used to follow on Twitter either don't post much there anymore or straight out deleted their accounts when moving to Mastodon. I haven't deleted mine, but I certainly feel much less inclined to cross-post things to Twitter anymore as well.
Twitter has all the users but is rather manipulative and high profile users start to form a toxic pseudo-relationship with the corporate(I’m convinced it’s mutual). So like a typical future ex they tend to mention Mastodon now and then.
The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
My favorite might be Ben Thompson’s rather bearish post, which argues essentially that Twitter is a very unpleasant product that most people do not want to use, but is extremely appealing and addictive to a small minority of us with significant personality flaws.
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".
Comments
what is the incentive for anyone but the technology adopter or politically inclined to move from Twitter to Mastodon? For almost all users, Twitter is free, and has all the users?
The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
- No ads
- No data mining
- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/web/@raphael/1093815543157191...
What stops the owner of a mastodon server from performing "data mining"?
Scale. Nobody will pay you for the deets on the 500 users on your instance unless you are 0.1-percenter invite-only.
What’s to stop them from data mining ever server they federate with?
Like, especially, a bad actor could run several large instances with no public relationship and so all kinds of correlation.
Most of the interesting data mining happens at the client, not the server.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
I’m thinking of stuff much more insidious than ad targeting - things like de-anonymizing
Then you do threat modeling in the same way as you would with email.
At the server level, nothing. What they're not getting though is the tracker data from all the _other_ places that the users of that instance go to. It really is refreshing to pull up uBlock, and see... zero. Just nothing at all that needs to be blocked.
Nothing, really, except that there's less data to mine. And, of course, if it's not part of the base software, they have to do all the coding themselves. And to what end? If they run ads, users will bail to another server, because they can.
They could also show ads in some fashion I suppose. Only thing you could do is move to another server - but at least you can do something other than leave the whole platform.
Thanks for sharing that @rglullis
The new owner has a lot to say about Twitter being a "public square". Not just a public square, but the public square. In the real world, a public square works (in general) because it is owned and operated by the public, not by a single private, for-profit corporation run by a megalomaniac. Twitter was terrible to begin with and we should never have allowed it to happen, and I do kind of disagree with the idea that Musk's takeover has changed all that much at this point (beyond abusing thousands of employees and somehow politicizing the myth of the 10x developer). I think what it has done is provided a big enough spark that a lot of people noticed this is kind of a problem.
For people that use Twitter but care about their public square on the internet being slightly more sustainable and human-scale, Mastodon's model makes a lot of sense. Mastodon provides the tool for building your networks, making it possible for small organizations to run instances basically as utilities. I'm particularly excited for the co-ops I've seen in this space.
Can you be a bit more specific? This literally applies to the top 6 media corporations, Amazon, several banks, and pretty much every other large corporation.
The reason the wording is good is because the criticism applies to all of them.
The use by Musk of the term "public square" when he's running a private corporation on his own whims is what is causing him problems.
If you haven't noticed a difference on Twitter, you are probably cis gender. The transphobia is out of control
I moved to Mastodon for political / philosophical reasons (I favor decentralized infrastructure, grass-roots initiatives, libre software, etc.) but I'm staying ... because the content is better. On Twitter I get memes, drama, crypto scams, politics, tons of content from people that I'm not following, and, did I mention memes? On Mastodon I find precisely the stuff that I was hoping to find on Twitter when I joined 10 years ago: information from experts about the things they are experts on. Is Mastodon going to replace Twitter? I hope not! I see Twitter's role as giving a home to junk content, so that people in other places like Mastodon can have a some fun.
Gab is the sink for junk content and eye-bleach-worthy content. Twitter is a distant second. Thank the lord for Gab and Twitter for taking the hit to spare the other online communities a bit.
I think the new owner has certainly been the spark here but there are real benefits to moving too that people are starting to notice. Replies here already cover a bunch of them but I’d like to echo the “algorithm” point too: so far my experience has been substantially less toxic and I put that in large part down to not being fire-hosed with content designed to enrage me every time I log in.
So far my experience is reminding me of 1990’s style connecting and chatting with interesting random people from around the world who are friendly and quirky, and I find being there a “nice” experience.
twitter is almost completely hollowed out for me already, so that's all the incentive i need. additionally, i don't want to participate in a social network where the only moderating philosophy is "is it legal or not". that's just bad community management.
Because Twitter has all the users, it is the pool that politicians, marketing consultants, and scammers can most efficiently piss in.
If they have to split their efforts among 10,000 independent groups, maybe the EV-chasers will go away and people will talk about things other than the latest scandal or movie.
With automation, targeting micro-communities is easy enough, especially when they all speak the same protocol. At the same time, you don't have a massive anti-spam team defending the platform, but instances can probably introduce small variations (like a honey-pot url-field in a contact form that immediately cuts spam frequency by 99% for most sites).
Twitter is heavily in debt. It's losing more money to interest than it has been earning, even before Elon shat on advertisers.
I don't expect Twitter to go bankrupt, but it will need desperate measures to stay afloat. When it'll come to "either we do this or we go bust", they won't stop at anything. It's likely going to be a massive sell-off of user privacy on a scale that will make people run to Facebook for safety.
For a long time, Twitter/Reddit/FB have been echo chambers of one view and banning everyone questioning even a little bit. At this point, I think everything is better than those, small communities of real people focused on intesrests. G+ had a lot of inspiring REAL people and communities and I see that Mastodon taking that place while it is not yet infected by the mass-trolling campaigns yet.
What's that one view?
Has it still? A lot of interesting people I used to follow on Twitter either don't post much there anymore or straight out deleted their accounts when moving to Mastodon. I haven't deleted mine, but I certainly feel much less inclined to cross-post things to Twitter anymore as well.
Twitter has all the users but is rather manipulative and high profile users start to form a toxic pseudo-relationship with the corporate(I’m convinced it’s mutual). So like a typical future ex they tend to mention Mastodon now and then.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".
#mosstodon
If you dislike social media switching to an inferior product could help you cut down on usage.