Mastodon

[Acitta]

Brittlestar takes on Mastodon. https://youtu.be/pzp9n8B-M6s

[dtkvictim]

And people understand the distributed nature just fine...if you can understand email or your phone providers you can understand this.

Disclaimer: I don't know what Mastodon is, nor do I care (just like Twitter).

But this claim does not help whatever you are arguing. People absolutely do not understand the distributed nature of email and phone networks, and being able to sign up with a phone or email provider is not proof that they can. The average person has learned a specific process and workflow out of necessity, but by no means understands why or how it works. Social media does not have the learning pressures of a necessity, thankfully (for now at least).

Counter.Social's software is a fork of Mastodon. It used to be federated, but the founder of Mastodon didn't like that CS blocked certain countries, so many Mastodon nodes blocked CS, so the owner (the Jester) stopped federating and went his own way. 
The Short History of CounterSocial and Mastodon from The Jester's point of view.
Wikipedia article about The Jester.
The Notorious Hacker Who’s Trying to Fix Social Media

Counter.Social seems to be good, but it is privately owned by one individual with his own idiosyncratic ideas of how things should be. I am skeptical about that.

Ah, constant incompatible forks of a decentralized technology, a tried and proven recipe for the mass adoption required by social networks.

---

And be honest, are you all looking for Twitter alternatives because you truly believe it will cease to exist? Afraid of discomfort from more lax content moderation? Think it be used to promote a particular billionaire's propaganda? Something else?

[danbrotherston]

And people understand the distributed nature just fine...if you can understand email or your phone providers you can understand this.

Disclaimer: I don't know what Mastodon is, nor do I care (just like Twitter).

But this claim does not help whatever you are arguing. People absolutely do not understand the distributed nature of email and phone networks, and being able to sign up with a phone or email provider is not proof that they can. The average person has learned a specific process and workflow out of necessity, but by no means understands why or how it works. Social media does not have the learning pressures of a necessity, thankfully (for now at least).

I'm confused...you think the average person doesn't understand that they (having a gmail account) can email someone with a hotmail account or having a rogers telephone can phone someone having a bell phone?

The point I was making is not a specific workflow but an understanding of the concept. People learned a specific workflow on twitter, they can learn the same workflow on Mastodon.

Counter.Social's software is a fork of Mastodon. It used to be federated, but the founder of Mastodon didn't like that CS blocked certain countries, so many Mastodon nodes blocked CS, so the owner (the Jester) stopped federating and went his own way. 
The Short History of CounterSocial and Mastodon from The Jester's point of view.
Wikipedia article about The Jester.
The Notorious Hacker Who’s Trying to Fix Social Media

Counter.Social seems to be good, but it is privately owned by one individual with his own idiosyncratic ideas of how things should be. I am skeptical about that.

Ah, constant incompatible forks of a decentralized technology, a tried and proven recipe for the mass adoption required by social networks.

---

And be honest, are you all looking for Twitter alternatives because you truly believe it will cease to exist? Afraid of discomfort from more lax content moderation? Think it be used to promote a particular billionaire's propaganda? Something else?

"Constant incompatible forks"...it's only confusing if you look at the history. At this point Gab, Parler, and CS are all entirely separate things, nobody is confused about Twitter because Instagram exists.

"And be honest"....*I* am looking for alternatives for many reasons. Most importantly, I don't think our social spaces should be owned and controlled by an asshole billionaire, or even a robot billionaire...or even a benevolent billionaire.

Most acutely because it seems quite likely Twitter will cease to exist in it's current form in the very near future. Whether that means actual bankruptcy, complete failure of their infrastructure, further inundation with right wing extremists and hate groups through permissive policies and the CEOs own fanclub, I don't know, but there are a lot of threats right now and a backup plan is good to have.

[danbrotherston]

You're giving the average person too much credit and I think not getting it.

Stuff like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and so on work because they're extremely straightforward. You create an account in 60 seconds and bang, you're online and can be following whatever sort of thing you want. A 70 year old grandma can sign up while she sips tea and become a popular poster. It's simple, which is great. The average person - the vvvaaaaasssstttt majority of users on the internet these days - don't have the patience for messing around with hunting out servers/instances that suit their interest and finding friends. They want instant, mass results and they want to be part of what is the biggest platform where the most people are. Gone are the days of the internet most of us grew up with in the 90s or 80s where it was actually decentralized and everybody on it got to do their own thing, whether it was making ASCII art, posting in Usenet groups or IRC channels or designing a Geocities page. About the only mainstream thing left that resembles that these days is Tumblr but they killed themselves by - seriously - banning porn, which is kinda amusing. I believe Linus Tech Tips said that recently regarding Twitter/Musk and how making bad choices like that can have a huge impact on your userbase/revenue. Twitter is filled to the brim with porn, amongst other things. Nothing is really going to change, there will just be more hate and shitposting.

And the same is true for email and phone which is why gmail and hotmail (and Bell and Rogers) control most of the market. So people will just join mastodon.social or mstdn.social and be done with it. Not necessarily ideal, but perfectly reasonable and perfectly approachable to most people.

And joining ANY fediverse server puts you in the fediverse which is (in theory) where everyone is. There's no reason you cannot follow people anywhere.

Our things are what we make of them. Money has a corrupting influence, but the idea that the "days of old" are gone are completely false. I'm literally posting this in a phpBB community of people talking about stuff I'm interested. Not only is it the same thing we did in the "days of old" it's using the same damn codebase.

The culture of the internet and people and actual generations has simply changed. People no longer care about that stuff. I think they should because I grew up on the "old" internet where I was one of those people making ASCII art, lurking obscure IRC groups, phone phreaking etc. But thanks to the way the internet has become so corporatized and Web 2.0'd (and now, increasingly, Web 3.0'd) everyone has forgotten that. Or was just never part of that old internet so they don't get it. That's what I mean by saying something like Mastodon will never be that big. It's way too niche, requires way too much effort (in reality, very little effort, but people have little patience these days) and is too confusing for most people who are used to the current ecosystems. I'd love to return to an era where the internet was treated as it was intended: a crazy wild west where you are free to do what you want, say what you want and talk to who you want but I think that's hard to return to. Almost all technologies out there get simpler and easier to use for people with time.

As for Musk, I think he's just a socially inept idiot that got sucked into being one of those chronically online fools now suffering from brain rot and this is the result. He's extremely basic...even 4chan users are more intelligent than this guy. He's just a shitty businessman that took advantage of things to get where he is, became extremely "online" due to memes and algorithms, fell down some lame rabbit holes of far-right conspiratorial misinformation and because he has a lot of money, thought it would be an ePiC TrOLl to buy Twitter and start shit. I mean the guy is online for tens of hours a day fighting with check marks like Stephen King. He's a moron, very bored (probably emotionally empty inside, if I had to guess) and very rich. He'll probably do incredible damage to Twitter but it's not going to go bankrupt. There's waaaaayyyyy too much at stake. Just advertisers alone will eventually come smack him and say smarten up (even though some have left - for now - due to his actions, but that just seems like platitudes...at the end of the day they want money and advertising on Twitter = money). It is the social network right now with everything from a brutal war in Ukraine unfolding on it, billions of dollars in advertising taking place on it, journalists and politicians and everyone in between using it as a communication medium and so on. He's right to call it the world's town square or whatever. It's not going to vanish because it's way too important.

Also another problem with Mastodon is that you just get a bunch of Mini Musks. My server must be run this way! Only this can be said! You must follow these rules. It just creates this niche, gated echo chamber where you end up with specific groups of people who think or believe etc the same way. The reason something like Twitter or Instagram works so well is that you can pretty much get away with anything on there. You might get banned eventually, but you're able to go on there and talk about your cooking, your pet cat, dox people you don't like, post videos of rapes, spread state propaganda etc. It is an incredibly open forum for communication which is why it's so big. You can't have that with a bunch of federated servers that are all cocooned and full of people who think the same. As I said, Mastodon for sure has its uses because you can go on there and talk about whatever little thing you want with others, but it's always going to remain small due to how it pigeonholes everything into a corner (despite a global timeline, but that's a mess).

If you don't like how the Mastodon instance you signed up with is being run, then you can move to another one. With the large number of people joining lately, I am sure that there will be some well run ones.
Since Mastodon is federated, you are not stuck following the people on your local instance. I am seeing some journalists joining Mastodon and I think that there may be servers catering to them. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what people are capable of or willing to do when motivated.
One more thing: there is porn on twitter???!!! You must be following different people than I am. I don't recall anybody that I follow posting porn.

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's "filled to the brim" but there is porn on twitter, it's within their TOS but the algorithm does a good job separating uses so unless you actually follow porn stars (or hentai artists or something like that) you aren't going to get served any of that content. Twitter did a decent job of managing that, with both permissive policies but with enough siloing that nobody's getting offended.

[danbrotherston]

As someone who uses twitter as a forum and RSS feed replacement, getting started with Mastodon has been a supremely confusing process.

I'm curious, what part was confusing?

For me, the biggest challenge at the beginning was finding people to follow, but a number of Twitter followers have moved there (to different instances) which are easy enough to follow.

I think my Twitter use case was more or less the same (forum and RSS), I think the RSS aspects are still a bit weak since there are large segments of my twitter follows missing, but it does seem to be improving.

[Acitta]

List of Canadian Mastodon Instances with open registration.

vindi.ca
canada.masto.host      B.C.
autonomy.ninja          Halifax
dcerebus.com                                atheists welcome, left-leaning
oceanplayground.social  Atlantic Canada
coales.co              Alberta
nfld.me                Nfld&Lab.
mstdn.ca

wrmstdn.ca/ A Mastodon instance for people in the Waterloo Region and beyond. Administered by Robert Bowerman.

thecanadian.social

[bravado]

As someone who uses twitter as a forum and RSS feed replacement, getting started with Mastodon has been a supremely confusing process.

I'm curious, what part was confusing?

For me, the biggest challenge at the beginning was finding people to follow, but a number of Twitter followers have moved there (to different instances) which are easy enough to follow.

I think my Twitter use case was more or less the same (forum and RSS), I think the RSS aspects are still a bit weak since there are large segments of my twitter follows missing, but it does seem to be improving.

Going from 1 massive global chat board like twitter, to little siloes was supremely weird. It wasn't intuitive that I couldn't log in with my @mas.to account to follow someone on @whatever.social because the UI and site looks exactly the same..

[tomh009]

"Unless he bankrupts the company"...he told the (remaining) employees in a meeting yesterday that he didn't know that the burn rate of the company was and that bankruptcy was possible. Then he went on twitter and mocked some more advertisers...so I'd say bankruptcy is a real possibility. Also, I don't know anyone who has called Elon a Nazi, but he absolutely did advocate for voting for fascists in the US election a few days ago.

OK, so I looked. Twitter is currently burning maybe $500M of cash per year -- but they have $6B in cash and short-term investments, so they are not going to run out of money anytime soon.

It's not the first time that Musk doesn't know what he's talking about.

[ijmorlan]

"Unless he bankrupts the company"...he told the (remaining) employees in a meeting yesterday that he didn't know that the burn rate of the company was and that bankruptcy was possible. Then he went on twitter and mocked some more advertisers...so I'd say bankruptcy is a real possibility. Also, I don't know anyone who has called Elon a Nazi, but he absolutely did advocate for voting for fascists in the US election a few days ago.

OK, so I looked. Twitter is currently burning maybe $500M of cash per year -- but they have $6B in cash and short-term investments, so they are not going to run out of money anytime soon.

It's not the first time that Musk doesn't know what he's talking about.

Don’t forget the $1G/a that I understand Twitter owes in interest payments.

[danbrotherston]

OK, so I looked. Twitter is currently burning maybe $500M of cash per year -- but they have $6B in cash and short-term investments, so they are not going to run out of money anytime soon.

It's not the first time that Musk doesn't know what he's talking about.

Don’t forget the $1G/a that I understand Twitter owes in interest payments.

I'm not sure where you folks are getting your numbers...According to twitter Q2 2022 financials here:

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/do...elease.pdf

They had quarterly revenue of 1.18 billion and quarterly costs of 1.52 billion.

Even if 2/3rds of those costs are salary the lowest I can see costs going is 1 billion maybe 750 million per quarter. Based on what we've heard, we can similarly assume that Twitter's ad revenue has been cut in half. So 1.08 billion -> 500 million.  So 600 million in revenue on 750-1000 million in income....per quarter. So they'd be burning at least 1 billion dollars a year in operational costs, and interest payments are coming due.

But the earnings release doesn't specify cash on hand or net liquidity....numbers for that I see are 2-4 billion.

I agree that Elon doesn't know what he was talking about...in the same earning call, Elon Musk...the CEO of the company said he didn't know the burn rate of the company...which is...insane to me...

I'm not saying that the company is going bankrupt next week...but they are clearly in a far more tenuous position than they were three weeks ago.

[neonjoe]

The interest payments that twitter has to pay exploded because of Elons’s Leveraged Buyout. Leveraged buyouts often seem to cripple businesses that were struggling beforehand.

[ijmorlan]

The interest payments that twitter has to pay exploded because of Elons’s Leveraged Buyout. Leveraged buyouts often seem to cripple businesses that were struggling beforehand.

Yes, I’m talking about the interest payments on the debt incurred to buy the company. I have no idea what kind of debt situation it had before.

[tomh009]

Don’t forget the $1G/a that I understand Twitter owes in interest payments.

I'm not sure where you folks are getting your numbers...According to twitter Q2 2022 financials here:

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Final_Q2'22_Earnings_Release.pdf

They had quarterly revenue of 1.18 billion and quarterly costs of 1.52 billion.

Even if 2/3rds of those costs are salary the lowest I can see costs going is 1 billion maybe 750 million per quarter. Based on what we've heard, we can similarly assume that Twitter's ad revenue has been cut in half. So 1.08 billion -> 500 million.  So 600 million in revenue on 750-1000 million in income....per quarter. So they'd be burning at least 1 billion dollars a year in operational costs, and interest payments are coming due.

But the earnings release doesn't specify cash on hand or net liquidity....numbers for that I see are 2-4 billion.

If you want to know when a company is going to run out of money, don't look at the income statement, look at the cash flow. Income statement includes non-cash items such as depreciation ($173M in the last quarter) and stock-based compensation ($282M). So, look for the adjusted free cash flow, at the bottom of page 10: negative $123M in the last quarter.

And then, on page 7, current assets: $2.7M in cash and $3.4M in short-term investments. They have about $1B in current liabilities (mostly leases and AP) but roughly the same amount in AR.

The leveraged buyout added $13B in debt. I doubt that they are paying 10% interest on that, so I would guess on incremental interest costs of $500M-$750M. (I personally think it's insane to do a leveraged buyout on a company that is losing money but I digress.)

Not to say that Musk wouldn't be able to run the company into the ground, but it certainly is not imminent. If they cut staff in half and lost half the advertising revenue they would actually be losing less money than they are today ...

[dtkvictim]

I'm confused...you think the average person doesn't understand that they (having a gmail account) can email someone with a hotmail account or having a rogers telephone can phone someone having a bell phone?

The point I was making is not a specific workflow but an understanding of the concept. People learned a specific workflow on twitter, they can learn the same workflow on Mastodon.

I think they understand they can do those things, but no, I don't think they understand the underlying concepts. I don't think the thought process goes beyond "I have email, they have email, therefore we can email". They certainly don't think "Google and Microsoft host mail servers and frontends to access them, which can communicated with each other via shared standards and protocols, and they allow me to sign up to make use of servers they specifically host".

"Constant incompatible forks"...it's only confusing if you look at the history. At this point Gab, Parler, and CS are all entirely separate things, nobody is confused about Twitter because Instagram exists.

If the history is confusing, then at one point the present was also confusing. This is just the nature of open source (and to an extent distributed/federated) technologies, especially ones used to host divisive topics. It happened in the past and will happen again in some future present, and it undermines the stability and wholeness required by certain types of social networks like Twitter.

"And be honest"....*I* am looking for alternatives for many reasons. Most importantly, I don't think our social spaces should be owned and controlled by an asshole billionaire, or even a robot billionaire...or even a benevolent billionaire.

Agreed, though Musk's purchase wouldn't have been that tipping point for me...

I've often wished there was more discussion around certain platforms or types of platforms being considered a utility, and regulated as such for neutrality's sake, even if I'm not convinced it will be possible in the end.

Most acutely because it seems quite likely Twitter will cease to exist in it's current form in the very near future. Whether that means actual bankruptcy, complete failure of their infrastructure, further inundation with right wing extremists and hate groups through permissive policies and the CEOs own fanclub, I don't know, but there are a lot of threats right now and a backup plan is good to have.

In the days since my post I've come more around to the idea that Musk could run it into the ground, with some of his tech related statements... Maybe he's just showboating for his ignorant fans, I don't know.

[danbrotherston]

I'm confused...you think the average person doesn't understand that they (having a gmail account) can email someone with a hotmail account or having a rogers telephone can phone someone having a bell phone?

The point I was making is not a specific workflow but an understanding of the concept. People learned a specific workflow on twitter, they can learn the same workflow on Mastodon.

I think they understand they can do those things, but no, I don't think they understand the underlying concepts. I don't think the thought process goes beyond "I have email, they have email, therefore we can email". They certainly don't think "Google and Microsoft host mail servers and frontends to access them, which can communicated with each other via shared standards and protocols, and they allow me to sign up to make use of servers they specifically host".

That's all people have to know to use mastodon. It's exactly analogous to using email.

"Constant incompatible forks"...it's only confusing if you look at the history. At this point Gab, Parler, and CS are all entirely separate things, nobody is confused about Twitter because Instagram exists.

If the history is confusing, then at one point the present was also confusing. This is just the nature of open source (and to an extent distributed/federated) technologies, especially ones used to host divisive topics. It happened in the past and will happen again in some future present, and it undermines the stability and wholeness required by certain types of social networks like Twitter.

I don't think it was confusing in the past, largely I believe because Mastodon has been smart with their use of their trademark. Gab and Parler never used the Mastodon trademark so for average people it was never associated in the first place.

Yes, it could be in the future that some Mastodon branded instances get blocked, but I think that's not going to be a huge hurdle to learn. People understand spam message filtering in email.

"And be honest"....*I* am looking for alternatives for many reasons. Most importantly, I don't think our social spaces should be owned and controlled by an asshole billionaire, or even a robot billionaire...or even a benevolent billionaire.

Agreed, though Musk's purchase wouldn't have been that tipping point for me...

I've often wished there was more discussion around certain platforms or types of platforms being considered a utility, and regulated as such for neutrality's sake, even if I'm not convinced it will be possible in the end.

Haha...

Well, I think we agree the current situation is very bad, where one asshole controls the whole thing.

I'm not opposed to regulating things, but my ideal situation is not a well regulated centralised system (although I still prefer that to now) but a distributed (ideally true P2P) network of services where individuals have more local control their own feeds.

I also think this (at least in the form that Mastodon is in now) limits...'virality' of the network which I think is a good thing. It should limit the corrosive effects of money by limiting the value of "influencers".

Most acutely because it seems quite likely Twitter will cease to exist in it's current form in the very near future. Whether that means actual bankruptcy, complete failure of their infrastructure, further inundation with right wing extremists and hate groups through permissive policies and the CEOs own fanclub, I don't know, but there are a lot of threats right now and a backup plan is good to have.

In the days since my post I've come more around to the idea that Musk could run it into the ground, with some of his tech related statements... Maybe he's just showboating for his ignorant fans, I don't know.

Yeah, hard to know how it will end up. As much as I want to see Musk fail, for the sake of all the little people under him, I hope that things don't go too badly...stabilising into a third tier social network at 1/10th it's original value is probably the best case scenario in my mind.