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This will likely accelerate the Left's attempts to move to a more pro-censorship platform. They also might pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter.
they, the left, will fail. twitter thrived in 2016-2020 despite trump having the most popular account. Some advertisers will quit, but either they will quietly come back after the virtue signaling wears off, and or new advertisers will replace them. Also, Elon will find plenty of other ways to monetize the userbase, without advertisers.
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I've seen the left going gaga over Mastodon in response to Musk helming Twitter. Suppose it's a good time to be that company.
I definitely see the people I follow on Twitter talking about trying to migrate to Mastodon. But I can't say any of them have much confidence in it as a platform. I've also seen a lot of "yeah, no idea where the next place is, here's my permanent personal website that will always point to my socials".
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Mastodon isn't really a company. It's more like one instance inside a federated network of tweets (the "Fediverse"), similar to how you can start your own email server with your own domain but anyone can send and receive emails from you.
For all the posturing from everyone about how they're fleeing to the Fediverse because of big bad Elon firing the mods and Twitter will soon stop working, the reality is that Mastodon is basically worse in every other way. Almost by definition, Mastodon is comprised of people who are so outcast they either don't like Twitter, or were banned from Twitter (many here recognize this as the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem). So already you have selection effects for a population of users that are worse than Twitter users.
Then there's the fact that moderation is harder, because while you can ban someone from your own instance, you cannot ban someone from another instance. However what you can do is defederate the instance - in effect, banning the entire instance because it's full of witches or whatever. But even this isn't a panacea, because spinning up an instance is so easy (after all, that's the point of the Fediverse) that people can just evade the defed anyway. Most people will just want a Twitter, a centralized platform that can simply ban the offending persons and be done with it. They don't want moderation taken into their own hands, they want someone else to do it.
Lastly there's also the simple fact that Mastodon and the Fediverse were simply never built to accommodate the huge influx of users from the Twitter exodus. For all the doomerism that Musk firing half the employees will result in the site simply failing to stay up, along with claims that this will happen during the World Cup (no similar claims have been made about Meta who did a huge round of layoffs shortly after Elon did), Mastodon keeps dying under user loads that are a fraction of the users Twitter has. Even other exodus destinations like Cohost haven't stayed up as well. Meanwhile I've never seen Twitter go down at any point. Sure there were sometimes a couple glitches here and there but nothing major.
I haven't used Mastodon (well, or Twitter except for following people manually / via RSS), but it sounds like the moderation support is pretty bad. It's really weird that they have decentralized hosting of accounts/feeds but not decentralized moderation. I understand individual instances may want to ban users, but it seems like there's no moderation mechanism for posts on other instances more fine-grained than banning an entire instance that won't moderate in a way you like. Which seems like it defeats a large part of the purpose of having separate instances if they effectively need to clump into groups that agree on moderation policies.
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Yes, one of the largest instances just defederated entirely to shed load.
I can't remember what it was, but back when I was figuring out how mastodon worked there was something about content serving that made me think "boy, that wouldn't scale well at all if a post goes viral across multiple instances."
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I think it's just a "I'll run away from home and live under a bridge where I can go to all the parties I want, mom" moment. The main utility of Mastodon continues being telling your Twitter audience how to uh are going to leave for it. It's easy to threaten to pack up your toys and leave, but actually do it and after a night or two you're cold, dirty and hungry (for attention, in the case of Mastodon) and probably already were beaten up and robbed by some ruffians and probably will have little will to fight back if a patrol car picks you up and takes you back to your parents.
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More and less in different ways.
There's no way to actually stop someone from speaking (including "dangerous" speech), but they can choose to be on instances that are not federated with instances that tolerate this speech (more power within their fiefdom).
Apparently it's currently going a different direction - as Mastodon had an existing critical mass of too-left-for-Twitter refugees, the influx of centrists, normies and media bluechecks is being met with widespread condemnation & bans/defederation.
Source:
https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
I imagine this is a temporary phenomenon, the masses are just following their the bluechecks & the latter has IRL status & isn't going to stand for being bullied by a bunch of left-radicals who just happened to get there first. If the structure of Mastodon makes the natives too difficult to dislodge, the bluechecks will find somewhere else, (probably Twitter) wrestling in the mud out in the political fringes is the last place these folks want to be.
Definitely a no-lose scenario for me, as another user quipped.
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Seems like exactly how twitter was before the Elon takeover, except you can't get kicked out of the entire network, you might just have to make an account on a different instance.
Though I doubt you could get a small number of instances. That would require a lot of computing power, and mastodon is hard to monetize.
That last bit is the real reason I don't see mastodon taking over. No ads means you'd have to charge up front, or a subscription, or something. Normies seem willing to endure leftist signaling, but we've never seen them chomping at the bit to pay for it.
I suppose someone could fork the client and change the protocol, but it's not really a mastodon instance at the at point.
Then you lack imagination. There will presumably be some with much stricter mods.
But they'll end up splintering in a series of inevitable purity spirals as these things are wont to do.
Normies would probably end up on whichever one the most celebrities end up on (or their particular favorite if they have one).
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The circular firing squads have already started there
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Mastadon isnt' a company. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
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Do not forget that Musk’s businesses such as Tesla and SpaceX wouldn’t survive a day without US government help (yes Tesla too). Musk isn’t anti-establishment, he is a part of the establishment.
The establishment has decided to let Trump back on Twitter, despite the fact that a lot of people (probably half the country) will be enraged by this.
Why they did it is an open question. My guess is they're just throwing the right a bone to cool the tides a little. They're too busy "celebrating" a minor victory while the larger and more important battles of the culture war, i.e. entertainment media, journalism and education, will remain their provinces.
China and Russia would love to pay for SpaceX launches at market rates, and would spend a lot on technology too.
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I'd say he's an expert at exploiting the establishment to do things he wanted to do anyway.
Electric car subsidies were going to exist anyway, why not get rich off them and kickstart the industry? [late edit, I just realized how ironic it is to use the term 'kickstart' in the context of electric cars.]
The U.S. needs tons of launch capacity and will (over)pay for it. Why not get rich off it, Kickstart the industry, and maybe colonize Mars?
Nothing in this equation implies being pro-establishment.
What do you honestly think the counterfactual world in which Musk does not exist looks like?
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The Democratic Party would lose popularity if they ordered NASA to cut ties with SpaceX. It is possible to take money from the government without being beholden to the government if your companies are beloved by voters. I think SpaceX and Tesla are beloved enough that the government is stuck with them regardless of what Elon Musk says or does.
I would be willing to bet $100 that no statement the Democratic Party could make in its platform regarding NASA and SpaceX would move popular support for the party more than 2%. Most people just don't care.
2% is enormous.
Yeah, I'm a coward...the original draft of the comment said 1%, but I chickened out.
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I don't endorse the conspiratorial view, but if it were to happen, I'd expect something more like the EPA (and maybe NHSTA) adding a million miles of paperwork to every single thing every single business related to Musk tries to do, instead of an explicit order. It costs a lot less political capital to not pay SpaceX for services not rendered because their launch sites are limited to one launch a year.
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There are a lot of things that half the country was enraged by that happened over the last five years. A precedent has been set. This is not enough to stop any sort of political action any more.
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“Musk needs government subsidies for his companies” is not sufficient to assume “the establishment has direct control over Musk’s adventures in twitter”. This strikes me as conspiratorial thinking. There are plenty of ways that the Musk-establishment relationship could be coloured without him being an enthusiastic and willing member, or otherwise a directly and forcibly controlled party.
Sure, but I am yet to hear a good argument against conspiratorial thinking.
It leads to incorrect predictions if it makes predictions at all. It's usually used to explain rather than make useful predictions. It's model involves people smarter, more cooperative, and more disciplined than they really are. It promotes either inaction or ineffectual flailing.
Not compared any of the alternatives. Same applies to Hanlon's Razor, or various forms of "skeptical", "assume good faith from the system, or any other "respectable" type of thinking I see contrasted with conspiratorial thinking.
Again, same, except other types of thinking promote shrugging things off, and pretending nothing happened.
That's just flat out untrue. Conspiratorial thinking does not involve levels of intelligence, cooperation, or discipline beyond what we've already seen from human behavior.
You seem to be contrasting conspiratorial thinking with blind trust in authority. I don't think that's the only alternative. I think the default assumption is that any given individual or group is foolish and treading water and build your hypothesis up from there.
No, like I said, I'm comparing to a typical skeptical framework, commonly used to dismiss conspiracy theories. I see how "assume good faith" could lead to a misunderstanding, but I specifically brought up Hanlon's Razor to take "any individual group is foolish and trading water" into account as well.
Notice how that approach also explains rather than predicts, and promotes inaction.
You see a pothole in the road. If you believe that the government has left it there intentionally to punish your community because it's too white, you're unlikely to call 411. If you believe it's because the public works department just didn't know about it because they're mortal, you call 411.
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