Reading this thread, I thought this press release was going to be interesting. Instead it seems totally anodyne and reasonable. Imagine being so angry that twitter is going to put its recommendation code on github.
Whether it qualifies as suitable for HN is another question, but I think the notable thing here is the anodyne and reasonable tone of the press release contrasted with the chaos and disingenuous touting of values of Twitter under Musk thus far.
Like if you saw someone casually building a snowman in their front yard you might be inclined to ask, “why are people talking about this? It’s boring. People build snowmen all the time” but behind them their house is burning down.
Elon Musk clickbait broke the brain of half of HN readers. We need to consider permanently banning anything tangentially related to restore the quality here
I have lots to gripe about with Twitter these days, but I don’t see anything non-transparent about a corporate release not being signed by a specific person. It is most likely a product of a group, not a specific person. Attaching a name to it doesn’t make it any more transparent. It just puts that person in the crosshairs given the current environment.
This is so hilarious that I'm having trouble laughing at it. I can't even describe how funny this is. I love 2023. It's giving science fiction authors a hard time trying to keep up with the absurdity.
I don't know about science fiction authors, but I feel bad for parody sites like The Onion. I guess it all started with 2016 election - when reality is this absurd, how can outlets like The Onion make a living? Slapping at Oscar for a stupid joke, Congresswoman going on and on about public urination, Billionaire buying a social media company for tens of Billions, ex-president spending insane amount of time testing insulting nick names....
Twitter shows up next to "By" for me, but it took a few seconds to load in after the page itself. Maybe it's being blocked by a script/ad blocker in your end?
I think it's fine. It represents the opinion of the corporation as a whole. The opposite of "the opinions here are my own and do not reflect blah blah blah".
Launching a big brand Twitter alternative on top of the existing Fediverse feels to me like it could work incredibly well right now.
The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.
Now imagine Tumblr ships ActivityPub. Every Tumblr user can now follow any Mastodon user, and vice-versa. The Tumblr ecosystem gets a whole bunch of new high quality available content. Mastodon enthusiasts can tell their skeptical friends "go sign up for a Tumblr account and follow me from that".
Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?
> Or... if you're launching something new, why would you launch from a state of zero accounts when you could launch with Fediverse compatibility and have ~10m accounts that your first users can start following straight away?
I'd rather build something new and actually have a userbase than be something akin to a subreddit with fleeting users. It will be a lot more hard work, but it's worth it.
> The obsolute worst thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon et al) right now is the onboarding process. You have to "chose an instance" before you can even start understanding what that's about - and if you chose wrong you might find your instance gets switched off leaving you high and dry in the future.
That's the problem. It's unnecessarily complex and other than a subniche, people in the real world are not interested in it. They just don't care about this at all.
It's possible that I'm missing something here, but I'm not sure what's the point of the 'fediverse' is. Looks like a solution looking for a problem, or an overcorrection to the trend from the 2010s to move everything to silos (independent forums -> facebook groups / subreddits / twitter).
Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?
>Wouldn't it be better and simpler to just revert that trend to how it was before the big tech behemoths put everything behind walled gardens?
That's... kind of the point of the fediverse? A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible. Identity is controlled by the end user.
But the web is already descentralized, isn't it? What I mean is, why don't we go back to the early 2000s phase where there were popular forums for everything, each of them with disctint styles and idiosyncrasies. You could have a separate identity in each of them, and I don't remember ever once thinking "oh, it would be cool to be able to somehow connect this account with this other one in this other forum".
It brings me back a few years ago where everyone just had to use blockchains instead of... a database, when it made no sense. It should be decentralization in the sense of offer, not technical decentralization.
Mastodon and the like feel flat to me. Again, maybe I'm missing a key piece here.
> A decentralized network built on non-proprietary software makes walled gardens and centralization by corporations infeasible
I don't think so. I don't think any of this will gather enough momentum to make a dent to the established networks (Twitter, FB, TikTok, Reddit, etc). That ship has sailed, imho
Sorry but I have this strong feeling that the Fediverse/ActivityPub will be one of those ideas that will fail miserably or just become a niche for weirdos. My reasoning is: it's completely unnecessary. Just have different sites, like forums from the early 2000s. Much cleaner and simpler. I don't need a shared identity throughout these places. It's not what the web was meant to be, at all.
On the other hand, I have no reason to assume Twitter will die. What trust are we talking about here? I have no idea. People will just continue using it. In fact, I vastly prefer what's happening now than what the last management was doing.
Not trying to be confrontational here. I'm trusting my gut feeling more because I've seen through so many things that range from delusions to failed ideas in the last decade: Theranos, WeWork, Metaverse, Clubhouse, Crypto [other than Bitcoin], Social networks pretending to be the arbiters of truth, etc. I have a strong BS detector.
They are too busy trying to get people to use the metaverse and dig deeper to get out of the absurd hole they have found themselves in. I imagine that the senior leadership probably hasn’t even noticed the sucking chest wound twitter has.
Transparency would be releasing the data that they check against for "abusive, toxicity, nsfw" content. I read the code, those are specific checks, but they're opaque on the data that it checks against. Without transparency on this data, they cannot prove to the public "twitter files" type censorship isn't still happening.
