I think (and have been saying this a bunch lately) that he's right about ActivityPub and Mastodon, and that "a universal timeline" is actually a really good way to put words to it. I was a Mastodon hater for years, but having used it for the past month or so with an actual community of people (really: the whole community I interacted with on Twitter before), I have to admit it: the ActivityPub people were right about this. It's easy to see the potential, and how it pulls in the writing we were all doing before there was Twitter while keeping most of what Twitter was good for too.
I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)
I was sceptical too, but at this point I would say 75% of the people I followed who I really got value from have moved over. But not only that, the conversation has become better, more in depth and less fleeting.
I just hope the last few people I follow on Twitter who I really enjoy following move over too. But unfortunately that's "Space Twitter", so we will see...
> I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)
Fret not; when Sony released the first digital Mavica (the one that stored pictures on 1.44" floppys) I would have made a bet that digital photography will never take off.
My only lame excuse it that at this time it was just unfeasible imagining that one day in the not too distant future you'd be able to store terabytes of memory on a device the size of a thumbnail.
I was _very_ sceptical of Netflix (the streaming incarnation, not ye olde postal DVD thingy); I didn't think the economics could be made to work, or that everyone would buy an AppleTV or similar to use it (I very much wasn't counting on smarttvs...)
OK, I have to ask- What exactly was your argument against MP3's? They literally let you transfer music with an order of magnitude less data than it took on the CD! Was it an audiophile argument, or...?
I was lucky enough to live in a freshman college dorm (a music-focused dorm, no less!) circa 1997-1998 when Napster was still a thing right after MP3's were a thing, and that shit was amaaaaazing
I mean given how much people love music, I never had any doubt that MP3's would be revolutionary
In the set-associative cache that was my brain in 1998, MP3s occupied the same slot as XDCC'd Amiga mods. But much bigger files. I was carrying around giant folders of CDs at the time. Also: you had to listen to them... on your computer? I had a whole discrete stereo system. Why would I want to listen to music through game speakers?
Didn't your discrete stereo system have external inputs? I've had an analog cable from my computer's line-out to the stereo system's aux-in from pretty much the same day that my parents let me have my own pc in my bedroom (which was 1996, I think).
These days it's a USB cable rather than a cinch cable, and vorbis/flac rather than mp3, but my PC has been my main music player for more than 25 years -- and the only pair of "game" speakers I've owned were positioned in the living room. Come to think of it, those speakers may very well have been the reason I was allowed a computer in my bedroom :)
Anyway... thank you for prompting that trip down memory lane, I enjoyed it.
I mean, to be clear, I did eventually come around on MP3s! I don't still lug a 15 pound folder of CDs around with me everywhere. It just took me longer than everyone else. :)
To put a timeline on this: I also ended up buying one of those Empeg in-dash MP3 players.
My PC is still connected 3.5mm to RCA to a old stereo box to my Dad's old full size JL430w Kenwoods which use the same 40 year old speaker wires. Still great sound!
Napster didn't start until 1999 :)
I remember downloading mp3s on Napster, and then using my parallel port to transfer them to my Diamond Rio MP3 player.
All 4 songs at a time!
The first MP3 I downloaded was from IRC and played back on the Fraunhofer Institute MP3 player. Old timers will remember that if you caused your screen to redraw at all, say by scrolling a window, the audio would skip. The first song? Bob Dylan - Stuck in the Middle With You… which is actually by Steeler’s Wheel.
An F-serves on IRC. Much respect to the glorious bastards running FTPs and F-serves off their dorm ResNet connections. The rest of us poor slobs on dial-up could actually max out our downstream bandwidth.
There were also quite a few websites that just straight up hosted MP2s/MP3s for public download. I can't recall domain names but I do remember .se and .ru being common tlds.
I couldn't read a single word of Swedish or Russian, but my friends and I figured out how to navigate to the music downloads.
Yeah, when I snagged my first ""backup"" mp3 of an amazing piece of music I had never before heard (I think it was "Megalomaniac" by KMFDM) in a measly 3 megs or so, I knew this format was about to take the world by storm. It was blatantly obvious.
I remember my processor struggled so much even playing it, I basically had to just listen to the mp3 on its own. I eventually figured out I could play 96kbps mp3s without slowing things down too much. These were such amazing times for me, suddenly exposed to an entire planet of music there's zero possible chance I would have otherwise heard.
What’s the term you prefer for this stage of its growth then?
The jump to 7 figures of MAU in the wake of Twitter’s collapse seems like an important change to me. The idea might be 15 years old, but the dominant implementation (Mastodon) started ~2016, the modern protocol (ActivityPub) arrived in 2018, and the last four years seem to have been mostly a small community working out the kinks.
Now it’s going mainstream. It’s held up remarkably well so far, but there are significant technical, economic and governance challenges to overcome if Fedi is going to fulfill it’s potential as the dominant interoperability layer for online collaboration.
Depends on what you mean by "they" and "fixed". There's a few clients. They do threading in different ways. I'm sure you'll find one that does what you like.
I can't remember which ones, but I've seen at least 2 clients doing just that. There's also Toot! with its "subway map on the border" approach which solves the longer nesting in a different way.
I looked at in terms of the "Fediverse", a coherent decentralized social network, with lots of instances cooperating to make one intentional thing. I'm still not bullish about that. But once you use it, you see that it's basically hyper-interactive RSS.
(Maybe you see the two at the same thing; I don't.)
To be fair, there still isn't an easy way (that I know of) to make sites (dynamic first, static later) ActivityPub participants.
I'd love it if my site's posts were ActivityPub posts, with ActivityPub replies being shown on the site as comments. I think that would be an amazing thing, but it's currently not very easy to do.
I made my own thing, fetching an RSS feed and posting entries to an existing account. It makes the code much simpler, but is not practical if you have lots of feeds (you need yo create all accounts separately): https://sr.ht/~rakoo/rss2ap/
Yeah. The vision of a unified fediverse at Twitter scale seems unhelpful. The whole point is that you don’t have to align with everyone else, you can do your own thing and opt into the world the way you want.
This contradiction flares up in many places. Most obviously, the existing community HATES all kinds of analytics, search, etc because they’re concerned they can be weaponized by trolls. At the same time, Mastodon has all kinds of unauthenticated APIs that make it trivial to slurp data. Mastodon doesn’t even let you post stuff to just your local instance!
I expect that the current post-twitter-collapse energy will result in ActivityPub 2.0, and that revision of the spec will make it easier to control where your posts go.
Ultimately I think the Fediverse will agree on the core protocol, splinter over activity vocabularies, and scatter over moderation standards. That Will Be Fine and we’ll have something clearly better the Web 2.0 local maxima we’ve been trapped in for the last decade or so.
I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how it has changed my life. I'm only in my early 30's, but I think many others my age grew up online and when the internet felt smaller, but in a different way. I made life long friends through these means. But something I've noticed is that as everyone has come online, I have made fewer friends. What I personally miss is the small niche communities. These don't seem to exist anymore. I made several friends on sites like What.cd and found many artists I would have never come into contact otherwise (even speaking with many). Even friends on sites like Imgur when it was smaller, but never once it grew. The global social media is cool and has aspects that are nice to it (e.g. being able to talk to power), but its same power is its greatest downfall (you can't speak to your audience when your audience is everyone, filled with different priors (how we interpret words), and different willingness to act in good faith).
I see everyone talking about Twitter and how it needs to be replaced. But I want to know how we remake these smaller communities. That's what I miss about the internet. There are clearly size thresholds for these. Finding them is often hard and word of mouth. But what I want to know is how we make these flourish and bring personhood back to the internet. We should have both types of communities. But I don't think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this. I think many even have seen this change as HN has grown. There are several people that I recognize their names but as the community has grown we have too seen a change in content, culture, and how we speak to one another. For good or bad. But I do think it is nice to have small communities as well that do develop their own cultures. Maybe I'm just old now though.
Most of the old niche groups (IRC groups, imageboards, forums, etc) I used to spend time on just migrated into private spaces once social media became a de facto public space on the internet. These places usually live as Discord guilds, Matrix spaces, Telegram group chats, private fora, Patreon groups, alternate networks (such as: mailing lists, Gemini, Freenet, Urbit, etc.)
I also feel like all this noise about Twitter is just the Twitter early adopters realizing what the old IRC and imageboard users knew long ago: social media is a semi-public space now that everyone is online.
The net was a very different place before, say, somewhere between 2010 and 2015. I saw a huge shift then. Everything got monetized, weaponized, optimized for addiction, or drowned in spam. There’s always been bad actors and criminals and trolls online too but in the past decade they have either gotten worse or become more empowered.
The golden age of the open Internet was really between about 1996 when it started to go public and 2010. The net today feels like either a ghost town or a hellhole. The only remaining good places seem to be niche sites or groups and private forums. The fediverse is decent but I am concerned for its long term future if it becomes big enough to be a worthy target for spammers and trolls.
As for the cause of the decline I can think of a few big factors:
1. Engagement maximizing algorithms give weight to the most inflammatory content. These hit the scene big starting around 2008. If you forced me to pick one root culprit I would blame this.
2. Thanks to monetized social media “Internet troll” is now a career option. You can make money. You can maybe even become the President of the United States.
3. Speaking of politics, I think something changed when enough people got online that the net became the major source for political opinion. There is now not just money but power to be gained by manipulating things online. This attracts a whole different level of scum.
4. Trolls have escalated to the point that people have died. Mass shooters post their manifestos on boards now before they go on killing sprees. Running a forum today is just not fun anymore, especially if it’s not narrowly focused and topical. Nobody in their right mind would set up something like Something Awful or 4chan today.
What happened to optimistic online cyber culture reminds me a bit of what happened to the 1960s counterculture. In a few years it went from exploration and optimism and art to Manson and Altamont. There seems to be a pattern where whenever humanity seems to be making a cultural breakthrough we get naive and then things go real bad real fast.
I'd add the Burning Man / burner community to this list too.
It used to be a wild-west sort of escape from real life, and exploration of the ten principles [1].
Now politics dominate and there's only one right-think. When I brought up some of my concerns about this, I had someone in leadership of one of the largest regional burns tell me "you all had your time with the ten principles stuff. We're in charge now".
Sad, that community really helped me grow into a better person.
> 1. Engagement maximizing algorithms give weight to the most inflammatory content. These hit the scene big starting around 2008. If you forced me to pick one root culprit I would blame this.
This isn't new, or even kinda new. Tabloids, TV, billboards, they've al been doing this since before anyone posting on HN was born.
> 2. Thanks to monetized social media “Internet troll” is now a career option. You can make money. You can maybe even become the President of the United States.
I wonder if maybe It Can Be Different This Time. I think it will take focused work at the protocol level, because you’re right that the Fediverse is a juicy target. I worry that the next 6 months will be a war against spam and other attackers… one that instance admins are under-resourced and under-equipped to win.
One thing the cryptocurrency people do get right is designing protocols for attack resistance from the get go. They do this because it’s money, but people need to learn that everything is money. Personal data, attention, access to boost opinions, etc are all fungible currencies that will get stolen if they are not protected.
ActivityPub is not designed for a battlefield. I worry that this dooms it.
I think that you make an interesting point. Having recently become interested in vintage computers I have been spending time with the forums at vcfed.org .
To be honest unplugging from the political outrage machine helped my mental state...and I might in time make some friends on that site...
I've been thinking about this problem a lot and I don't think there is an easy answer or solution to this. I think that world is gone.
--
To recreate the feeling of a small group of people chatting like it was commonplace two decades ago, I created a Discord server for strangers to just hang out and chat whenever one feels like. No pressure, no overbearing rules, just a small island in the modern lonely internet.
Its been going on for a little over a month now, there's about 15 people that are more or less regular. If you or anyone reading is interested, send me an email with your Discord name.
--
Still, any attempt like this is still so unlike the Internet we had in the 2000s. Myspace died and with it the sense of community. The modern internet feels as lonely as standing in Piccadilly Circus on a Sunday afternoon. So many people, with so little time for anyone else.
That said I think we forget that barriers to using the internet were the gates that kept it a cozy medium-sized community. I knew older programmers than me who were content learning languages and frameworks by buying books or renting books from the library, but only socialized with colleagues, friends, and family in purely offline venues. Only a certain type of person put up with the jank of the internet and the early Web and that's the kind of person who was writ large on it.
Just how in real life we don't invite the world into our homes or grab lunch with anyone off the street, likewise our internet presences are now becoming circumscribed to specific groups. The trick is to make the barrier to entry just high enough as to select for compatible people but not so high that the group becomes a clique.
I completely agree, I think that scenario is indeed a relic of the past. I was talking about exactly this with a friend recently. Never again will worldwide instant chat (IRC) be an amazing new thing where only the lucky few get to try it out -- figuring out etiquette, lingo and customs along the way with "innocent" ignorance (not sure how else to word this). Same for all the "first" big protocols and platforms, and of course the early years of the internet altogether. The cat is long since out of the bag, and that universal wide-eyed surprise and awe cannot come again.
> But I don't think methods like Mastadon or Reddit really facilitate this.
Reddit offers two features for supporting intentionally-small communities: first, you can restrict posting to accounts that have been manually approved (although I think voting is still open to anyone with a Reddit account), and secondly you can make the subreddit private such that only approved accounts can see its contents (which solves the aforementioned voting problem).
As for Mastodon, that's a matter of setting up your own topical instance and restricting who can make an account.
> new types of tech (defi and crypto has a lot of that)
I’m sure crypto and Defi has some good people, but a huge proportion of them seem to be grifters and scammers who I’d want nothing to do with. That wasn’t really the case on the early web.
See also Paul Haddad's situation[1] (creator of TweetBot):
> I really want an official public statement. We have a large number of sub. renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we're permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I'd rather not do.
I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land. You're always going to be a tenant, and the API gatekeepers play landlord and can rugpull you without notice.
But I'm looking into Nostr[0] as an alternative, aswell as ActivityPub which seems to be working well these days.
Dorsey's Bluesky Social[1] looks promising too, but it's a very late move since Twitter should have been a protocol from the outset.
> I never relied on Twitter's API, since building stuff with it is akin to building your castle on other people's land
This is a wise attitude. I can’t imagine any company whose existence is wholly reliant on another single organization not entering into an agreement with the said single organization to protect itself. I feel sorry for them, but damn…you need to protect your product.
This is not the first time twittet screwed developers. If you're olf enough to remember they did this shit in their early day when they had the real possibility of being social media's message bus. Corporate greed took over and capitalism won / they pulled the plug on developer apis. Up until that point they flourished. Now with new wind in their sails generated by 45 and more recently by the technoking they have forgot the lesson and doing the same mistake. Twitter is nothing without its ecosystem. They are killing the same env they need to survive.
They haven't _forgotten_ it, Saint Car is _ignoring_ it. People in Twitter would absolutely be aware that the last attempt (which for all its problems was still infinitely more ordered and less user-hostile than this one, of course), didn't go so well.
I am glad you brought it up, but it is the reliance on API provided by any company can be changed, restricted or rescinded at will. The mere fact that APIs have become so commonplace has always struck me as problematic ( and became more apparent during some of FB depositions ). You are effectively relying on a goodwill of another entity. You can have zero to no expectation that it will serve you today or tomorrow just because.
Can we return to dumb protocol designs? No?
Oh well, I guess we did not suffer enough yet then.
edit: All this twitter drama may actually result in useful changes to to the net.
Why would I even need a twitter client when the experience of using twitter is going downhill. I think the API being shut down should be the least of his worries.
I'm still waiting to hear any kind of official word, but it looks pretty bleak.
Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use. Checking in on https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/, the alternate UI, it's almost usable, but still missing like 8 of the most important features that made Twitter useful to me.
I have been posting sometimes on Mastodon but still primarily on Twitter, waiting to see how things turned out. But if Tweetbot at least isn't restored, I will switch roles and will likely try out Mastodon for a while, posting just a little on Twitter.
The problem is, most of the "Fediverse" right now is a big echo chamber (kind of like Voat was when Reddit had its weird issues a few years back, or more charitably like a community like HN is... it's not always bad as long as people are aware of it). So it's not the same kind of community as Twitter had.
> Without Tweetbot, Twitter is almost impossible to use
In what way? Don’t probably 99% of people who use Twitter not use Tweetbot (including myself)? I use the browser and/or the iPad app and don’t find anything unusable about it. What am I missing in my ignorant bliss?
> Don’t probably 99% of people who use Twitter not use Tweetbot (including myself)?
My understanding is that the significant accounts tend not to use the official apps / web interface, one of the biggest reasons being so that they can track accounts for reading purposes without providing what the algorithm treats as a positive endorsement of them, and so that they can use the signal boosting effect of “following” selectively and separately.
Someone said Twitter was essentially unusable without Tweetbot. As someone who finds Twitter very usable without Tweetbot, I asked, “Why?” Someone else said that a very small number of people have a very specific use case that makes Tweetbot better than the Twitter apps/website. I said that was a neat example but doesn’t really apply to many people.
How do you find your last read tweet? How do you move from phone to desktop and pick up reading where you left off? It's like, not impossible to write a novel on a typewriter, or on a pad of paper. Writers have proven that for hundreds of years. But when you snatch someone's word processor, and tell them to get the selectic out of the closet from now on, it is pretty damn annoying.
I’m not too worried about it. I just read what it shows me when I open the app or go to the site. If I’ve seen it before, I keep scrolling. When I lose interest I stop.
The lack of any official word is part of the message. They cut their third party partners off in the most abrupt, unprofessional way possible. That is what Musk's Twitter is now. (The leak yesterday suggests they are working on messaging at Twitter.)
I’m reluctant to use Mastodon because I don’t see it gaining much traction outside of tech. It’s incredibly annoying to use, and the entire concept of how different servers work is far too complicated for any non-tech user. It really needs a frontend to take off that regular people can join without having to worry about getting anything setup.
Please give it a go. For all the talk about needing to know things and the process being complicated, I've only heard from one person who actually had any issues with that side of the system. I think people mostly overthink this. For example, go to https://hachyderm.io , register your account, done. If you want to research other instances and think about it some more in the future, you can move somewhere else - you're not stuck to one place. In the meantime, I don't ever think of the "entire concept of how different servers work" while using the service.
This is a really common attitude _on Hackernews_, but, well, on Mastodon, non-tech people seem to be using it happily enough (in particular it is full of journalists, for obvious reasons).
I don't think this should be that surprising, because people already use _email_.
I've been using Mastodon for the past couple of months for most of the people I follow, but prior to that I had been using Twitterific for Twitter because it was so much better for how I used it.
Up until a couple of days ago I was still using Twitterific to keep up with those who hadn't yet made the jump (mostly non-tech-adjacent people/communities), but with the iOS version now being dead my usage has seen a nosedive. For now I still check every so often with the Mac version since it's still functional, and if that dies then I'm going to try to figure out alternatives for aforementioned communities (probably Discord, but we'll see) and drop Twitter altogether. I have no interest in the stock client/site whatsoever.
Twitter was never one community though, of course. The amount of interaction I had outside my bubble was really minimal. I could see other people shouting at each other if I wanted to, but of course I could do that without having an account.
Apparently it's the same for engagement with content. I've seen a few people comparing their large user bases and getting the same amount of link clicks on Twitter and from ~10% of that many followers on Mastodon.
I remember Voat! It started off with great intentions, just to be a more free speech version of reddit and at the end was just posts about Michelle Obama being a man and Qanon.
It was an interesting case study in how free speech can decline to a lowest common denominator type situation.
I just hope we walk before we try to run. It feels like Mastodon has been given a colossal opportunity and it feels like it’s being completely squandered.
I trust that Space Jerk will give Mastodon a very long opportunity window but the sooner the better.
Maybe revolution is a good idea and I’m completely wrong. But I still find Mastodon so frustrating and unreliable that I am just not on social media at all now.
Apparently as a baby I learned to run before walking so I want to defend doing it that way.
Running is a bit easier than walking, walking is a process of carefully balancing at each step. Running is just falling, but you catch yourself before you hit the ground. As long as you aren’t too concerned with steering, you can easily at least run until you find an obstacle. And then you’ve learned about a new type of obstacle!
Even the fastest baby should have trouble getting into trouble as long as the parents are attentive — they are tiny and parents have long arms to catch them.
Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves I’m pretty sure.
Or I dunno, at least I survived. Apply this to your analogy as you’d like.
Haha, fair enough. Hopefully the slightly tongue in cheek nature of my post came through.
I’ve always understood this to be what the expression was about, though. Skipping the first step to jump recklessly and possibly incorrectly to the second.
Yeah I’m not sure I feel strongly about my own opinion. I think I’m just worried that a bunch of engineers, in absence of designers and product, are going to do what engineers do best: find fun technical problems to solve.
I feel like it was squandered as well, but I don't blame anyone on that, Mastodon core team employed their second person last month full-time.
When the next wave comes I hope if Mastodon can't get its act together there are commercial offerings that can take the wave, and I'm all for it. Cloudflare is building its own Mastodon API-compatible server, and Medium put its own instance.
This is what I’m super pumped about. Because of the fundamentals of the technology, big actors with resources to do it properly can make Mastodon awesome, without completely capturing the social network.
Just curious, what is unreliable for you? My setup is as reliable as Twitter ever was for me (I run my own server). Some things are annoying of course, but I’m a little surprised techy people would find those rough edges so bad they wouldn’t use it.
I’m not on the same server as all my Twitter friends and I cannot get my timeline to reliably update with everyone’s Toots and Goots.
It works if I catch up the next morning. But there is no reliable ability for real-time Toot Blooting.
In all fairness I took two weeks off. Maybe it’s better. Or maybe I need to try another server (three tries so far.)
Figuring out what server to pick was ridiculous. I eventually decided “just find a really popular one.” But they were all just crashing out when making an account or were closed to new accounts.
I misunderstood what “federated” meant because I also learned that it really matters what server you’re on. It’s not like email. The length of your Toot is different, rules of what you Toot is different. The stuff on your server is a bit more first class than what’s on other servers. And my Toot Boots didn’t Doot Doot or Bloot Flute.
It sounds like you joined the really big servers when they were buckling under the load. I’ve not had any of these problems at normal times, or with servers that weren’t being hammered. I will say that with the caveat that I haven’t paid that much attention to real-time posting.
There's actually a lot of software projects, Mastodon is just by far the most popular one.
From top of my head, there are more extensive lists out there: Pixelfed (Instagram alternative), Peertube (YouTube alternative), Pleroma (another Twitter-like microblog), Bookwyrm (Goodreads alternative), Funkwhale (like a mashup between Soundcloud and a podcast host), Owncast (Twitch alternative), Mobilizon (event organizing), lemmy (reddit alternative)...
They're all rather tiny and unpolished, having even less resources to work with than Mastodon, but you should be able to follow a user on any of them from Mastodon. At least in theory, haven't tried with all of them.
The annoying thing in my opinion is that you can't have a set-in-stone identity and then use different frontends for different purposes, kind of like you can on Facebook for groups/events/marketplace/stories. You have to have an account on all of them to make use of all features, even though they're all relying on the same protocol to a certain extent.
This is a moving post, I wish Craig and everyone else effected by these events the best, onwards and upwards!
If these people who pioneered the use of Twitter and fundamentally steered how it developed through their community contributions turn their experience to Mastodon and the Fediverse, big things will come.
From the ashes of one thing can be built the future.
It should be liberating, no more working under ever worsening constraints, someone just ripped off the band-aid and made the hard choice for them. Didn't want to let go? Not sure of how much effort and support to continue putting in? Problem solved! The answer is zero. Zilch. Nada. Enjoy the free time!
Well-written and touching post. To switch off this API used by so many long-time users on the same day "For You" appears as the default option on Twitter triggers me. The "For You" timeline is only for Elon: it will drive engagement, extremism, and all the things social networks have been accused of driving for years now in order to make more $.
Some folks here have been comparing the crypto/Web3 and ActivityPub craze recently but I see a massive difference. A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard. Crypto and NFTs did not impact how I use my bank accounts, Elon ruined in a quarter a very special place I had crafted over a decade.
Mastodon is not great right now, the UX needs to vastly improve, but all for-profit social networks have always disappointed in the long run. Looking back, few technologies have kept the same degree of greatness over the past 15 years: emails, torrents, RSS feeds... only tools no corporation fully controls. I hope ActivityPub can join that list fairly soon.
I admit I don't use Twitter or Mastodon very much, but Mastodon's UX seems pretty decent these days. At least 50% of the time when I click on a Twitter link something breaks. Either the page doesn't load or a video won't play or whatever. And that's to say nothing of the "SIGN UP FOR TWITTER" bullshit that pops up whenever you click on anything.
I was just thinking about how every page I visit on mastodon is in a strong dark mode theme.
About a week ago I was in Twitters web settings checking stuff like connected apps, just to see if there are some, and switched the theme to light, the default blue-white, which probably 90+% of the users see.
I then noticed that Twitter looks nicer when not in dark mode (I have this same issue with IDEs, but yet I always stay with dark themes), that it looks friendlier.
Does Mastodon have a way to set my own preferences across all the different servers by specifying it in one location, or is this something the owner of the server decides? because if 90+% of those light themed Twitter users are confronted with default black themed mastodon feeds, it might give them a bad association towards this dark web thing the news talk about, or some depressive mood.
I wonder if it would help if Mastodon instances had a light theme by default.
The "For You" timeline is a new name for the "Home" timeline that's been around forever. And now it's easier to get to the chronological feed ("Following"), the first actual UX improvement to the site since the acquisition.
You can‘t default to the “following” tab anymore (every time you open the app it shows “for you” by default), which likely puts it in the “for Elon” camp. Or maybe there’s an even-more-buried setting to default to “following” than tapping the old (were they?) “stars”? But definitely not good UX when users have to tap “following” every time they want to only see, ya know, who they’re actually following (aka what they’re explicitly interested in).
It doesn't work that way for me (Mac/Chrome). Whatever tab I choose stays active, and persists through opening and closing tabs. Only goes back to "For You" when logging out and back in.
Yeah, the "For You is only for Elon" thing isn't a smart take. Makes me think he hasn't been around Twitter very long. From my perch down here in southeast Asia, Twitter is better than it's ever been at this point. A lot snappier and faster for users outside of North America.
Maybe because it doesn't seem to be loading every tweet and mention from people I'm following. Quite a lot of threads are broken (at least for me) because a lot of tweets aren't being loaded anymore. The amount of posts on my timeline has been decimated, but if I go to the individuals I follow, I can see that they have tweeted, I just don't see them in my timeline.
It does seem to have gotten substantially _worse_, though. In 15 years of using Twitter, up to late last year, I had blocked maybe three 'real' users (that is actual established accounts with followers, not FirstNameBunchOfNumbers). I mostly used it via Tweetbot, but if I went to the website, the algorithmic timeline was... not that useful, but basically inoffensive.
Then between the takeover and giving up entirely at the end of November, I was hitting block every time I looked at the website. For instance, I'd never had to trouble to block Elon Musk before, but he was suddenly constantly popping up.
I'm pretty sure that some settings got fairly dramatically tweaked.
Twitter was really pretty solid for what it was, had lots of great accounts and even with the stock UI was pretty operable for me. Even advertising on Twitter was pretty fun. You could reach
people all over the world at reasonable cost and get feedback on your product and messaging.
Most recently I used Twitter pretty much exclusively for following the war in Ukraine, and it’s been a big loss for me—Telegram is a good source for primary content, Twitter was great as a human-driven social redux. I followed a person in Mariupol, some people in Russia and Belarus, lots of people in Ukraine and Europe. It was a great for keeping up with such a terrible thing.
Unfortunately it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, to overcome network effects when something like Twitter is involved. The only way it goes under is if they are losing revenue and they actually go bankrupt at some point.
Elon has already been muzzled quite a bit and I haven't seen much out of him recently, so I imagine as long as that keeps being the case going forward we're going to see Twitter do just fine.
To be clear, I meant "RIP Twitter" for me personally. I wouldn't bet on Twitter failing. I think he'll make it work one way another.
> The only way it goes under is if they are losing revenue and they actually go bankrupt at some point.
That said,
> According to press reports, Twitter requires more than a billion dollars a year just to maintain its debt service and anything that endangers loan repayment or workforce security could endanger the business.
"much out of him" is a relative qualifier. At the least his tweets haven't been making news unlike the week where he was taking polls whether he should step down and unban journalists.
I find it hilarious when people say stuff like this. Every day, Twitter shambles ever closer to the distant, cobweb-laden corridors in which you can find Myspace, LiveJournal, or DeviantArt. Yeah, they're still out there, technically operating, but with not even a fraction of the social/cultural relevance they once held.
At this point the signal to noise ratio on Mastodon is amazingly good. Who would have thought that just displaying the timeline would be so refreshing.
yep, I have to say, it (Mastodon - mostly infosec.exchange) has been ..nice.. and /tilts head .. effective in communicating what I wanted to communicate with people who I wanted reach. And I think for social media that is the bar you want to reach. Nice and works. refreshingly surprised after being scarred by years of facebook and twitter- I assumed that was a good as social media was going to get. Apparently not.
Dealbreaker for Mastodon (that I've seen multiple people mention) is that instance admins can view personal DMs. Yes, employees from major social media companies can view your private messages, but it's more likely there's an audit trail in those cases while Mastodon instances have minimal oversight.
Right now I’d be more worried about Elon Musk giving activists access to Twitter DMs than either of the admins for the Mastodon instances I’m on. What good is an audit trail when the auditor is part of the problem?
You were able to switch to "latest tweets" before as well. The control was top right next to "home" label, the icon looked like stars.
The only thing that truly changed is "latest tweets" got renamed to "following" and it now takes up more vertical space (53 pixels to be exact) completely unnecessarily for something you're quite unlikely to click on on a regular basis.
Change for the sake of change. Doesn't actually have an impact on anything.
Not that I want to defend Elon’s twitter, but a sliding menu is far better than a button you need to click on to see the options of what it does. It far easier to see tweets just from the people you follow with just a glance & swipe
There's no sliding to be done on a desktop, and I'm pretty sure there's enough space to put "for you" and "following" next to "home" above it, where the icon used to be. Or better yet get rid of "home" above it completely as I fucking know when I'm on a homepage, plus there's three(!) additional ways of getting back to the top when you scroll down the timeline ("home" in the sidebar, Twitter logo in the sidebar, "see new tweets" popup), and there's your space for "for you"/"following". Still horrible, but at least as horrible as it was up until now instead of being twice as horrible.
That vertical placement on a desktop is by far the biggest part of my complaint. It's half a two-line-long text-only tweet less on your screen at all times (spacing and controls below the tweet included), accurate to the pixel. It annoys me enough that I used inspect element to measure it. The implementation on a phone is way less horrible.
you've been able to switch for a while but it wasn't obvious, i kinda stumbled upon it one day.
i find the new tabs at the top of the screen take up too much space and they scroll down when i go through my timeline. (i browse on my laptop via firefox, no idea what the mobile experience is like)
The "for you" was already the default option, if anything they made easier to switch to the "following" that before was kinda hidden on top and hard to find.
p.s.: i dislike musk since it was cool to like him.
What's wrong with Mastodon's UX? It's basically Twitter from ten years ago. The whole federated thing is a bit confusing but you can just use the default mastodon.social instance and not think about it.
Indeed. I got to that point of signup and playing with Mastodon and stopped. What, am I supposed to go hunting for some random server that'll allow me to join? Nah. I'll take my chances with getting kicked off or banned from Twitter, thanks. If I'm sent away from Twitter, I'll just stop consuming that content entirely. Probably a waste of time anyway.
This notion of affiliating with specific servers with specific cultures is I think one of the first things that's going to go out the window as Mastodon/ActivityPub succeeds. It's not that hard to provision single-user instances, and the fabled moderation overhead issues are, as I understand from talking to operators, mostly a thing that follows from having lots of people in an instance following lots of other instances --- much less a big deal if you're personally choosing every follow on your own instance.
Think Blogger, not Twitter or Facebook.
In the meantime, there's lots of smaller servers that are taking signups. I ended up on infosec.exchange; it's been fine (thanks, infosec.exchange people!). I'll be on my own address sometime in the next month or so.
Mastodon was not made for p2p, which having a huge amoung of single-user instances basically is.
The problem with Mastodon is that it ties your main account (and yes, most people just want a single account to represent their online persona) to a single instance which might have a very silly name and a very strong and unique culture (i.e. local timeline).
The solution to this is not to self-host, because the infrastructure was not made for it. The solution would be to completely rethink the Mastodon experience, but that will never be done
I'm not sure I even follow this argument. I can stand up a single host in an hour or two. Six months from now, there will probably be 30 competing providers who can do it at the push of a button. Respectfully: why is it relevant to me what Mastodon was "made for"? I just want to follow people and post stuff. That works just fine even if literally everyone has to run their own server.
ActivityPub is like RSS and Google Reader rolled up in Twitter's UX. That's what I'm psyched for, and the part of it that I think will catch on.
It's not a dumb question! I know that there is some notion of portability from one instance to another but I haven't the slightest clue how it works under the hood. I'm just sort of counting on this working. :)
I greatly appreciate federation being available even if I never have to use it. If a future social network comes along with some kind of new innovation,and it supports ActivityPub, I'll be able to use the new network while still communicating with my old contacts.
It's an excellent choice of name! (Signed, a kiwi)
Pleroma seems interesting too, though some drama in the community there turned me off a bit. I might keep an eye on Takahe too, I hadn't come across that one. Cheers!
Awww, I know they were accepting new accounts a few weeks ago because I made an account! But it looks like they closed again. That's a shame!
If anyone reading this just wants a simple Twitter replacement, I recommend masto.ai, another large and general-purpose instance which is accepting signups. But, yes, this is very much The Problem.
Elk (https://elk.zone) seems pretty good to me, though I'm not particularly fussy about UX in this particular case (I only check social media a couple of times a week). But there's quite a range of clients to choose between.
A billionaire attacking somebody else as "Pedo Guy" was peak hominem plus outrageous power imbalance, and the post you're replying to doesn't hold a candle to that. Plus Musk really is "a prick" "Space Karen" "King Shithead" "shitty person" "arrogant bastard" "billionaire bozo" "a clown". Truth is the best defense against libel.
Thing is, that level of invective just makes me think he's got politically motivated brainworms. In terms of performance and features, Twitter is better than it's ever been.
Elon just killed a sizeable chunk of their business without a word of explanation, let alone at least heads up. He’s pissed, rightfully so - it’s “livelihood motivated”.
It's not an ad hom if he's not claiming Musk is a shitty person therefore he's wrong about X. He's saying Musk is a shitty person and he's wrong. He's just using Musk's chosen pronouns.
Anyone comparing ActivityPub to the web3 craze has no idea what they are taking about and probably knows nothing about both of these things. They have nothing in common.
> A billionaire has spent the last 3 months shitting on what I thought was my social backyard.
I think Elon Musk is a horrible person, but... this one is on you, right? You thought that a company's service was your social backyard? That's on you.
There hasn't been any damage. No one has been hurt. Calm down and stop being overly dramatic. Twitter is not a real place, it's just a social network. Anyone who doesn't like it is free to use other communication tools, or even build their own.
And I'm not defending Elon Musk here. I don't care about him one way or another. This isn't an issue that rational, educated people should get agitated about.
> There hasn't been any damage. No one has been hurt. Calm down and stop being overly dramatic.
We are literally talking about a posting from the CEO of a company that has been essentially shutdown by this change. Other companies have also been placed in this predicament. People will probably lose jobs, at least, and these companies may go bankrupt.
This is so utterly wrong it hurts. The internet is real life the same way that evening news is real life. It’s a self-referential funhouse mirror that’s useful exactly for understanding what people who post on the internet think, and “people who post on the internet” is a tiny, profoundly idiosyncratic group. Conflating their opinions with “real life” is a powerful solvent for rationality, empathy, and mental health.
I'm defending the right to own property, which is something really fundamental to the way we organize our society.
... and when you say "the people that were hurt"... If you leave your wallet on the street, it might be stolen and you might be hurt. I'm not blaming the victim; someone stealing your wallet is wrong even though you left it on the street. It's not your fault, I'm not blaming you, I blame the thief for the theft. On the other hand there's something that you could've done that would've avoided it - don't leave your wallet on the street.
Nah, you are defending something that is based on the right to own property (and do whatever you like with it), but may nevertheless be shitty behavior. Just because something is legal and the legal basis is important (in your opinion), doesn't necessarily mean it is ok behavior.
E.g., being rude isn't forbidden, the freedom of speech is important, so is the right to express your personality. But lecturing the affected person about these rights may not be the best reaction when they have been insulted by someone.
I think the main point to discuss is not the rights, but whether the owner of a company should act more responsible, even if he is within his rights. And that's also the point of the OP.
I feel for this guy. He worked on a product for 16 years. A lot goes into that and it becomes part of your identity. Then right at a time close to the loss of his mother it gets shutdown, with no warning. I'd be devastated.
That said Elon is not doing this to anyone. He is not attacking anyone. He simply made a business decision. This happens all the time. Companies let suppliers go for financial reasons, they let staff go for similar reasons. People invest their lives into helping these businesses only to find they were let go for a few dollars. It sucks and it's can be super painful. Businesses mostly exist to make money and people should avoid investing their identity and loyalty into businesses as they probably won't reciprocate.
Just business doesn't usually lead to massive losses in an advertising revenue at an advertising business to the point Twitter is giving away ads. I'm not sure what it is but it's not just business. https://mashable.com/article/twitter-free-ads-to-advertisers...
It's just that we need to see business as business. You make relationships with people and put your trust and faith in people not in businesses. They're entities that can be bought and sold and exist purely to make a profit. They have their place and offer huge value to society but they are not people.
Why? Turds like Musk don’t need defense from anything other than their own ego.
Taking a poorly run site that had such a great influence in society and somehow running it even worse so that it loses its influence and revenue capability is breathtaking. It’s a lesson on how the modern hands off approach to corporate governance puts society at risk and is a lesson for limiting the rights of property owners.
You seem to be suffering from Reductive Personality Disorder.
Just because Musk has the power to do things like this doesn't absolve him from the absolute shittiness of his behaviour. He doesn't get a free ride because he's the owner, quite the opposite. People who wield power should act responsibly with it. Musk hasn't heard of the concept because he's so self absorbed and insecure he has no room for any sort of basic human empathy.
I’m not a Twitter user at all, but the people who have engaged with Twitter over the past few years are the ones who have provided Twitter with its value ($44 billion according to Musk). It’s not because of Elon or the previous shareholders, it’s because of the users.
In return for this value, the users got a social ”backyard”.
We like to say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but it’s also true that the free lunch is an exchange.
How does this example supposed to work? When you deposit money you get an asset (an IOU from the bank), while the bank gets money + liability (they are short the IOU).
Your property after the deposit is the IOU, not the money (you gave the money away in exchange for the IOU!).
There is contract + law that governs how the IOU can be redeemed for money (up to a limit the federal government guarantees some kinds of IOUs via FDIC/etc).
Once the bank has your money (for which they gave you the IOU), they in fact can use the money at their own discretion (it is their money!) subject to some legal limitations. Those limitations are not about how banks use other people’s money (because normal banks aren’t custodial), they are limitations based on risk and collaterization of IOUs (the bank’s liabilities).
These limitations are not expression of your property rights, they are in fact limitations on bank’s property rights (their freedom to deploy capital) since historically banks were not very responsible and blew up (in which case they failed to cover their liabilities, so IOUs were redeemed for less than their face value).
Edit: as an aside, this
money => money + IOU + IOU short
Is exactly how most of “money” in circulation is produced. People take the IOU and spend it like money, banks take the money and lend it collaterized by houses/factories/etc. So you get people spending more than total cash in circulation (because they spend IOUs), while banks accumulate large IOU short position (again, collaterized through stuff like houses, factories, etc).
Nothing bad about this, this is in fact working as intended.
Really? So if you go on a rampage of profanities and spew never ending hate and be as ugly and rude as possible that's praiseworthy?
> "For You" appears as the default option
No, it had been the default for several years now and every time you disabled it, it would mysteriously re-enable itself after a while.
> The "For You" timeline is only for Elon
No, he even complained about this feature, shadow-banning, censoring, and basically brain washing the masses among other things, before he bought Twitter.
> Mastodon is not great right now
No, because it will never be great. We discussed de-federation when I was at Twitter in the early days. It was clear an archipelago of decentralized servers can never generate momentum to drive enough revenue to get the wheel of acceleration spinning fast enough.
It was true then and it is true now, no matter how many hipster wanna be crypto bros who work on m7n tell you otherwise.
Pretty clear where your values are here. Personally I quite like a system that's explicitly not being designed to drive revenue, and would like to interact with other people that also want to be in a place with a higher value then the dollar bill. Im perfectly happy to let people with your values stay on twitter away from me.
Great post. I hope we see a multitude of new clients for Mastodon. In the meantime, if you're someone like me that is dipping their feet into Mastodon but isn't ready to leave Twitter fully yet, then you might be interested in a browser extension I developed[0] which puts Mastodon posts in your Twitter timeline.
Sorry to break it to you Elon but you really did spend $44 billion on the next MySpace. There's nothing you can do about it now. All we ask is that you please stop trashing your Tesla brand. Oh!!! and by the way recommend to the BOD to make Tom Zhu CEO of Tesla. You can stay at Twitter.
Twitter had so much potential under new leadership. There are so many ways he could have made the platform a richer experience. YouTube could have been a competitor. But he squandered it in a truly epic fashion.
MySpace didn't have the President of United States and the leader of Taliban on the same platform though. No matter what side of the debate you're on, Twitter does have solid network effects.
Cry me a river. Build something based on a third party platform and expect possible consequences like this as its vagaries and ownership details change. Most of the post reeks of self absorption and naval gazing. Yep, some billionaire that for the moment isn't quite popular among the glitterati of social justice and elite media bought a major social network only to change it in ways you don't like. It happens, adjust. It might be fashionable to pour shit on Musk but nothing new or horrible happened here as far as the world of tech is concerned. Twitter was treading shit with all kinds of bad policies long before space man came along to apply his own brand of convoluted management..
Noob question: what demographics is or was Twitter popular with? I remember is as something like the FB news feed, and used mainly by grownups, vice university students. Since then, I haven't met anyone who suggested to follow it, or encountered it outside the context of news articles (especially lately). Or the occasional link here to a long-form post split up into tweets. Is this like Whattsapp that's popular in some countries but not others? I'm in East coast USA.
I removed the official Twitter app from my phone a few weeks back. I was leery about the amount of extra data that could be slurped up from my device and sent back to...well, wherever. And so I reinstalled an old version of Tweetbot that I had paid for, and was really quite happy with the experience. It was a bit cumbersome, didn't give me nearly as many stats, and lacked push notifications.
But, it was helping to wean me off my constant doom-scrolling. And now that Tweetbot no longer works, I am even less inclined to reinstall Twitter on my iPhone, and I'm opening the Mastodon app more often.
If federation was a worthwhile goal (in one's mind) after "the bozo took over Twitter" then it is quite obvious nothing fundamentally has changed such that federation would have been a noble goal as a foil to previous Twitter management. Seriously - if more personal sovereignty is the goal then complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management.
In reality the argument for federation is as I've already said - more personal sovereignty, less centralized, corruptible, overlord control. Twitter is certainly doing much better now than before, and that doesn't mean federated communities online still are not, in principle, superior.
If someone wants to use crypto to do justify sentiment like this, they'd be mocked here, but this is much better? It goes to show that people denouncing different approaches often aren't doing it because those approaches lack coherent justification, but because those approaches are related to aspects of technology some people don't like and don't care to examine.
There are plenty of reasons to lampoon the majority of approaches 'crypto' takes to 'solve' problems - that doesn't mean one shouldn't lampoon carefully and thoughtfully. Likewise, there is reason to justify federated platforms, but a dislike of Elon Musk's politics will not be the true driver.
> complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management.
This rings very true. The move to Mastodon isn’t likely to translate into “…but why do we need speech owners at all”. Unaccountable and unjustified concentrated power is simply not a concern to most. Once the dust settles, business as usual will kick in. It’ll either be a feudal lordship of mastodon instances, or a brand new dickhead in a leather jacket.
> complaining about Twitter only after new management is admitting that the primary quality you don't like is the new management.
So the thing about Twitter (and actually I think this is something Musk badly misunderstood) is that Twitter users, particularly long-time Twitter users, have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It's always been a bit of a broken unpleasant mess; there's a reason that Twitter users affectionately call it the hellsite.
Previously, federated services were a nice idea, but there was never really the push needed; significant numbers of people weren't sufficiently annoyed with Twitter to leave. Now, well.
(I pretty much expected this to happen once Saint Car bowed to the will of the Delaware Chancery Court, but I've got to admit I thought it would take a lot longer, via a thousand cuts. This API thing feels like such an unforced error.)
Also, this has served as a timely reminder that, even if the private service you like (or love-hate) is fine now, it could at any moment be taken over and ruined by a weird idiot. Even if your interests align with the platform's interests, you can no longer assume the platform will act in its best interests.
That's a fair point - though I do think this particular 'happening' won't be enough to get more sovereign solutions to critical mass, but maybe it's a strong step.
Paul mentioned that they had a way to push new API info to the clients, so I think they basically just re-registered the app as a YOLO thing to see how long until Twitter pulls the plug again.
This situation is heart breaking for us who have a lot of attachment to this API. I built a research thesis around data mining the firehose, and that work got me my first data mining job. I made hundreds of valuable connections. However, the API really died years ago when requirements of ad-based revenue meant neutering many endpoints. It's been on life support since. Recent events really were about pulling the plug.
But Mastodon excites me the way I used to be excited about social. There's possibility again to turn it into the things we gave up on a decade ago. I look forward to a new wave of innovation here.
And yes, I refuse to say the name of the company or the owner at this point. I agree with the author. It isn't deserved.
This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.
The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt.
Which is a thing that happens.
The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it.
So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control.
If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so.
And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here.
If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pro Tip: Don't build "your life's work" around a third-party API over which you have no definitive control. Moving forward, the author would do well to keep that "top of mind."
His "life's work" is a fresh coat of paint on someone else's creation, which is of questionable value to begin with. And using his mother's death as a comedic prop in a public rant doesn't exactly engender sympathy.
you do realise that twitterific shaped a LOT of twitter in the early days, like he says in the article? that the concepts they pioneered in their app, which twitter didn't have (they didn't have a first party app for quite a while) are integral concepts to the very foundations of twitter?
i don't think his mum's death was a comedic prop, it was a storytelling device. what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
Calling it a comedic prop is the charitable interpretation.
> We loved this app like I loved my mom.
He genuinely loves an app like his own mother? It says a lot about his opinion of his mother that an app can be on the same level in his estimation. For his sake and his mother's I hope this was an attempt at gallows humor, but it's a pretty horrible one.
> what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
I'm not belittling his life, I'm belittling the phrase "life's work" used by the parent commenter. I wonder if the article's author would even consider it his life's work. He appears to run an entire company with a number of other projects.
I'm aware of the innovations. Personally I don't find them all that profound, but either way, it's just an alternate UI for a social network that isn't a particularly positive influence on the world. People in this thread painting it as some sort of magnum opus are being a bit grandiose, don't you think?
Look, if I was this guy I'd be pissed too. But elevating a Twitter client to the level of his recently deceased mother is in unbelievably poor taste, no matter how "groundbreaking" it was.
Normally I would agree 100%, but in this case the target has more than earned it and the tone matches the impact on the author so I give them a pass on it.
Yeah, I had a hard time getting through it. At least, I don't get the point the author is trying to make.
Is this really a surprise given the direction social data has gone in the past decade or so? APIs will only remain public as long as they are useful.
Elon sees an upside to making the API at twitter more private, in order to maintain control over Twitter's direction. You can argue as much as you want for, or against this, but don't add noise and make me rake through it.
Why? I loved reading something that was heartfelt and unfiltered. Does everything have to be sanitized to that it doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities? Because I find that offensive.
Being coarse on purpose to express yourself is perfect valid. It's not like he's being asked to critique Schopenhauer and his reply is "Fuck that shit." He's responding to having years of work rendered moot for no apparent reason beyond one man's preference.
Do you really think that "Space Karen" is a clever insult? It's such a boring meme. You might as well just print a "Spaceman Bad" t-shirt so that everyone knows your approach to technology is motivated by politics.
I don't have any opinion on it. I was explaining why I think the author used the language he did. Even if I did have an opinion on it, I don't think it's an insight into my politics, any more than simping for Musk would be an insight into yours.
Why is this hard to understand without bringing your politics into it?
If you build an app that depends on an API, it really sucks if that API is taken away. But we all know it happens. Even so, most companies care enough about goodwill that they will give some advance notice so that you can prepare for it.
In this case, the API was revoked with absolutely no advance warning for people like TapBots, who have been selling and supporting TweetBot for literally years, and now have to clean up the unexpected mess.
That's why, on their merits, Twitter the company and Musk the owner are complete dicks here.
Can you understand that, or is basic common decency too much woke orthodoxy for you?
I thought Dorsey was a doofus whose part-time management contributed to the utter stagnation of the product. And their API changes in 2012 were a shitty thing to do to developers, but perhaps less cowardly than the current changes.
I don't use it much these days, but hopefully it'll stick around, even if only as a Parler clone with $5B in debt, mostly populated by angry reply guys whining about wokeness. I'm sure you'll be happy there.
This is an absurd gotcha. If someone is pointing out that someone else is employing a political buzzword for that argument, that's somehow having a "propaganda driven mind"?
Everyone knows using the word "woke" like this is a cheap shot pejorative that has no substance, but pointing out someone using it like this is some kind of "obsession"? If the original poster didn't intend to be so provocative, maybe they shouldn't have leaned on using the words "woke orthodoxy" to make such a lazy point for them.
Yikes, and here I thought Twitter is the best it's been in years now that people can share meaningful information again. I guess greed and pet projects trump accountability these days.
We’ll see how this plays out, but I think Twitter has grew despite sabotaging developers. I’ve left Twitter in 2011-2012 because of their API changes, and that made me salty so I decided to not use their platform. So they lost me as a user, but that certainly didn’t matter much.
In my opinion, you can only push it so far. You rely on some of the “power” users to run a platform. In HN, think of it of people that post, comment and visit the most. The rest of the users are mostly “followers”. These “power” people make and set the trends.
This is the last nail in the coffin. These people will find new territories and hopefully they’ll learn this time that they need to own the platform, and not just their contributions. If successful, this will make it hard for any future centralized platform to see the light again.
If success, this will probably take Facebook and other social media networks too. This will make it even harder (or easier?) for governments to control narrative or even understand what’s going on.
I’m optimistic today for the future. Thank you Elon Musk!
Hate on "space karen" all you want... but we all know that if he hadn't bought it, the company would still be a bloated carcass incapable of delivering features, its c-level would be dancing to the tune of every 3 letter agency, and its moderation teams would be openly enforcing left wing dogma while granting media friends a total exemption.
There never would have been an exodus to other protocols had the awful people responsible for all of the above not gotten what they deserved. They would still be relishing exactly the position and behavior they now openly hate musk for: petty tyranny.
All in all, a positive development. Twitter didn't fall as predicted, tons of incriminating evidence is coming out, and people who are used to always getting their way are now hearing what an unconditional "no" feels like from the other side, for the first time in their lives it seems.
This is a computing forum, ain't nobody got the time to explain what API means.
You should not go on medical forums asking in any post what SVT tachycardia means either. It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions.
I didn't ask was "API" meant. Instead, I asked what was the specific API they were referring to. There are thousands of APIs
and the authors assumed what API they had in mind was clear. Clear enough???
For your
> It's just rude, and trollish, since you have been here for 10 years and you're wasting everybody's time with fake questions.
Wrong. All wrong. 100% wrong. I did no such thing. What I did is 100% fully appropriate, reasonable, justified, and constructive.
Just read again, setting your hostility aside, what I actually WROTE.
E.g., I wrote
"API"
to question the meaning of the quote I gave
"the API".
Okay, as is fully clear from what else I wrote, I was asking WHAT !@#$%^&() API? Not your misreading -- I was NOT asking what an API is but what API the author had in mind. You blew it. You get an F for simple reading comprehension.
More generally, sorry to break the news, but computing and Hacker News have a strong desire to be as obscure as possible. It appears that most of what competence* the audience has is simple explanations of obscure jargon about trivial concepts and then omit the explanations and leave the jargon.
My view is that poor technical writing, including undefined obscure jargon is by far the worst bottleneck to progress in computing and, thus, in the economy and civilization.
In a few words, JUNK THE OBSCURE JARGON. Clear enough? This is a controversial suggestion?
Usually when I see obscure jargon, I don't bother to guess or look up what it means and, instead, conclude that the content is from such a bad writer that I should not attempt to read the content.
Writers, take note: A large fraction of the content on computing and at Hacker News I just won't attempt to read.
I know quite well what advanced material is in computing and math.
I'll put it to you this way: I know enough about academic computer science research to understand that a large fraction of accomplished, expert, famous, tenured, chaired professors of computer science at some of the best research research universities don't waste their time, effort, or energy on undefined, generally trivial content presented as obscure jargon either.
Undefined terminology -- bad stuff. Don't do that. Understand now?
I know; I know; these ideas are a bit too subtle for the diligent Hacker News audience well informed on obscure aspects of Twitter. Uh, I have next to nothing to do with Twitter. Apparently some of the Hacker News audience expects to become better informed about computing by paying attention to trivia about Twitter -- not good.
Losing your business like this has to be infuriating, but that's always the risk building your business on top of someone else's business. However, the writing style completely undercuts the message with the name calling. I wonder if Craig will still pull the plug now that the API seems to be back up.
where have you heard that the API is back up for those who've been banned? only thing I've seen is that some have worked around their bans by getting new API keys
Ah my bad, if it's an app instead of a website, I understand how it is appropriate to use the passing of your mom as a metaphor in a blog post named "The Shit Show".
One is business, the other one is family life. His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way. Why would anyone involve their mother's death in an Elon Musk post?
> His business decisions were not right and he is learning it the hard way.
This is absurd. His business decision worked for 16 years, which is longer than many jobs or even companies last.
The point is that the new owner of Twitter has no respect for the people who contributed to the platform over the years. Twitter won't even announce that they've shut down the 3rd party API. How cowardly is that?
How is that absurd? His twitter client is just an interface for what twitter does already. It is like buying pizza from Dominos and adding one more topping on and reheating. I think investing in social media platform APIs is risky because they keep changing their business models and policies.
> His twitter client is just an interface for what twitter does already. It is like buying pizza from Dominos and adding one more topping on and reheating.
This is also absurd. If the app is so pointless, then why did so many people buy it?
twitterific and tweetbot were amazing polished UIs that made twitter better, before twitter even had a first party app. and twitterific coined tonnes of metaphors and UI that twitter uses to this day.
if you don't know the history of the third-party twitter clients, maybe don't make stuff up about how useless they are
Do you think it's appropriate to tell others how to grieve? Should they only be allowed to grieve by your standards?
If the author thinks it's appropriate to draw a parallel between the two, it's not your place to tell them otherwise. It's not you losing your passion project, and it's not you losing your mother.
> The first sentence of my first comment was literally "I guess everyone griefs differently".
How is this comment even meaningful if you don't support the article author's own way of grieving?
> But apparently we're not allowed to express our opinion anymore?
This is ironic when you consider the article author's expression of his opinion to be "particularly distasteful". You're not even disagreeing on substantive points, you just seem to think it was wrong of him to express his opinion in the way that he did. Nothing more than tone policing.
It's a metaphor about dealing with loss. How knowing something is coming allows people to cope more effectively. If your interpretation of that metaphor is that he is saying Elon's move is worse than or similar to his mother dying I find that much more distasteful than anything he said.
I understood the metaphor, but I still think it's distasteful to evoke your recently dead mother in a hateful post full of slurs and titled "The Shit Show".
People gets attached to things, people, concepts, etc… The emotional effect is the same. The intensity is determined by their investment and time. What the author wanted to say is that he made a huge emotional investment into his product for 16 years.
A Karen is a personality type. They are not imputing the gender on Elon but the personality. By applying the insult to men they are de-gendering the insult.
Yep, it makes no sense - fueling, empowering someone's private property,even voluntarily helping to sidestep/skip platform shortcomings to make it dominant player instead of promoting open standards and solutions and then surprise, "Pikachu face"
I'm perceiving Asahi Linux initiative in similar way and it's astonishing to see people putting countless man-hours for free into improving device produced by one of richest companies in the world which is known for having full controll on sofware and hardware intentionally and steadily making it as locked as possible, hostile to OS
What could go wrong here..
While I agree that getting locked out is a clear risk of any business built against another company's platform I do think it is perfectly reasonable for someone whom has done so for 15+ years (and is part of an ecosystem that helped establish that third party) to be publicly upset for the mode and method for how this change happened at twitter. Its not just his frustrations being vented in this post but the impact to his users (which is well out of his control).
Twitter's actions of breaking the API for the largest 25 integrators with millions of users (by all indications) on purpose with 0 deprecation warning, 0 communication, 0 response the the break is garbage. Knowing that Musk is the agent of change and the one setting these actions in place he can take the heat.
at the end of the day I am done with twitter as it is, so its no skuff on my skin either way -- as far as I am concerned there is a clear path forward for the types of actions Musk has taken at twitter. It is just a matter of time.
Elon took "complaining to the manager" to a whole new level by buying the whole company outright and then firing all the managers he was ranting about.
Was the Twitter API taken down intentionally or is this a bug? If intentional was it announced ahead of time? If its a bug, has this happened before -- looks like in happened in July 2022 (https://api.twitterstat.us/history?page=3)?
To the people who were already warning of things like this, in the '80s and '90s, all the cries lately of "I let some rich guy own my social network; how could I have known that would be abused" might seem a bit /r/LeopardsAteMyFace.
It’s not even clear that they “pulled the plug”, could just be a temporary outage. Wish Musk would announce his thoughts on the future of the API, though.
Regardless of how it started, a "temporary outage" that has lasted for several days and has received zero acknowledgement from the company can now be considered intentional. They don't get the benefit of doubt without sending even a bare minimum "sorry, we are working on fixing it" tweet.
Can a “temporary outage” be limited only to the most popular apps? Can a “temporary outage” affect Twitterrific for iOS but not Twitterrific for Mac [0]?
Yes, of course (if e.g. some shards but not others broke/received an updated incorrect config). In fact, it applying to some but not other versions of the same app makes it look more likely to be a bug than intentional.
I'm expecting this to be the second-dumbest thing I ever predicted badly (I dismissed MP3s, too!)