systemicdanna

The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.

Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.

This one looks like a hacked account of a musician called Joe Memmel. I hope at least hijacked accounts will still be taken care of by Twitter.

The incoming wave of crypto spammers with blue checkmarks is going to be impressive in size.

I appreciate your explanation!

The existence of overwhelmed workers who don't have any energy (or desire) to think outside of their daily routine is a shared characteristic of all economic regimes in sufficiently large countries. It's not due to "socialism in the US" or capitalism somewhere else. Lowering taxes or improving public school system won't solve that completely. And, just to note, Catholicism doesn't encourage freethinking either.

I see the situation you described in the last paragraph as a very real possibility. Not going to defend Twitter, but at least it can’t ban whole organized communities at once. Mastodon’s federation that is left up to instance admins to decide on is bad design.

I would prefer to use an instance that has no control over who I can follow. As an added benefit, this instance wouldn’t have to fully federate with every instance I follow users from, so wouldn’t add all updates to the federated feed.

This way the instance would only be responsible for user identities but would not have much control over who its users can follow. I still don’t fully understand why Mastodon did not choose this design.

> You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big

Instance admins can certainly be more decisive and just ban anyone they want without causing a media storm. Not sure if that's what people meant when they asked for a Twitter alternative.

So... are there any countries in the world that are not socialist by your definition? Maybe China? It has, perhaps, lower taxes and better public schools.

There you go: just clone and deploy https://github.com/RisingGeek/twitter-clone.

Are you suggesting they should pre-ban all people and entities you don't want to see on the instance?

Register on website A -> you can post at and follow people from website A. Go to website B and follow a person from that website without registering. Now you can also see their updates on website A.

Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.

This is just not a solid argument. Let's replace Twitter with the US government. Why should it be allowed to impose its own bias on billions of people worldwide?

LGBT communities are mostly very supportive and welcoming (which I envy as a straight man). Also they are not niche in the same sense as some music genre communities, which I am trying to be a part of but the discussion is just not happening.

Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.

AFAIK if you access a user's private info at Facebook your employee's ID will be immediately flagged leading to very severe consequences (instant firing in most cases).

I have the same experience so far but also acknowledge that it will take a very long time for communities to form around individual Mastodon instances. Of course, that might never happen at scale (a large number of instances with functioning communities). Twitter (and Reddit, IG, etc) certainly benefited from mixing different people together and not being limited to a specific niche. On the other hand, niche forums and discussion boards in the 90s and early 2000s had a wide variety of amazing communities. So maybe it's just a question of time.

Privately-owned global public square with laws and regulations set by the said private company? Then we all agree and there is no problem to solve.

You are certainly aware that Twitter did not start as a public square either (the original idea was to share SMS messages with a group of friends). So I am not following your argument.

My argument is that there is a place online where anyone can go and express an idea and challenge ideas of other’s. That place is (among others) 4chan. It’s not some obscure personal blog, it’s a large and influential platform. Is it working as a public square? Are you using it to challenge ideas you disagree with?

One problem with this argument (and there are many) is that we assume that this _global_ public square should be controlled by the US government. That doesn’t make it much more fair or impartial than the current ownership. If being gay is illegal in many parts of the world, should people from those countries be able to call for punishment and basically harass gay people? If not, why not if this is a global public square.

There is place like that already: 4chan. How is that working so far as a public square?

I really dislike when people downvote without commenting... wish leaving a comment was a requirement for a downvote at HN.

Saying that, my guess is that you are being downvoted for self-promotion.

I can see logic in this. "Local", federated spaces are more analogous of a public square in my view.

On the other hand, a global neutral public square where all ideas can be expressed and challenged is just not feasible in any meaningful way.

> However we also need a public square online

Why? What is this notion based on? A global public square never existed in the history of our species, why do we keep bringing up the idea of a public square as something completely reasonable?

This comparison of Twitter to some fantasy public square will never stop bewildering me. What was the global public square before Twitter? When did we have a place where every person on the planet could freely express themselves?

This is just a purely imaginary space which for some reason even very smart people keep bringing up.

> In 2 weeks Twitter will have shipped a major feature ($8/mo subscription).

Do you mean that he is planning to increase the subscription price for an existing feature called Twitter Blue? Why do so many Musk’s fans have the urge to constantly exaggerate his impact?

For sure. It is frustrating to watch Twitter struggle so much with introducing meaningful monetization streams. Saying that, things probably seem simpler and more obvious from the outside.

Jack is an idealist in a very stubborn way. He sacrificed too much of Twitter’s reputation and neutrality by fighting for questionable causes.

Well, you are missing the fact that Musk ordered Twitter to reboot its short-form video app Vine. Expect tens of billions of dollars in revenue by 2028!

Did you expect it to crash the second people were let go? It’s not like they power Twitter servers with power-generating bicycles.

Agreed. He probably didn’t let go many infra people. If some product teams were reduced in size and will become slower at butchering the UI, the user will only benefit.