| > What I’m doing · I’m not closing or deleting my account, because Twitter might come back, who knows. > I’ll still use Twitter to post pointers to ongoing pieces because that benefits me, not Elon. So not really leaving. > Are people really leaving Twitter? · Yes. [..] So, suppose I’m right about Twitter… The evidence is that Mastodon users are increasing, and therefore leaving Twitter. The assumption is that they are not doing exactly what this author is doing, and signing up to both. > Why Mastodon will succeed I was just reading how every time jwz posts, they receive a DDoS from other servers loading the content [1]. The problems scale as the users do. > General-purpose (non-affinity-group) instances won’t be free; typical charges will be $5-10/month. I assume that means either using crypto or a central payment system. People were hesitant to pay $8 for Twitter believing it should be free, how will you get them to pay if they can just move to a free instance? > They will compete on the quality of their moderation and spam/abuse prevention. None of them have the resources to do this. Twitter had quite a large moderation team being paid a lot of money to work on this problem full time. You'll either end up in an echo chamber (reducing need for moderation) or there will be little to no moderation. All that said, this person was likely more suited to a platform of shorter writing, rather than these longer form pieces. It contradicts itself in places. [1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/ EDIT: Less inflammatory. |
As, of course, is jwz.
Smart people who we admire for their thinking and writing on technology can be embarrassingly shallow when it comes to other domains, and (as I’ve reluctantly learned over the decades) can be safely ignored when they opine obviously way out of their depth.