[Timwi]

Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure. If all software were just open-source, anyone could run their own Twitter and make it interoperable. Except this already exists and is called Mastodon, or more generally, the Fediverse. The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.

[darawk]

> Twitter (and other platforms like it) self-impose those costs on themselves in order to maintain the feudalist structure.

No they don't. The site would not exist if they did not "self impose" those costs. By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

> The fact that billions of people still choose to use Twitter instead of the sensible alternative shows that the feudalist gambit (using algorithms to make people angry and turn on each other) is working.

It shows that people prefer Twitter to Mastodon. It does not show anything about why they prefer one to the other. Your reason may be a factor, but there is no prima facie evidence that it is the dispositive factor. There is quite a lot of evidence that other factors are substantially more relevant.

[tmcb]

> By simple analogy, which self-imposed costs were paid by feudal lords?

Mantaining lords and knights, letting go of a parcel of their land so that they could accommodate enough serfs and their families (as in comparison to, say, slave quarters used in the Americas).

[red-iron-pine]

and running their manor, in a day to day sense in many cases. the point was to maintain a military and agricultural base, and they had sizable obligations to their bosses, up to and including dying in battle.

[exe34]

Shut down twitter for a week and people might move to mastodont and never come back - network effect.

[theGeatZhopa]

Not necessarily :) I wouldn't even notice if one or the other is shut down.

Then, you underrate the "homeing" feeling, the whole posts, the followers, your digital "brand" and all the work invested - you don't have to learn a new platform (it's peculiarities), you don't have to start from zero. So your motivation not to leave X/Twitter is quite high.

It's a wishful thinking by you. I don't know where and why it originates. But, being a rational human being, I wouldn't switch. Let alone the reach you get with X/Twitter compared to mastodon. Even the smallest blog shows X/Twitter embeddings. Where is that from mastodon? ... It would be an unwise decision to switch. Sorry.

[exe34]

Plenty of mass migrations have happened online, usually when the payment processors decide to go puritanical.

[theGeatZhopa]

Yes, you're absolutely right here. It's the way of money all of us following. May it be the payment processor goes rogue, or the platform itself. Or a competitor emerges (like tiktok did suddenly, like Facebook did suddenly at their start..)

it's a very easy equation: Time = money.

No matter if it's the right hand or the left hand of the equation, but one of the sides must be bigger than the other And the quotient have at best to go towards the positive infinity if you consider how much money/work you invested and how much time you spend on it .. (ROI)

So, big, mass migration actually never happened once. It rather happened slowly and over time. Consumers switching to platforms which have what they actually want and that are easy to use (time investment). If you want Facebook/meta to go down the river, then you need something that gives the consumers what Facebook doesn't give them. If you want Google to go down the river, then you need to offer some better experience. Like bing chat / Copilot. If I think about that, I didn't use Google search in the last 4-5 months. Because I can formulate what I actually want and if I need more in depth knowledge, I still use Copilot as a starting point for my things. It's a total different approach to search.

So, mass migration happens, yes. But not because some says "it's bad.. omg, musk is the CEO" or "oh no, they put the API behind a paywall" - idealistic thinking stops there, where someone must invest time/work to get where he/she/it already is. And that's what lures the consumers into a closed, walled system - in the end they get exactly what they want.

That's why f.e. mastodon is still somewhere .. let me say, behind the fence..

It's all economic thinking and processes ruling "who and how many go to"

Just take the influencers. They can't even earn money on alternatives. Why should they migrate?

[exe34]

The lack of money for "influencers" sounds like a feature to me, not a bug!

[mlrtime]

Reddit almost had this same experiment, other than a few anecdotes nothing changed.

[pas]

According to Apptopia analysis, X/Twitter is estimated to have around 121 million daily active users, significantly lower compared to company announcements.

Elon of course says that it's around 300M and all-time-high was 550M in 2023. (Whatever that means.)

[gizmo]

The experience for users is just much much better if everybody is on the same platform. And the platform operator has to deal with spam, abuse, and compliance issues. Federated platforms haven't even attempted to seriously deal with this. Twitter has thousands of people working on this stuff and open source can't replicate that. You need many lawyers just to respond to overbearing governments demanding immediate censorship.

It's not some feudalist "rage bait" conspiracy that keeps people on twitter. Federated software just sucks in comparison. Twitter, despite all its flaws, is the only game in town.

[non-chalad]

How much does the electricity cost to run the servers? How much for the maintenance of those computers running the software? How about rental fees for the space they are kept in, air conditioning, sewer, taxes? Nah… doesn't exist. It's self-imposed feudalism.

[piva00]

The issue is not giving you the option by making Twitter interoperable with an open protocol.

Imagine if the web was like that instead of being an open network where if you follow a few protocols you can access it through any protocol-compliant software (aka: a browser) giving you the option to self-host or pay some service to host it for you, if it was a single service operated by a Big Tech that closes off this web based on their whims, locking out competing browsers, impossible to access outside of their provided clients, etc.

It's self-imposed feudalism, Twitter created a feud, API access has been curtailed, you have to access it through their provided means.

Open protocols is what made the web as powerful as it is, the closing of parts of it is a disgrace.

[LunaSea]

This is complete none-sense masquerading as deep philosophy.

Sites have costs (employees, infrastructures, offices, development) and this requires free access coupled with advertisement or closed access and payment of some sort like a subscription.

How could such a site survive if it has to freely give access to all it's content to other sites without anything in return. What would be the incentive for users to stay on the paying version?

[piva00]

> How could such a site survive if it has to freely give access to all it's content to other sites without anything in return. What would be the incentive for users to stay on the paying version?

Provide services on top of the protocol? Adjacent to it? Niceties that don't break interoperability of data? Ads that are relevant to the core group using your version of the site for the protocol? I'm sure business people would find many ways to monetise just like they have monetised an open protocol called "web".

> This complete none-sense masquerading as deep philosophy.

Don't start with this bullshit, it just makes the discussion become inflammatory, fuck off with that, please.

[LunaSea]

> Provide services on top of the protocol? Adjacent to it?

You can't, because those features would then not be available on said open protocol making these features another "serfdom".

Or you'd have to add them to the protocol negating the differentiating factor.

Niceties that don't break interoperability of data?

> Ads that are relevant to the core group using your version of the site for the protocol?

Wait until you hear how Twitter, Facebook and Youtube get monetised.

> I'm sure business people would find many ways to monetise just like they have monetised an open protocol called "web".

This is wishful thinking and does not form a coherent end-to-end strategy.

> Don't start with this bullshit, it just makes the discussion become inflammatory, fuck off with that, please.

Lets not start calling all businesses "technofeudalism" then.

For someone as left leaning as Yanis he seems to enjoy all the "niceties" of capitalism just fine. I'll wait for his books to be open source. I'm sure this will happen any day now.

[piva00]

> Lets not start calling all businesses "technofeudalism" then.

I didn't, and it's clear what kind of business are defined as technofeudalists in the book which you haven't read. I recommend reading the book before having opinions about the subject, not headlines. It's clear you are having a knee-jerk reaction to something you didn't have intellectual curiosity to learn about.

> For someone as left leaning as Yanis he seems to enjoy all the "niceties" of capitalism just fine. I'll wait for his books to be open source. I'm sure this will happen any day now.

As usual comes the variation of the comment "leftists with iPhones" to shutdown discussion. This is a thought-terminating cliche, and a tired one at it. Don't use it, it just displays a lack of arguments.

[theGeatZhopa]

I always thought porn made the Internet successfully penetrating almost each part of life.

You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.

So in an utopian open web where everything can be imagined like you wrote, there wouldn't be any Facebook. Any Instagram. No tiktok. No Amazon. And actually there would be anything that is used by millions of millions now. Who would be capable to build and to finance the whole? A few OSS programmers? They're busy with other projects...

X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..

(One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )

[Rinzler89]

>porn [..] penetrating

You just had to :)

[piva00]

> You're right about the open protocols. But this are more important for the background services and architecture. In fact, no one is interested in selfhosting or things like that. Everyone just want to use and to consume. But someone has to build. And that one wants to eat and feed.

I will have to repeat myself: you don't need to self-host if you prefer another company providing you the service based on an open protocol, exactly like the web does, you could pay Twitter (via your attention, clicking on ads, whatever) and have that interact with other Feeds through a common protocol, whomever wants to self-host could do it, whomever wouldn't could use a Twitter-like platform.

> X/Twitter can curtail what ever they want. If you want to be part of it, play after the rules. No one forces you. If it's really so bad, then new players will emerge and do things differently - it was always like that and will always be like that. Thats, btw, is the true reason what made the web powerfull: actors who do things differently. They come, they go..

This falls apart when an entity gets large enough to completely feudalise a part of the web, that's the whole point of "Technofeudalism" (I question if you ever read the book since you do not understand this core principle). Amazon got so large that nowadays if you want to sell goods as a company in the web in some countries you cannot avoid also participating in their marketplace, so many customers use it for their purchases that if you stay away you are on the back foot against your competitors who are willing to sell through Amazon.

When Facebook dominates local groups for organising local activities (hobbies, student-parent groups, neighbourhood communications, etc.) there's no other option to jump to because the network effects locked in people, even if you dislike the platform you can't force all of the other dozens to hundreds of people using such groups to move over to a different one, the friction from network effects is too great. Instead if there was an open protocol that Facebook also implemented for the groups feature there wouldn't be any friction on just moving over to a different player if the Facebook experience didn't work well for you anymore.

> (One correction though.. protocols describe a "same language" that different systems speak so they "understand" each other. What X/Twitter curtailed was their API. Application programming Interface. The difference is here that access to a system and software has been granted instead of speaking"same language". Why should it be free? They have costs by others using the API.. )

That's not my point, I know what APIs and protocols are. The API example was just for illustrating the power that a closed platform has against all their users, be the users end-users or developers relying on the platform. No need for corrections, it just sounds very patronising trying to "correct" me while you completely missed the point I made...

After going around this thread of comments it feels like I'm discussing with people that have never experienced the web pre-2010s, you are so used to have massive services provided in the web being closed off by a few players that you think this is the only way they could exist. That was not how the web worked at all, there were visions for protocols springing to help those activities happening on the web to be interoperable between different platforms, to allow the movement of people between different services if one didn't work well anymore. These were killed by Big Tech fencing off their feuds, it was done on purpose to vacuum as much data as possible since data was the new gold rush after Google emerged in the 2000s.

And I see time and time again people in this thread ignoring how massive network effects are, thinking that "a new service will emerge and do things differently and just because they are better people will choose it", absolutely ignoring network effects and the friction of moving platforms when you can't take or port your data away to a new one. That's not how reality works, it's wishful thinking that a better service will inevitably attract enough people to move into them, if that happens it's also a very slow process, slower the larger the network is, as a corporation of course you need to care that in 10 years your users might migrate to a different platform if you fuck up but as an individual I don't have many 10 years slices in my life to wait for a shit product to die while I'm forced to use it due to its network effects.

Lastly to add to the last paragraph, you are also not considering that Big Tech just straight up acquires whatever appears that could be a potential competitor, most times to either kill the competition or to absorb it into their machines.

Please, go read "Technofeudalism".

[theGeatZhopa]

I've used the web since round about 1995 already. Altavista emerged at that time as yahoos competitor. fireball was their competitor. If you know the the difference, then you know what Google did. I used Google since the very beginning. I used usenety I know IRC and each of the messengers msn, AOL, QQ.. I did peer to peer streaming, sharing and DC++ .. ah.. i started with Windows for workgroups 3.11 and DOS6+, I used Linux, tried BSD. It was my hobby at that time I was 15. I had to discover the computer and system without much books or Internet. My father worked with HPUX. And, I thinkingy I'm a true digital native if you want to have a calling name. Don't judge me here.

I'm a rational man. I know what f.e Google did for the Internet. But it's completely going by your definition of technofeudalism. Just am example for you to think of.

If you don't realize why and whats happened, what lead to it, then please talk further about open protocols and open APIs.

It's just a left orientated thinking you show here. Same as varoufakis, a leftist who is against the capital. Always arguing that's bad, the other bad - but happily living in a world, consuming and having a good good life. Build up by the so wrongful capitalist. ... Lol

I'm out. Please go and get a economic understanding and thinking. Each part of your life has been built around that and you now say "it's bad". Typical survivor bias behavior (go look it up ...) bye