Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve.
They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.
I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated.
I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work.
Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like the media/everyday people hate him for no reason is just dishonest.
How many rich people and fund managers around the world have been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for the past several decades?
How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.
The criticisms are getting more and more comical. Michael is a friend of Elon and trusted Elon with many of his ideas and contacts. I'm sure Musk would say as much. Do you think Michael was sharing these ideas and contacts with just anyone? Why do you think he specifically chose to work with Elon?
Mike saw Elon was good at recruiting Silicon Valley talent and selling the whole "save humanity by going to Mars" story (but even that was Mike's idea with Orbital).
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
Er, no. That was his stated goal as a member of the Mars Society's board of directors when these talks happened. He wanted to purchase a Dnepr ICBM and retrofit it for that purpose. When the deal was rejected, he discussed building his own rockets with Michael Griffin.
There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit
Do you think he's crafting his tweets with hours of deliberation?
Honest question, how much time do you think he spends trying to antagonize people on Twitter per week?
One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old.
It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I both started different companies on the same day, who do you think is going to attract funding and top talent more quickly?
If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing his reputation inside of a week.
Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here.
Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).
Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle of the call to sell next year's baseline because you aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply arrogant incompetence [0].
Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your advertisers [1] — your primary customers — is unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost it.
Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY they are actually pausing by one of the people in the meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with the day before...
I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the business model and the key elements, and just thrashing about blaming everyone else, when literally he is entirely to blame for the chaos.
Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5] that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it fired yesterday to return!
If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually a good argument that his initial intent was to sink Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we are)
I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't quite alt-right). It's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term it hasn't been.
Yes, I see that he wants to market to that not-quite-alt-right-but-not-neoliberal customer.
I just do not see how any of his actions actually help enhance that even with even an idealized version of such a customer, and does not alienate even that customer.
How does it establish any credibility with anyone to 1) be so unprepared for a critical advertiser's (your customers) presentation that customers literally cut their spend during the meeting; 2) publicly make excuses trying to blame for your failures on some "activist groups" who actually had no influence on advertisers' (your customers) decision to cut spending; 3) destroying verification and turning it into a anyone-can-pay-$8-to-say-they-are-anyone-and-get-greater-reach; 4) come into a $44B deal making a lot of noise and failing to articulate a plan, any plan that gets anyone on board?; etc., etc., etc.
I wish Elon all the success in the world, but he is seriously flailing here, and creating confidence in no one. I expect that he has a good chance of sorting it out once he understands the issues, but he's clearly done no homework up front, so is figuring it out in real time.
I do not see how this helps him, even with his ideal customer. Of course, as usual his comments have plenty of fanbois claiming whatever he does must be 4-D Chess, but seriously, how does this much public flailing, thrashing, and excuses give anyone confidence?
Can you point to any specific action that would actually give such a customer more confidence? From what I've read, the RW people are also really pissed at him because they expected to be able to rush right in and raise hell, and that's not yet happening either...
EDIT: A new case in point:
"Comedy is now legal on Twitter" 5:16 PM · Oct 28, 2022 [0]
"Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended" 5:53 PM · Nov 6, 2022 [1]
How does this kind of obviously figuring it out as he goes along increase credibility with anyone?
Even if we were to accept that as true as stated, which I don't, that doesn't explain Paypal and Tesla. Even if you think this Michael Griffin guy did everything - why did Elon bet on him? Why didn't anyone else? Tons of people had the money to do it at the same time. None of them did.
Musk talks about his employees and how critical they were/are constantly. This whole notion that "Musk didnt do it all" is such a clown argument because theres no other form of attack from people who simply dont like him and his politics.
....and Griffin gave him ~$2B of taxpayer money. (DARPA and COTS contracts before SpaceX flew a single rocket and CRS for Falcon 9). All discussed in the link above.
Throwing money at people and saying “I want these charts to be customizable” vs “let’s land a rocket booster, it’s ok if a few blow up, we can test it live” will get VERY different levels of passion/expertise
Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how it works.
You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.
Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.
When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the next prediction.
A track record of success is not sufficient evidence, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades and especially when even the first random success (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.
It might not be 1024, but he probably has more failures than successes: Solar City, Neuralink, Boring Company, Hyperloop (he decided not to turn this into a company, but he wasted his and his other companies' resources on this so I think it is fair to consider it a Musk failure).
Solar City isn't a failure, it's part of Tesla now. Still selling panels, as far as I know.
Boring company is also not yet a failure, and has recently built several tunnels. Neuralink is an early stage research company and is still humming along. It may fail some day, but it certainly hasn't failed yet. As for Hyperloop, he specifically said he wasn't going to build it, and several companies are still working on it, including in China:
None of these things are "failures". They may become failures one day. It'd be crazy if some of them didn't. But you can't count a research project as a failure just because it doesn't have a product yet.
None of those companies have any real success to show for themselves. They haven’t met the hype that Musk has put on them or shown any real progress in reaching that hype.
I can at least understand you saying it might be too early on something like Neuralink, but I don’t understand calling Solar City a success. Musk had to bail it out with his other company in a deal shady enough to trigger lawsuits.
I'm aware of this scheme. But I don't think you understand why it works. Track records are absolutely evidence of skill, if you understand the distribution from which they're drawn. Elon's track record is very, very far outside the null hypothesis of that distribution.
They typically just purchase the company instead. See: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple.
Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen, especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e. horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing.
> Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing.
He has obviously been highly successful at marketing. But his "real success" has been in delivering products like useful electric cars and reusable rockets that didn't previously exist. His marketing skills help with that, but all the marketing in the world isn't going to sell a product that doesn't exist (except in crypto).
Undeniably Elon’s success is his tremendous wealth, the basis of which are two very valuable companies that the cofounded and has as CEO marketed brilliantly, if not always honestly.
He obviously knows a lot about what people to work with.
It is highly unlikely he knows how to build or design almost anything Spacex or Tesla makes.
He knows a lot about everything they make of course, and can get more detailed briefings and information on it that anyone, but he didn’t make it.
So the wealth and the successful companies are his success sure, but his greatest personal accomplishments are obviously his marketing skills.
I don't know how you're measuring "greatest" but I certainly consider his greatest accomplishments to be putting together, betting on, and operating the companies that produced these products. Of course he doesn't know how to build a Tesla batter or a SpaceX rocket himself - probably no one person does.
These were very difficult industries, industries that were extremely contrarian to bet on when he did. Making the financial bet alone would be a great accomplishment for any normal person. Peter Thiel is a famous investor for making far less contrarian and far less successful bets without operating anything except Paypal.
Musk's bets were far more concentrated, and he chose the personnel, operated the companies, made the strategic decisions, and yes, also marketed them brilliantly. But he only got to flex those marketing muscles because he spent a decade assembling, managing, and financing the teams that built the product in the first place.
Yes, I agree with that. I guess I’m just trying to reconcile the person that could do that, with the irresponsible and impulsive person he displays publicly for the past few years.
Perhaps it’s just that his wealth got the better of him.
> his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers
This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge.
Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were dismissing achievements of people who give others good reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if they are doing some great things. There are many people who smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write these comments here.
He doesn't have deep knowledge, he a broad high level understanding of the technologies and processes used at his company. In the interview you can see how he's aware of what the major components are supposed to do, but he'd be completely useless if you told him to do the engineering design and analysis behind it. Which is perfectly fine, that's how it's supposed to be as a CEO.
A certain % of the population are clinical narcissists, which is a massive amount nominally online. And narcissists cant stand when other people are successful. I'm convinced thats who these people are.
My theory is that getting smart people to make twitter vs landing reusable rocket boosters… will yield VERY different levels of passion/interest.
Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff and have a great work/life balance. I don’t want to (and don’t have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.
I guess… not everyone’s problem domains are interesting enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don’t like him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these tough problems. Just admit FSD isn’t a year away!
Because it is hard to trust those you hand your money to and not get in the way by checking in too often. Also, not every passionate engineer should be trusted that much. Being able to spot those that are passionate about what you want done, while simultaneously being both competent and trustworthy is a skill that will make you very wealthy, and almost no one has it consistently. A success or three may show that he is one of those people. Or that he is survivorship bias waiting for a reality check. I don't know how to tell, or I would be quite wealthy as well.
> paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?
is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?
Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
> I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
There are lots of people that have those things and are still not a tiny fraction as successful. Most people could be given all of those things and they'd quickly waste them all in a spectacular fashion. Often the people that are the loudest on this issue don't even have their own absolutely trivial finances in order.
Aerospace had a lot of overqualified, underutilized engineers that were spectacularly easy to tap into with a little bit of extra money and a very interesting project.
That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without throwing LOTS of money around. On top of that, Twitter mostly isn't that interesting.
At the moment there is a magic clump of such people, large language model experts from big tech who have left because they got sick of not being able to apply the technology.
They are currently floating around in various startups, but we are entering a tough market for VC funding. Twitter can offer hardware, data and a culture of shipping.
I don’t agree with them, but this counter argument doesn’t quite work. In a system with x% chance of success, we’d expect most people to fail for small x. But some few will still succeed multiple times.
Throw in that your odds get better the more you’re successful, and it’s classic survivorship bias.
Companies don’t have to be profitable to be successful. A charismatic leader + lofty goals (FSD, rockets, flame throwers) and you’ll get a ton of money even if you never turn a profit.
Let’s not forget the tunnels I’m Vegas btw. They aren’t all winners.
He's definitely the 'chief engineer' of his companies in that he made engineering decisions, but to pretend that somehow means he does ALL the engineering work and grunt works is a very silly notion.
But yes, there's indeed the thousand of engineers and technicians doing the work. He even credits them for making his dream possible!
I don't know why people think he's not doing the work. Have they actually read interviews and books? The books I read does not paint him in a very flattering light people-wise.
It's also possible to be simultaneously an egoistic asshole, genius, having actual skills, being a money man and visionary leader, People act as if a person who's a jackass can't have positive traits or vice versa.
"I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. "
To me it seems, his success comes from being an engineer himself and wanting to get shit done and kick people until shit gets done in a working way. And yes that includes throwing money at smart engineers, but to do this, you have to be smart and have domain knowledge to do so.
The problem started, when he got too much success and lost touch with the ground of reality.
In general they show that it was indeed a bit more than a high idea, to which it was reduced around many places.
Still, a funny quote from Elon:
"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems."
I think he means it. But of course it is BS, when he is in fact the boss of so many people and making them burn out for productivity in various ways.
You sound very conflicted. I can see like at least two places where you directly contradict yourself. You have to learn what people say and what people do are very different. Elon Musk is a bullshitter and narcissist. It's time to stop listening and believing anything he has to say. Otherwise they'll keep dragging you in and you'll keep finding reasons to give them another chance.
I am not really conflicted, I can respect his achievements without negating the downsides or the narcistic, egomanic "BS". I thought I made that clear, with labeling it as "BS".
I respect his achievements about as much as I respect any corrupt company that has had success by having money to spend and people willing to work for them to pay their rent. While many people chose to work for Musk because they believed in a formidable mission.. I don't believe that will be the case for much longer. I truly think he is now acting out of desperation as he's seeing a large downward trend that has him on edge.
> I respect his achievements about as much as I respect any corrupt company that has had success by having money to spend and people willing to work for them to pay their rent
Just to extend this, there are a large number of plausibly legitimate reasons people might hate Musk. Maybe you're stuck in Tesla service hell, or maybe you retired to Boca Chica and now have to deal with rocket noise and road closures. Maybe you're an environmentalist who doesn't like to see a launch facilities next to a wildlife preserve. Maybe you're a Tesla employee who was injured due to company negligence. Maybe you're a Neuralink researcher who is embarrassed over Musk's absurdly fantastical claims about what your technology can do. Maybe you founded a visionary electric car company only to see it sabatoged and taken over by Musk and have him launch your vehicle into space. Maybe you're a stressed out worker at any of Musk's companies who resents his demands for a work/life imbalance. Maybe you're a market trader who lost money due to Musk's fraudulent "funding secured" tweet. Maybe you're uncomfortable with the constant stream of vaporware, dumb ideas, and bogus dates issued by a false messiah preying on the technological optimism of your fellow nerds. Or maybe you're just an American who is tired of seeing bullshit artists wag the dog, behave illegal and unethically, and never be held to account for their actions.
There are many good things one might say about Musk, but don't pretend there aren't any bad things.
> and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers
Doing that with this level of success in these domains is extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the investors are far more important than the workers.
Eh. I dislike Elon, BUT being able to efficiently allocate resources and identify an opportunity and/or valuable employee, who is more than just talk is a valuable skill that surprisingly few people have.
Yeah, people have different roles and talents. The face of the company does get most of the praise and fame, but that's true of nearly every organization I can think of.
Musk's skills are pretty domain-specific and not, I think, transferable. He really excels at:
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
Acting like Elon hasn’t given people legit reasons to dislike him? Anybody is allowed to overlook the flaws he has but you shouldn’t ignore them outright.
I’d actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the last handful of years.
It seems to me like there is a possible, albeit compromised, middle ground between highly centralised and the (in reality) partially centralised Mastodon model where users flock to popular monoliths: strictly per-user instances.
Given the right tooling etc etc, expediting user's migration to their own instances, of something like a Mastodon node, could be an achieveable route to greater decentralisation without getting muddled down in things like blockchain etc.. And executed correctly the model could be more communicable than what it presently appears to be.
From what I can see though, Mastodon isn't currently the technology stack to achieve, perhaps it could get there.
No solution is going to be perfect, but surely an emphasis on data sovereignty would reduce the volume of arguments over what a given platform should be.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it.
Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years.
The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.
Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-Twitters.
> email has been working great for the past 30 years
When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders (like people running private mail servers)...
...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their personal accounts...
...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation working great.
Still you can pick any server you want, any client you want, move your data freely if you are not happy with provider. And there's no corporation that can say that tomorrow you are going to pay $5/month more or you can kiss your contacts goodbye (sure you can loose your address if you don't have own domain, but you still can access the network).
I will gladly take it over closed protocol, even if it has reaction gifs built in.
That's very strange definition of failure: many non-homogenous systems have Pareto distributions. That in itself is not indicative of failure.
30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of the resounding success of email federation, those domains still exist and can still send/receive emails universally. If email had hypothetically been non-federated and proprietary to AOL, it would be dead today (or as close to it as gopher)
>don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve
I mean it does somewhat solve the problem of Musk running twitter into the ground. For most people, I imagine mastodon is a lateral move, not a step up.
One could argue that the centralization process is already in place. Only servers that are deemed 'acceptable' are recommended ( I think the criteria for acceptability no hate speech, no transphobia, no homophobia ). It is interesting to the point that Guardian in its article trying to describe mastodon suggested it is left leaning. I chuckled. I mean, I suppose it is, but the whole point of an individual instance is just that..
I agree with your point. I think people are generally missing forest for the trees.
Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.
The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.
We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.
Well a handful is still way better than only one. If tomorrow someone want to leave Gmail they have quite the list of alternatives and can forward their mail to their new address. Compared to leaving Twitter or Facebook this is so much better.
It's like if Twitter was an ActivityPub instance even if it had 99.9% marked share at least you could leave without leaving everything behind
> people are centralized on a handful of providers
Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.
>The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check
They do? Changing your email address across every service provider you use is a colossal pain in the ass, and that's when they let you change your email address.
You can just forward incoming email to your old Gmail account to your new email account and take your sweet time to update your old emails all over the internet.
It’s not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on a vps a few years ago and didn’t have much issues with spam lists. Only gave up because I couldn’t be bothered updating the thing.
That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too much work in the long run.
They work great when they're the ONLY option in town, but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as they did with email.
Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb, but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a single company department might have 10+ machines that could receive email (email addresses would look like name@machine.department.company.com).
Then it devolved to one per department, and then one per company, and now one per massive IT provider.
Security became big as well. Mail servers used to get hacked constantly and you’d have your private data leaked and your server turned in to a spam gun.
These days to host anything securely you need a team of the top minds in that domain working full time on it. Just makes no sense to run your own mail server when for less money you could let someone else do it and they will do it much better.
This is just a sign of the industry maturing imo. You could relate it to construction. Used to have people building their own mud and stick huts but now everything requires planning, regulation, codes, licensed workers, etc.
So all the newsletters I'm on are getting sent out to subscribers one by one? Man, seems really inefficient. If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...
> If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...
Getting an email with a really large number of recipients to be actually delivered is difficult enough that there are entire companies e.g. Mailchimp devoted to making it work. You can't just bung a million addresses into BCC and hope.
There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and ActivityPub.
When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each other using the IP protocol.
I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping platform is not a healthy system.
This is all-or-nothing thinking that's endemic to Silicon Valley's subsidies-as-a-service business model.
Mastodon does not have to monopolize microblogging the way Twitter has, because it isn't competing with Twitter's cursed ad-based revenue model. Similarly, the tiny niches that do migrate are likely more valuable to have than the hordes of Twitter users who never post anything, and just juice the algorithm by liking and retweeting.
I don't disagree, but the design of urbit is such that there's a path to it being good - that's not true of any other system built on the current stack (imo) because they don't fix the underlying incentive failures that lead to centralization in the first place.
I’ve spent a lot of time at the edge of decentralized and useful tech. You’re right that most decentralized systems don’t accomplish the goals they set out to achieve.
A few key things: decentralized means a network of at least 3 nodes where no operator controls more than 1. Anything beyond that is vanity or more censorship resistance depending on your vantage point.
What we actually want is governance with checks and balances. I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.
Now to how emulate that in software is another quandary. I think ethereum for all of its faults is doing a decent job at decentralized governance.
I think we’re still in the very early days of decentralized finance. A lot of lessons will be learned (and relearned from the past) as we move forward.
> I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.
On the contrary, I'd argue that the power has towards the executive and legislative branches. The judicial branch exists to curb the excesses of the other two through the invocation of law that was already written. The other two either write whatever the hell they want and vote on it or invoke their powers by fiat (i.e. executive orders).
Crypto is trying to solve this in a different way. Namely projects like lens protocol.
The idea is that the blockchain is a shared, decentralized database and you store simple messages on the blockchain and larger files on something like ipfs. This forms a social graph that a frontend ui can then import and provide a view into (a lens if you will).
It's nice because users just need one account (a wallet) and they have access to the whole social graph if they want, or they can configure their apps to only show certain things. The downside is that it's all public and once you lose your keys you're locked out of your account. Also, you can't really prevent anyone from posting things but you can choose which types of posts you allow on your feed.
It's a different set of tradeoffs that's interesting to explore.
I would LOVE if there was a way to federate FB, instagram, twitter, etc...
You post and read on your preferred platform but can see posts from your friends from other platforms, or even their own implementation on their own server!
You're describing a federation of platforms, and this can work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned against it.
The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph.
This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to) address the mass market.
XMPP still works wonderfully if you want to setup a chat server for your friends and family and be independent from all the walled garden messaging apps.
I don't know if he's going to succeed or fail (or even what "success" and "failure" are in this case), but I think it'd be better for the world if he failed. Twitter isn't necessary and can be replaced, but it would be good for Musk to be mired in legal problems for a while and hopefully lose a lot of money. Reducing the power and influence of both Musk and Twitter seems like a clear win-win in the long run. I feel bad for all of the people at Twitter being trampled over in the process, though.
He’s kind of said it himself on multiple occasions.
“Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.”
He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have total voting power, the board (which barely even used Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad. Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5 which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon taking power and being able to actually make the necessary changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too.
Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model.
If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself.
That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.
Why are so many people calling Elon Musk by his first name, like he's their buddy or neighbor? This reminds me when Steve Jobs had passed away, many people were walking the streets with candles and cards in memoriam of "Steve". How come?
The obvious counter to the notion that the issues with Mastodon can't be fixed is that nothing would prevent a carbon-copy of Twitter (or Twitter itself, for that matter) to federate. It's not about Mastodon, but about ActivityPub.
And sure, most users will end up centralised on a handful of servers, and that is not a problem as long as they can move when a specific server does not meet their needs. The biggest importance is a safety valve.
I don't know which parts of the UI you think can't be fixed, but I don't agree. Better search is needed, but can be externalised (nothing stops someone from federating with the main instances and signing up to a few relays and offering more comprehensive search). A better experience when looking up external users timelines is largely down to Mastodon's developers having very specific ideas about how to do things. The logic for following or boosting/liking toots when you're on a different instance's timeline is awkward but can be improved with an optional intermediary (falling back to the awkward request for your address for those who insist on opting out of an intermediary providing a mapping).
The upside with Mastodon is that it's not a single thing. It's the server, and the web UI, and you can replace either or both. E.g. you can run Pleroma with the Mastodon web UI, or it's own, and there are additional web UI's. Or you can (and people do, and I'm doing so to) build your own, so we'll see a number of choices of platforms that will look very differently.
Personally I hope Elon fails, because it will make things easier, but I think the long term belongs to ActivityPub over Twitter in any case for the simple reason that the presence of ActivityPub means that the threshold to stand up a viable social network has dropped massively. On one hand you have the software you can set up in less than a day (been there, done that), but far more importantly, sign up to a relay and within hours you have an instance that looks lively, even though most toots are via federation. Where there before was a massive chicken and egg scenario, there's now an increasingly vibrant starting point for people to experiment with their own visions for what social media should be, and each one of them will add to the network effects of ActivityPub.
Mastodon may well fail, but social networks has a history of reaching tipping points that very abruptly changes things dramatically. In both directions. But the federated networks are far less vulnerable to people moving elsewhere.
As for the failures of federation, e-mail and mailing lists is the obvious counter. As is the web. Social media is a newfangled baby in comparison to the successful federated services.
> Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite.
Everything he's done so far reads like he's deliberately trying to destroy the company. The only reason I don't really think that's his intention is that I don't see how he could hope to benefit from it. But it doesn't make sense.
i have a suspicion that much of what he’s doing is just chest thumping for his new fan base, “look at how i do whatever i want. i behave how i want. they can’t stop me, i’m The Strongman!”
just red meat for that particular crowd who worship strongmen. tho if he’s even a fraction of the irrationality that he’s portraying, i completely agree, twitters in trouble.
The Twitter status quo was one of stagnation (took them ten years to ship edit to a handful of people) - they're a good example of how you can basically do everything wrong, but if you have product market fit it's hard to fail.
He's trying to pivot them into a focused company. I think his actions make sense in that context.
There's no context in which many of his actions make sense. He ranked people based on lines of code written, immediately fired thousands of them based on that objectively stupid metric, than immediately tried to rehire a bunch of them because the company couldn't function without them. "Random flailing" is the most charitable way to characterize that.
> As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.
The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic, and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even bigger bump.
I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.
> The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter
Yeah definitely, feels like they should have seen this coming though. They have an opportunity that won’t come around again, and poor performance and confusing UX seem like pretty serious problems.
I dunno, on performance they could just have limited number of registrations to what they can handle. Better that than having potential users getting a bad impression because everything is too slow.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
This is the media capitalising at the maximum over the emotions of the tech crowd to move to a platform that is worse than Twitter, especially in UX and is essentially a solution that is creating more problems than it is trying to solve.
It really is not early days anymore with this, and the hype around Mastodon is manufactured by outrage due to 'Elon Musk' being the new villain of the month. If you have to explain what Mastodon is, which server you have to choose and how to find which people you followed on Twitter are on Mastodon due to its poor discoverability, then it tells us that it is another pointless hurdle for users to bear with, resulting in a worse experience.
Mastodon clearly is a solution that is creating more problems for users and the media is clearly parroting over the hype and emotion to pretend that it is an alternative or a threat to Twitter.
I'm actually laughing at you and the entire Twitter chaos on this 'migration' made up of the same techies overhyping with the media taking advantage of the current outrage pretending that Mastodon is a viable 'alternative' when it remotely isn't.
Given that it already takes much explaining how to use it, 'choosing and instance', struggling to solve it's poor discoverability since a minute amount of Twitter users out of 200M+ have tried to move themselves, it means that you are already losing.
It is not 'early days' anymore. After 6 years of 'exoduses', Mastodon doesn't cut it as an 'alternative' and especially with the exact unchallenged reasons I've stated. It is not about getting manipulated by the current hype by the media, it is always about the retention afterwards that counts. Twitter is here to stay despite the 'current outrage' that the media is riding on.
Sorry to burst your (techie) bubble as hundreds of millions of non-technical people are still using Twitter and won't delete their accounts over something worse.
They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.
I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...