Inside the Twitter Meltdown
Casey Newton, Zoë Schiffer,
Platformer,
Nov 11, 2022
The Causes of Disaster presentation is almost twenty years old, but some things never change: as illustrated, the cause usually originates with the management and board. The same is true of the walking disaster we call social media, as this Platformer story (and many others) make plain. And to be clear: while there are good criticisms of Mastodon, the exodus from Twitter is just beginning; Black Twitter, for example, is on the move. Elon Mush will go down in history as the first person to have burned $44 billion dollars in something other than a war.
The rise of Mastodon is the people's response to the social media disaster (and therefore, as this Hacker News item makes plain, anathema to FAANG companies, a target to be co-opted and destroyed (look what they did to RSS and podcasting). The more popular you are, the less well Mastodon works for you, making it really hard for advertisers. Centralized search (so useful for spammers and trolls) breaks down in the fediverse. It also means, as Tim Bray suggests, there is no centralized culture.
More: the Midrange popup guide to Mastodon. How-to Geek offers ten fun Mastodon accounts to follow. Jim Groom launches a DS106 Mastodon. Humanities Commons has launched an instance for humanities scholars. Mastodon alternative Misskey, which I tried out yesterday (works nice!). (This post authored over 53 minutes while listening to the 1973 Genesis album Selling England by the Pound).
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