I think that's a narrow perspective. When Twitter was sabotaged, lots of people made noise about moving to Mastodon - but even with all that momentum, the adoption was less than lukewarm. The issues were not technical, but of usability. The average person is less than interested in the inner workings of a thing, what make a service "better" in their eyes is how easy it is to use. Federated social media is not it.
I wonder how much of the narrative about Mastodon adoption (or the lack thereof) was that professional content creators didn't know how to adapt their Twitter workflows to it. It's definitely retained a mostly non-commercial flair, which makes me think people have had a hard time monetizing it.
The community I've found on Mastodon has been incredible—I'm reminded of early Usenet days.
These two things are connected: if something is easier to use, it is more likely that the others you want using the thing are going to be on there. Doesn't mean they will be, of course.
Example of statistics: 22.3% increase in annual traffic (112.9 billion visits in 2023, compared to Instagram - 87.3 billion visits in 2023, and TikTok - 41.8 billion visits in 2023)
Example new features/improvements:
- Community Notes (huge feature).
- Grok AI.
- Long form messages.
- Open Sourced ranking algorithms.
- Monetization for creators.
- Audio/video calls.
- Job listings/search portal.
- Passkey support (at least for iOS)
- Upcoming features like money transmissions/payments.
Biggest things I noticed (and why I hardly use it anymore):
- Tweets from a lot of the people I really cared about dried up as people left
- Discourse in replies became noticeably worse as low-quality replies were brought to the top because the poster had paid for “verification”, when most of these posts would probably have been (and rightly so) under the ‘more replies’ section before due to how low-quality they were.
Launched for testing in June 2022 4 months before Musk was forced to honour his offer to buy Twitter. I don't think you can claim it as a "new feature" under his leadership.
Twitter’s Community Notes may sound nice in theory, but with the current botched implementation it’s just another vector to spread misinformation, now labeled as “context” and made harder to disregard.
Of course, Birdwatch existed since before Musk, so I don’t blame him for inventing it, only for pushing ahead with it.
What Musk could’ve done is apply the same algorithm (that Twitter now uses to choose which community note to show) to sorting replies. Of course, that would defeat the point of blueticks paying 8 bucks to get on top of replies, and Musk wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on now that the big advertisers left.
The original note (see screenshot at https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/5080048) was up for a while as trending tweet gathered 1-2 million views by users worldwide who saw “context” and were trained to assume it’s the truth (it’s context, after all; it’s the meta above the facts).
Since the algorithm for which note to show is more or less a popularity contest, whoever has the most bots wins, and it took a while until people managed to correct the note. But of course the way Twitter notes work, there is no evidence of this controversy and attempted misinformation, or how many people exactly saw the false “context”.
How many notes like that can you honestly estimate you have seen and just automatically believed? For me, the answer is “no idea”. (Note that if the note agreed with your preexisting opinion it doesn’t make it true.)
I theorize it's still way better than the biased "fact checkers" from institutions.
How many more millions of viewers were lied to re: COVID vaccine safety when the doctors and scientists were outright silenced and replaced with one-sided propaganda?
And so many other topics.
At least now people can continually fact check and expose the bias to a greater degree.
No average person fact-checks context. You did not answer my question; did you trust these community notes before? Do you know how many were false without you realizing? Especially if you agreed with them?
People could continually fact check tweets without false notes masquerading as “context”, that is why I said Twitter could just use the same algorithm for sorting replies in the first place.
Community notes are not more trustworthy than tweets, but they are painted to be. This makes them a valuable target for misinformation campaigns.
Community Notes are not about whether you trust them or not.
They're just notes, usually with links to contrary/correcting evidence.
I can vote to agree after reviewing the evidence, or disagree and specify why.
You know there's AI and algorithms that moderate these things? You can't just go crazy and doing some community note disinformation campaign all over the place.
Fact-checking companies don't even allow for disagreement.
Community Notes existed before Elon took over and it's being used for spreading misinformation/misunderstandings, including on Elon's own tweets.
I've never seen Grok AI being used for anything on Twitter and long-form messages is a downgrade of the entire platform, not an upgrade.
Open-sourcing the algorithms has also not really done anything to actually improve the platform. What he should open-source instead is the way they pay out to creators, since Mr. Beast seems to be earning way more for impressions than anyone else on the platform. His videos also seem to be served as non-disclosed ads on the platform (https://twitter.com/SHL0MS/status/1748337607694574045), which also seems like a thing that would be better laid out in the open.
Audio calls were also a feature before Elon took over since Twitter Spaces has existed for years.
And here's waiting for money transmissions and payments. Elon says that it'll be out by 2024, much like your Tesla could operate independently as a robo-taxi by 2020.
Right, which is why the separation here is important. The user-facing app can focus on product concerns, the protocol it's built on top of can focus on technical concerns. The two can then feed back into each other in a virtuous cycle.
