If we could build a "bubbled" city on Mars, we could do it on Earth far more cheaply, it seems.
I'm not sure if that is the same case if a meteor strikes.
And it's easier to ignore people on another planet. Empathy does not survive distance, and on Earth even a wall is enough to remove empathy.
A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side.
"If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew.
For a single tweet."
Honestly, I stand by my estimation that interplanetary communication will probably primarily be done over email.
It's just helpful to discussion if we don't assume others are expressing the stupidest possible iteration of the ideas they describe.
For example, my only means of accessing Twitter are either through the bloated Web UI, which is unusable on most of my devices, or through Nitter, which is read-only and sometimes doesn't work due to Twitter's API limitations.
In the context of interplanetary communication, sending the tweet from a server on mars to a server on earth would be a tiny packet containing a payload no bigger than the char limit, and some metadata. Browsing the website on earth would fetch from the servers on earth, and might still be 100KB, but no one cares about optimizing that bandwidth usage.
Idk if this is that much different from the original telegram at this point though. Sending tiny messages using limited bandwidth between two places. Eventually we'll widen that bandwidth sufficiently, it's just latency that probably won't ever surpass the speed of light. Also the problem of timestamping tweets when relativity is involved.
They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.
More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.
They just send one to Mars and it’s good to go.
For live transmission I think signal issues will cause everything to need to be pre-buffered basically to completion so streaming is not a realistic thing to consider. For instance, twitch is probably just flat out unless we have some pretty insane developments in general data transmission reliability (probably including FTL data transmission which, who knows, might some day be possible through entanglement).
I don‘t think so. That‘s why you get people posting screenshots of text, or 50 tweet threads including a link to a thread reader "unroll" service.
Many people want to use Twitter like a blog. But it is terrible for that use case.
It's so terrible that it must have been implemented this way on purpose.
They do share a great many similarities. Both seem incapable of logically structuring their content, but most of it consists of gibberish and made-up facts anyway.
Recently tweet limits were relaxed, but it still remains the normal to communicate "significant dialog" through image macros which are extremely unfriendly on transmission size and threaded discussions (multi-part tweets) tend to mesh very poorly with how the social features of twitter work, where certain chunks of the thread often get different levels of promotion leading to incomplete segments of the conversation being conveyed.
I don't really think twitter has any real advantage over any of the other social networks (outside of the explicitly image focused) except through its arbitrary payload limit which, as I mentioned, is no longer a firm limit and often comes with additional auxiliary payloads (like a linked image) to actually communicate - AFAIK the actual mechanics of how communication is executed isn't particularly well suited for this sort of lossy transmission, at least in any way that isn't matched by other social companies. It's much more likely, IMO, that mars based communication would just use emails since that transmission format already comes with the ability to embed images as needed and works well enough that it's survived decades of existence.
The current limit was not.
The limit was not chosen because it's particularly well aligned for interplanetary communication so I'm still confused as to why twitter is being touted as the best aligned social media platform.
Right, it was even more arbitrarily chosen based on stylistic preferences not any communication system constraint.
I mean, yeah - my whole point is that's not far from what twitter is already. Musk is getting a social media platform full of users that's tailor-made for interplanetary latency.
Social media in general would be infeasible on an interplanetary scale.
The delay this introduced would have a social effect similar to time zones: "Oh the martians are caught up to event <x> and their reaction is <y>" instead of "Oh the Australians are waking up after event <x> happened today and their reaction is <y>."
I'm looking at this from the perspective of the user experience and the physics limitations, and I'm observing that they fit very well together.
The point is that a non technical user sees Twitter, fundamentally, as a place to send one way messages out, and to consume one-way incoming broadcast messages. And, crucially, the exact time of sending or receiving isn't a significant aspect of the UX.
You just log in and see what showed up in the queue over the last n minutes. If you want to say something, just send a message; you don't really care when it's received, because Twitter is fundamentally all about checking your feed whenever you feel like it, and 23 minutes latency is nothing.
The user experience fits the physics limitations. Who cares what the current implementation looks like.
I haven't given much thought to this but managing earth time zones and other planet timezones is going to be a real PITA - obviously these are smaller issues.
I would have to imagine that interplanetary communication wouldn't be as frivolous as the stuff we waste energy on here currently as the deployment costs are much larger.
In a Vernon Vinge's novel, they used a kind of galaxy-wide Usenet.
Well, it seems you had a notably unique idea. Your comment got presented on the Timcast, and a 20 minute clip containing it has over 90,000 views at the time of writing this comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyrf5wLit34
I think a lot of the child comments have very valid criticisms, particularly concerns with bloat and other existing character limitations often being more about managing the user experience than bandwidth constraints. But your comment's a magnified part of the conversation now, so we'll just have to see how the narratives develop and the nuts and bolts of "interplanetary twitter" and the "Elon Musk NeuraStarLink Space Dystopia" actually plays out.
IMO, it's still too early to really expect much of interplanetary anything. I would expect Twitter to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced by something new, and then for that new technology to reach the end of its lifecycle and be replaced with another new thing which might be ready for integration in interplanetary communication.
Notable too, I think we're seeing here news people sympathetic to the right wing looking for large, active, engaged "intelligentsia" social media alternatives to twitter to quote comments from that use chilling moderation strategies. Ones that aren't completely overrun and saturated by fringe far right content refugees. Hacker news is probably going to get quoted more often by those kinds of sources until its owners/operators feel like taking some Illuminati Deep State money or whatever. That is, if there's any of that money left.
In that case, I wonder if the monetization will ultimately be based on latency and message size: pay more for your message to be sent from Mars in the next transmission, and pay more to send a larger message. Locally, I wonder if Twitter will be tied to starlink in some fashion.
If this does become some kind of interplanetary messaging system, I wouldn't be surprised if other technologies are built around it. Maybe Dorsey's decentralization attempt will be used as the infrastructure for the free tier of Twitter, and starlink is the infrastructure for the paid version (pay more to send faster, or to another planetary body).
Edit: I can imagine a rebuilt backend that's decentralized across large (planetary?) regions, where messages are just the tweet content & metadata and passed between nodes. Very efficient, and the non-technical user already has the right expectations.