That gives me a new level of respect for Dorsey.

Right? I can't help but wonder if he's planning on doing something in the fediverse in some way. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.

If you’re not aware, that’s basically exactly what Jack (and team) are currently working on [0][1]. 1. https://blueskyweb.org/ 2. https://atproto.com/

Interesting. I hope this ends up being a pull request or somesuch on activitypub, rather than a standalone competing standard. They're right that migration is a problem on activitypub atm, though I'm not sure there's a good way to build it into the protocol. Maybe have a server tag a couple of others as trusted backups?

https://macaw.social/about ?

This was downvoted but refers to the second part of parent's comment:

> a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.

Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.

Why?

Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.

But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.

> Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.

But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?

I get the sense that Dorsey played Musk hard. Musk heard what he wanted to hear, and Dorsey walked away with a cool billion. Musk is wrecking the place and laying the ground for the next thing, which Dorsey was already working on.

Except Dorsey left his billion with Musk https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-saves-elon-musk-...

OMFG nevermind he's a damned fool.

So, those two played each other? And the Twitter board was the laughing third party?

If Twitter had good growth period in sight they woudln't be selling. And they were the ones that knew how much shitshow it was inside

Why would he possibly do that?

Yep. Although I don’t understand why anyone thought that would amount to anything WRT Twitter itself. I honestly laughed when I read this take a few weeks back:

https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440

An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.

There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?

If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service.

My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.

Users are running away just as employees who weren't fired.

He might retain something like a single digit percentage of users, but that would still be a lot more than if he started from scratch.

How often websites/apps that were really good at some point, rose back from dead to glory?

Well, not often, no. I'm not really expecting that to happen with Twitter, I just think it IS a possibility. How many websites/apps that were as big as Twitter have totally disappeared?

GeoCities, Myspace are the two biggest I can think of.

I'd argue neither was anywhere near as big as twitter. In terms of users, maybe — I have no idea. But in terms of reach and influence? I don't think so.

I think regardless numbers, it is usually a slow burn for situations like these. And probably plenty of people will probably not see a space to fill and try their luck. Hopefully, one of them will work.

Those users are all hardcore addicts whose lives revolve around Twitter. It won't take much to get them crawling back IMO

I take a look at twitter, and there's more activity than ever. Everyone is talking about twitter.

Where will users go - parler?

So like truth.social? Not sure that approach is working

"We have to throw away the entire business and product and rebuild it in a model where our old thing is impossible" is a tough sell to a boardroom, obviously.

I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).

Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.

But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're meaningful and human-generated, so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter. Why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let BP come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?

And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.

I've been having the same feeling about discord - this is the future for social media, or at least the social media I want:

- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.

- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.

If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.

Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?

>If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.

Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.

That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.

> Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts.

On the other hand, also Clown Girl Honk Heaven. Perhaps there is yet hope that Internet Porn will survive 9/11 3.0.

Just give Zucky all your nudes, so he can, uh, keep an eye out for them. A dream come true.

https://futurism.com/facebook-wants-protect-your-nudes

"wait a minute, this is gay as hell..." "yeah, this is way gayer than tumblr". "alright everyone back onto tumblr"

Is that not Reddit?

Reddit suffers from intruders trying to influence. With Discord, you won't find my group of friends to intrude upon, because we won't invite you.

I thought about it more, and you are correct that Reddit enables private subreddits. My circle of friends on the Internet have one - but we've stopped using it. For me, a problem was that Reddit itself became polluted by influencers, so I avoid it (the whole site) as much as possible now. Since Discord hasn't had that problem, it was an easy, pleasant move to make.

basically: humans can totally interact in 10 x O(50) communities despite being utterly unable to interact in 1 x O(500) community. That's really the same lesson as scrum teams too, just at a different scale.

human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.

Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.

"Contextual communities" I guess.

Which is why Google plus circles were excellent. Too bad nothing from Google takes traction anymore.

Discord is absolutely horrible for discovery tho. It's fine for private communities but it is entirely ungooglable so you need the other forms of media to even get people to attend say your community around some video game.

I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.

Impossible search is a feature: where there is search there are ads, paid links and SEO spam, instead of people you trust, or at least people you know, giving out links to Discord servers.

Curious about how well collateralized that debt is. At current rates I’d be surprised banks would want to write 10s of billions for twitter. Particularly when the business plan is “I will lay off 75% of the company and hope things hold together.”

I have only been reading the details through Money Stuff, but according to Levine, the banks are taking a bath on the deal. Currently trying to underwrite the debt for 60-70 cents on the dollar.

A few _days_ ago they were looking at 60-70 cents. I suspect those were (relatively speaking) the good old days.

And they were offered like 50 cents, if memory serves well. Brings some serious Margin Call vibes, doesn't it? "Sell everything, today", getting 50 cents is better the 30 or, worst case, nothing. Looking forward for the banks to find loopholes in the agreements with Musk and sue him for negligence or something.

"65? Jesus. Let me call you back in 5 minutes." "In 5 minutes it will be 55"

This movie slowly turns into my most rewatched one!

Which movie?

Margin Call. I have no idea why it wasn't more well-known. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Aasif Mandvi, Stanley Tucci. It's about a thinly-disguised Goldman Sachs realizing the housing market was about to collapse in 2008 and unloading all their toxic assets in a single day.

Dorsey is buddy buddy with Musk and has proven time and time again he'll say whatever needs to be said in the moment without ever committing to it. Excuse me for not believing a single second any idea he puts forward. He had every opportunity to do it while he was there, was majority shareholder for the longest time.

Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.

wow! web5! people saying web3 isn't web at all, no sightings of 4th and this guy already working on 5th!

Web5 is supposed to be web3 + 2

Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0

Ah, the Winamp approach to versioning.

That's a lot of bullshit when you could just simplify it as "we want to take money from suckers"

<humour>Well, did you ever see sight of IPv5 ?</humour>

I know you were joking but it was really a thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Stream_Protocol

> But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.

"I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards,"

The board predicted this would happen.

So why not keep the main instance pay to play, for any official and public accounts, and the anonymous parts of the net get their own distributed instances?