What Mastodon has shown is that it is also a viable platform. And if you are on Twitter and Mastodon you have a larger voice than if you were only on Twitter. Mastodon is so incredibly active these days, especially in dev circles.
Paul is also posting to Mastodon as of yesterday - follow him here:
Mastodon is a nice project, but to me the architecture is wrong.
You sign up for an account at some server and the moderator can just ban you for no reason (which happens to a lot of people).
You need to own your account. The servers should merely be publishers and relays of content. I think Jack's Nostr is closer to what could work at scale and time.
> You sign up for an account at some server and the moderator can just ban you for no reason (which happens to a lot of people).
No one I know personally has been banned.
The only people I've seen blocked and banned were aggressively anti-LGBT and who claimed their free speech was being impinged if they had to stop yelling about it. If you have very strong opinions on other people's sexuality, so be it, but go get your own server rather than yelling this at random passerby. Mastodon encourages good civility and getting along, rather than extreme free speech.
Twitter wants views in order to sell ads and in many ways, controversial extreme opinions can do that -- they get reactions. Mastodon isn't about that. It is more of a friendly place to hang out with friends. It isn't about yelling at political opponents.
Yeah agreed. This is like a post equivalent to reddit comments. I don't want a new post high on the feed every time some famous person leaves twitter.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This pretty squarely does NOT fall under "On-Topic". The only reason it's even being upvoted is because it has "PG" in the title. if it were like, Kanye West, we wouldn't even have it _submitted_, let alone upvoted here.
Democracy demands the interchangeable
part and the worker on the production
line; Thomas Jefferson may have had other
notions but de Tocqueville was our
prophet. Or take American cuisine: it has
never added a sauce to the world's
palate, but our fast-food industry
overruns the planet.
PG left because of censorship. Now he’s back. He’s a smart considered guy so it’s interesting to ask why he went back. We all have to make similar decisions, and one way we do that is to look to leadership.
There are always ethical compromises engaging with the real world, and there are few hard and fast rules to follow.
If PG is reading, I’d love to hear the thinking behind going back.
I get what you are saying, but let’s cut it out with the ethical, free speech and other aspects of the Twitter dilemma. Leaving or staying is the same virtue signaling that most people were fighting against during the last few years.
PG likes to do that as much as any other person. I recall a random tweet telling something like “all smart people I know are moving their wealth from bitcoin to ethereum”. This is crying for attention, unfit for such an accomplished person and this great website.
It is very hard to leave platforms. You lose a voice you had. When you rely on communicating with others, where the platform was the mechanism, then you end up severing some severe ties. Most are anonymous accounts, so there is no easy way to move those conversations.
Paul’s last straw was the policy on tweeting for competing services, but that has been taken back. Perhaps that is the reason he is still tweeting.
Paul is also posting to Mastodon as of yesterday - follow him here:
https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies