#Twitter
#TwitterMigration
#twitterdown
#twitterexodus
#twitterrefugees
A recent Salon article lists 5 potential problems during a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon:
Despite the silly headline (we would hope it doesn't become a new Twitter) would anyone be interested in commenting on any or all of these 5?
" 1. ... finding a server to join on Mastodon can be hard, especially when a flood of people trying to find servers leads to the creation of waitlists, and the rules and values of the people running a server aren't always easy to find.
2. ... there are significant financial and technical challenges with maintaining servers that grow with the number of members and their activity. After the honeymoon is over, Mastodon users should be prepared for membership fees, NPR-style fundraising campaigns or podcast-style promotional ads to cover server hosting costs that can go into the hundreds of dollars per month per server.
3. ... despite calls for newspapers, universities and governments to host their own servers, there are complicated legal and professional questions that could severely limit public institutions' abilities to moderate their "dorms" effectively. Professional societies with their own methods of verification and established codes of conduct and ethics may be better equipped to host and moderate Mastodon servers than other types of institutions.
4. ... the current "nuclear option" of servers entirely cutting ties with other servers leaves little room for repairing relations and reengagement. Once the tie between two servers is severed, it would be difficult to renew it. This situation could drive destabilizing user migrations and reinforce polarizing echo chambers.
5. ... there are tensions between longtime Mastodon users and newcomers around content warnings, hashtags, post visibility, accessibility and tone that are different from what was popular on Twitter."
- People have been creating tools and guides to help with this, it’s difficult mainly because it’s new, and the network effect helps a lot with this too - once people get on here, they want their friends here too and are willing to help them with their onboarding steps.
- People have been pretty generous about donations so far (in places where the admins have asked for it), and there are an encouragingly high number of people opening up new instances too, avoiding concentrating the pressure on a few overburdened instances.
- Unclear what complicated questions they mean here. These institutions don’t have to run public instances open to everyone, just a place for their own members/employees to toot from and federate with the rest of the ‘verse. Just like people have person@organization.org email IDs, let @person@organization.social become a norm too.
- This is kind of a vague point, and a complicated topic. I’ll just say I kind of agree about the echo chamber issue, and that’s a big reason I’m on #Qoto which doesn’t defederate on a whim.
- This is of course to be expected when two populations collide, and such growing pains are a good sign. Generally people have been somewhat respectful and receptive of these norms, and it’s likely (imo) that the people who are willing to take up these norms will be the same ones who decide to stick around long term. People who just want a place to yell at the clouds without regard to their environment are unlikely to find as much engagement as they’re used to (especially without an algorithm to boost posts drama-baiting posts), and are more likely to move on elsewhere.
#TwitterMigration #TwitterReplacement #Salon #Instance #Mastodon #MastodonCulture
@wjbeaver
I feel like this article has some issues, particularly with 1, 3, 4, and 5. I'll let others elaborate on that.
2 also kinda depends on whether you are using Mastodon or other ActivityPub software, some of which is more tailored to small server populations than Mastodon is, but I will let that slide.