Leaving Twitter with Tim Bray
Well, this is exciting Yeah. That we're because, Tim we got Tim Bray with us who wrote a terrific blog entry on why he's leaving Twitter, and it feels very fitting that we are doing this in our foe first post Twitter space Discord. Whatever we're gonna whatever noun we're gonna apply to this. So, Tim, we Tim, have you used Twitter spaces at all?
Speaker 2:A couple of times. Yeah. One of yours, actually. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 3:How could we forget? Right.
Speaker 1:How could we have forgotten?
Speaker 2:Right? I forget what the subject was.
Speaker 1:Did you, was it us complaining about some technical difficulty with Twitter spaces, which is approximately 20% of the content I feel was us actually. And that there's still a Twitter space that, I know that I I think that, Ian and Jay may even be, here. They run a Twitter space. And, Adam, I you will not be surprised to learn that Twitter spaces seems to be doing worse with 1 eighth of the employees or whatever they have at Twitter, and they were getting even weirder problems, I think, in their most recent Twitter space. So feel we've made the right decision.
Speaker 3:Good good decision to rip the cord when we did.
Speaker 1:Exactly. But so, Tim, first of all, thanks for for joining us. And I was, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were I view you as leading the, leading the charge on explaining why blogging was important to Sun execs in 2003. When was that? Is that is is that correct read of history?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm not sure what year that was, but sometime around then. Yeah. It was a it was a it was a new idea at the time.
Speaker 1:Totally new idea. Because I've read I've been reading ongoing for a long time because you've been blogging for 20 years, probably, close
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:it at this point. Right?
Speaker 2:Next February. 20 years.
Speaker 1:Next February. 20 years. Okay. So one question that I definitely have for you is do you think that the that leading that getting out of this kind of short form narrative in Twitter is gonna lead to more long form narrative. Are we gonna see a resurgence of blogging, do you think, a little bit?
Speaker 2:Maybe. I don't know. In my mind, the short form category feels distinct from blogging. I think the short form category, which put approved could be interesting, even when it was only 140 characters, you know, allowed you to have relatively high velocity conversations on things that were happening right now. It felt a little bit ephemeral, evanescent even, and and that was okay.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're talking about, you know, the World Cup or some concert you're at or a keynote you're listening to or something like that, short form is just fine. And and I I never have had any doubts about whether something I wanna say would fit better on a blog or just blurted out on Twitter. So so they they they occupy 2 categories in my mind. Now perhaps my mind has been formed by the availability of technology. But, you know, that's how it feels to me.
Speaker 1:And were you, were you an early adopter of Twitter? I gotta imagine that you that you were. When did you discover Twitter, and when did you start using it?
Speaker 2:Well, I got Tim Bray, so I must have been on there pretty pretty early. I I think it was early 2007 or something like that.
Speaker 1:That that would make sense. I feel that certainly in the period that you and I were colleagues at Simon, just in general, as I've known you of, like, getting out 2 decades, I feel that you have always been I I I always pay really sharp attention when you're an adopter of something because over and over again, I've seen you be an a leading indicator of a trend. Remember, you got into Ruby in 2,005, if I remember correctly. I I feel like I feel like I watched the DHH Rails video because you recommended it. You made the case for blogs inside of Sun, which, you know, Adam and I were both bloggers inside of Sun.
Speaker 1:Very grateful for that. That was a that was a a you were definitely on the leading indicator there. And then the other thing, I gotta say you are the only indicator for it. Adam, I don't know if you remember this, So we all 3 of us were together at Sun when Oracle acquired the company. And, Bim, you were one of the first people I mean, it like, moments after the acquisition closed, you're like, I've seen this movie before.
Speaker 1:I'm leaving. I and I remember at the time thinking like, I think this could be different. And then mere weeks later being like note to self, if Tim goes to heads for the exit, follow him.
Speaker 2:You're almost right. I actually exited about 15 minutes before the acquisition. I was never an Oracle employee. But You're never an Oracle. Oh, you're just a pure.
Speaker 3:Wow. Really, really, got out even saw it coming even before it hit.
Speaker 2:It was a mildly funny story. Let let me take, 3 minutes and tell it because it it's amusing. So so the word came down that we were gonna be acquired. And, you know, I was in the software CTO office, and I kept asking what what am I gonna do? And nobody knew.
Speaker 2:And I never got a straight answer. And, and the thing was, for people at our level, it was pretty fat payout for for if they didn't offer you a job. So I was fine with that too. You know, it would come to, like, 18 months worth of salary. And so, I I was greedy and hung on even though nobody was telling me what the job was gonna be.
Speaker 2:And then about, I don't know, a week before closing, my VP who was g g what was his name? G call. Called and say, good news. You're gonna be working with James Gosling. I said, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, that's cool. So I I I ping James and say, hey, James. What's up? He said, no. Nobody told me what what the fuck's up.
Speaker 2:Nobody told me. So, so James and I were both equally irritated. And, you know, I I I badgered the VP, and he still couldn't say anything definite. So I quit at the very last second. And because of that reason, God punished me for my for my greed, and I didn't get the the severance either.
Speaker 2:Oh, well.
Speaker 1:I I think that that is a view, but you kept yourself pure. And certainly wise in my view, because I just again, I remember you saying, you know, I've seen this movie before. I know how this is gonna unfold. And, you were definitely you were right. I mean, you were even righter than you could have imagined that you were, sadly.
Speaker 1:And I I by the time I was leaving in July I think, again, you left in February. By the time I was leaving in July, I was without without regret or second thoughts, certainly. And the the way that I mean, that that acquisition was such an absolute mess. It I think there's a long time where each of us assumed that we personally had been screwed because there'd been no, sort of retention paid, and then you realize, like, oh, Oracle didn't pay retention to anybody. They just like, oh, and I I don't know.
Speaker 1:For me, that was an eye opening moment. Adam, I don't know if you felt the same way. You're just like, you know, if if, coin is the currency of the realm,
Speaker 4:which is
Speaker 3:It clearly was.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's like, I think I get it. I think you might not value Sun employees. Like, yes.
Speaker 3:Now you're understanding. Yes.
Speaker 1:Now you get it. So, Tim, I've always paid very close attention to all the things that you've adopted. You were, very outspoken, about Amazon and their practices, and very much admired the principled stand you took there. Because I mean, the thing is, like, also, like, you're not a firebrand. You're someone who is is willing to see to my view is you're willing to see Nuance and a kind of a moderate middle, but you also are a principled person.
Speaker 1:And, so do you wanna, talk a little bit about kinda what led up to this this blog entry? I mean, you'd you'd written about Mastodon before, obviously, but it it sounds like you had hit a breaking point as so many had, in the last couple of weeks.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I I I joined Mastodon. Every time a new social network comes along, I join it, just on principle to see, hey. What's this all about. Right? And and I joined Mastodon in 2017.
Speaker 2:A lot of people did. And, it it struck me as okay, but kind of unpopulated and clearly not where where the action was. So I I've had those those accounts sitting sitting around. And I think just like, you know, all of us talking here and most of the people who dialed in, you know, we've been kind of vaguely nauseated. By the way, Elon Musk has has dealt with this.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you if you follow the the finance world and and, you know, Matt Levin's money stuff and so on. Just the hilarity, of the of the stupidity with which, Elon Musk did the acquisition, you know, on on impulse worth way more than it offering way more than it was worth than trying to get out of it and losing his ass in court. It was, you know, it was just, you know, not good. It wasn't something you wanted to be near. And and then there was a second wave of nausea when he actually came in and started talking about, do you realize there's 3000 RPE RPCs and and 2,000, microservices that they should all be just shut down?
Speaker 2:Right. So so it was clear that this was not what I would call good engineering leadership by any means. And then the manifesto about, oh, you know, you don't stick around unless you can show me great code and and, have
Speaker 1:a hard Extreme hardcore. Hardcore lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And, you know, you know, a lot of the SREs and so on who actually keeps things running don't write code. Right? You know, it's they do valuable work, you know, with scripts perhaps and so on. But, so so, you know, all that stuff just kinda bothered me. And then, in my goodbye Twitter thing, I I quoted this piece by Josh Marshall, the well known, you know, US, progressive, blogger who's got a really successful publishing operation over at talking points minimum.
Speaker 2:And he actually drilled down on on what Musk was doing. I think this would have been a weekend ago now. Oh, it's all been happening very fast, kind of blurring in my mind. So all these all these ultra right wing scumbags, were were, you know, making, showing right wing talking points at them about, you know, how Antifa are pedophiles and stuff like that, and Musk was going, yep. Right.
Speaker 2:Correct. Analysis. And and then Crime Sync, you know, Crime Sync is this anarchist, wild eyed collective, mostly out of Portland, who are really great. You know, yeah. They talk about the sometimes the advantages of burning down police stations and and things like that.
Speaker 2:But, it's a witty and and good and high quality feed. And, you know, they they get reported all the time for being, you know, dangerous. And the the very morning they were banned, they actually got a routine email from Twitter support saying, oh, yeah. Somebody in in Germany reported you for being awful. But we, we looked at it, and you're not breaking any laws, so that's okay.
Speaker 2:And then Andy Ngo, that's NGO, who is this guttersnipe, nostril, provocateur, fake reporter, lost a bunch of complaints about, about crime think saying, oh, they're they're antifa. They're awful. And and so he bounced them later that day. And, you know, at at that point, it's alright. You know?
Speaker 2:It it's it's it's it's it's not a public company anymore. It's owned by Elon Musk. Elon Musk is playing FTSE. It was the worst kind of outright scum. To the extent that we do anything to make Twitter better, it's going to it's going to benefit that.
Speaker 2:No. I'm out of here. And, well, simultaneously, you know, Mastodon was perking up and becoming more interesting. And I went over there and started participating. And every time I looked, I had, like, several 100 more followers.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I I'm I heard some from some really interesting people about really interesting stuff and just the whole notion of building social media in a way that's more like email and less like Facebook, struck me as, essentially a profoundly good idea. And once I finally understood how instances work, that, you know, your instance is part of your identity. If you're, you know, if you're from faculty.mit.eduorkremlin.ru or, you know, rolling stones.com, you know, if if that's where your your your your your handle is from. Well, it says something about something interesting. Solves a whole bunch of interesting identity problems in a way that does not require an opaque process by an exploitative capitalist.
Speaker 2:And it just became really, appealing looking at the same time as Twitter made me wanna puke. So so there you go.
Speaker 1:Well and so one of the things that that you highlighted, and I had a piece yesterday that kind of inspired by some of the things that you had said. But as, you know, people are talking about alternatives like post and hive and cohost, I think you had the same reaction I had to that, which is actually the centralization here in a a a venture backed entity is actually part of the problem, and we're just gonna repeat history. If we we may repeat it a little bit better, I mean, it's hard to beat at this point. Kinda hard to be worse, but, we may repeat it a little bit better, but we're gonna effectively repeat history with a centralized entity. Is that is that a an accurate read of your your perspective?
Speaker 2:That is an accurate read is, you know, why would we jump you know, if this one particular capitalist enterprise has gone bad, why would we jump to another and hope that it would be better? But, you know, there's another point on top of that, which is it's just not gonna work. I mean, Twitter managed to do an unthink an unthinkably impressive thing, which was concentrate, like, a high proportion of the really interesting voices in the world in one place and give them to everybody for free in an extremely short form fashion. Nobody could have predicted that. And it was a profoundly lucky historical accident.
Speaker 2:And does anybody think that it could be repeated by, you know, some other startup? The idea is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Totally lucky. And I think in so much of what Twitter became became that way because of the users and the way the direction that it was taking, whether it was the character limit or or retweets. I mean, retweets were originally a a user invention. Right? Reteats retweets were not part of the platform.
Speaker 1:Quote tweets, certainly. I mean, all these different tweet threads, which I think get into kind of that longer form. You know, all these things were kind of evolved in the platform, and I I I think, yeah, it was very it was definitely in the right place at the right time. It'd be very hard to to, I think, reinvent any of that. And I also think that, like, you have this issue of if you have an ad driven model, you are going to want to, to drive engagement.
Speaker 1:And right now, these things are not smart enough to drive engagement without driving enragement, I feel. And I I just
Speaker 3:feel They're not smart enough. Or that's part of the human condition. Right? That being being enraged is the thing that bring brings back the engagement. So what what whether it's, them not being virtuous or us not being virtuous, you know, we land in the same spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally, Adam. And I don't know if you saw it. Tim, was it it was in another piece. I think he wrote protect me from what I want.
Speaker 1:I think you had that are aligned to that effect. Am I paraphrasing that correctly?
Speaker 2:Well well, right. I mean, in the the whole thing is that, Facebook and Twitter and and and and so on have built these models that, use they built they built huge ML models based on billions of data points. And, you know, these models have one function saying, you know, which selection of posts should we put in front of this person to ensure they stay in front of the screen? Because engagement is defined as staying in front of the screen so we can show ads to you. And, you know, it's not as though Facebook maliciously decided that, hey, if we show everybody right wing trolls and stuff like that, that'll, that that'll, you know, deepen the quality of the engagement.
Speaker 2:It's just that that's what the ML model produced that that turns out that when you, you know, enrage people share that that gets them maximally engaged. And, you know, people can say, well, I don't like that, but, you know, the model isn't isn't lying. You know? It shows quantitatively.
Speaker 3:You're gonna like it, but here you are. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's That's right. And that's why, you know, I wrote this on a blog piece because there's this huge debate is breaking out over a nest in our land over whether there should be an algorithm. And well, of course, there's an algorithm. Sorting is an algorithm, even in a chronological sort. And, and the algorithm currently used by Facebook and Twitter gives people what they want.
Speaker 2:So there's this conceptual artist named Jenny Holzer whose main work is just short, pissy little phrases. And this is one of hers. I I I first saw it many years ago. I was walking through Times Square in New York, and there was a huge billboard up there. And it just had projected on it, protect me from what I want.
Speaker 2:You know? And it felt like somebody was sticking a knife in my brain because, you know, what a profound statement that explains so much. And when people are saying, well, I don't want an algorithm, they're they're kinda saying protect me from what I want. Now we do want algorithms. Okay?
Speaker 2:We want algorithms to improve the quality of curation and protection and moderation and all those things. But the the fact of the matter is in the context of a capitalist offering like Facebook or Twitter, the algorithm is going to operate in the interest of whoever paid to have it written. Nice thing about an open source based, federation based thing is people are just gonna, dick around and and make algorithms because they're cool or because they they produce a feed that makes their dad happy or something like that. And and, that that's great. I, you know, I think we need algorithms.
Speaker 2:We need lots of them. And because nobody at the moment is smart enough to predict predict what what's gonna be the right one. So so let's go and do that.
Speaker 1:Well, totally. And have you because I found that I that I am calmer when I'm at NASA. Like like, my feed, I like my feed. There's just more stuff in there that I find intellectually interesting as opposed to being enraging. And I probably, in the mastodon sense, engage with it less because I'm more likely to get kinda off the site and read a blog entry that's interesting or what have you, but I like it a lot more.
Speaker 1:Have you has that been your experience as well?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And on top of which, I'm only following, like, 1 tenth or 1 sixth or something like that, the number of people I follow on Twitter. So, clearly, the signal to raise noise ratio seems to be better.
Speaker 1:Well, totally. And I'm amazed that, you know, people say that things can't go viral on on Mastodon. But, Tim, as I was writing that piece yesterday, I had to keep updating it with the numbers that you're I'm not gonna say toot. I'm sorry. I we're not even getting rid of toot.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Like, we're not gonna call it a toot. I feel like that.
Speaker 2:Fine by me.
Speaker 1:They're fine by you. I know. I they I know exactly. It's like, why would we be be fine with a tweet and not a toot? I mean, I guess we should just suck it up.
Speaker 1:But I feel that, like, that's been that they're changing the name to something else. Maybe someone could tell us in the channel what they've I I've been calling them posts. But the, it it feels like that I mean, that post kept doing numbers. I mean, and they kept you you you know, you look at how much that had been boosted because it is easier to it's a lighter weight operation. I mean, I feel like retweeting something on Twitter is kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1:It's a heavier I mean, it's obviously still just a click of the of the mouse, but it is a heavier weight operation than boosting it on Mastodon. Certainly, I boost more things. I mean, Adam, are you boosting more things than your retweet?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Boosting more things, I think, in part because we're we're the algorithm. Right? We're we're doing this for, like, folks around us, and I think, actually, that's how Twitter used to be before they started you know, the algorithm became much more heavy handed and incorporating things like like likes. And remember, it used to be a a heart rather than a star or whatever or a star rather than a heart, on Twitter.
Speaker 3:And I think that, you know, we used to do this as a service for one another to to to fill in for the algorithm, And now, it's been completely washed out on Twitter. So we're we're we're back to doing that service for one another to being that curation, you know, on, on Mastodon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what Adam says is is is right. And, you know, there's all these tools you can do, which will go and find all your Twitter followers on Mastodon and and hook you up with them. And I totally haven't been using those because
Speaker 3:You have not been?
Speaker 2:No. Oh, that's what I'm saying. Because, you know, all I did was, you know, follow a few people I knew, and then, you know, look at things they boosted and then follow looked at people who are following me. And and and I've grown quite a different flavor of feed as a result of that than I have on Twitter, and I like it better. So, you know, you can just grow organically.
Speaker 2:And, boy, the growth is fast. Like, I'm up to, like, 75 100 followers or something like that over there. And, you know, that's in, like, 3 weeks. And there's lots of people more interested than me there too. You know, I I I was looking at NL Dash is already up to, like, 30,000 followers or something like that.
Speaker 2:So things can Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I think it's great to see, but I would say that my feed currently is is more boring. Like, there's interesting stuff that I get deeper on, but it doesn't bring me back. And I think this maybe is it protecting me from what I want in a sense. Or, like, I'm following folks. I find interesting folks.
Speaker 3:I find interesting topics, but is it is not yet for me, and maybe this is, you know, sharing too much about myself, that kind of obsessive what's going on question that I would have with Twitter.
Speaker 1:Well, so it is definitely less of a news function, and that's what I'm having to, like, dewire in my brain is where I was going to Twitter for news and getting enraged as as a side effect of that. And Yeah. I I have so, Adam, have you I know Tim deleted the app off his phone. Have you deleted the app off your phone?
Speaker 3:Is this an intervention? No. I have not. Intervention. I have not.
Speaker 3:I have not. You know what I'm talking?
Speaker 1:I have not.
Speaker 3:And there are a couple of voices on there in particular, like, this guy Aaron Rupar and, Eason Torbay who who monitor right wing media, like, so I don't have to, that I that I look up, like, pretty constantly actually over there. So there there are converse and then conversations about sports and World Cup and things like that that I have not yet found on Mastodon. But and maybe this to to Tim's point, I'm also seeing a lot more shit in my algorithm that I that I didn't see and I really don't wanna see, that, you know, I'm seeing, to me, very offensive kinds of posts against against people, against, you know, kinds of people, against protect class, like, folks that I, you know, I think are at the butt end of a lot of commentary. And all of a sudden that's creeping into my feed in ways that it never did before.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 3:and that's really hard.
Speaker 1:Totally. Oh, I I mean, it feels like my feed is is like in a a a city where, like, the police force has been or the the the people have moved out, and the thing is being ransacked. I mean, it is, like, my feed is nuts. I'm just getting the weirdest shit, and I get, like, tons of Elon Musk tweets in my feed.
Speaker 3:I know. I'm like, I I in fact, I I don't know if you've had this experience. You can click and say, you know, I wanna I'm not that interested in it, and then say, I don't wanna see tweets from Elon Musk. That option is not available to me anymore.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 3:know whether I've clicked it enough times where it's like, no. No. No. We get it. But so finally, I just blocked him.
Speaker 3:But it but it it wasn't even giving the
Speaker 1:option. Him?
Speaker 2:Did you
Speaker 1:block him? Yes. It's space. Did you block him?
Speaker 3:It's space. I a 100% blocked him. Yes.
Speaker 1:I I do not have any I I do not have that self control. I can't I I I should. I mean, I'm I'm broadly I have not yet deleted it off my phone. I am trying it's actually I'm gonna have to leave it off my phone because I do have a muscle memory for it on my phone more so than I've got when I'm when I'm sitting at the computer. But I I have also, Twitter's loss has been the gain of this bonkers local news app that I've got.
Speaker 1:I've never observed that. I my mom loves to watch the local news, and, so she do you ever watch the local news app?
Speaker 3:No. I don't even know how I would do that.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. This is kinda how I feel. And so, like, I did not actually know how I would watch the local news. So, I think it comes does it come on at 10, 11?
Speaker 1:I guess it comes on on, like it's broadcast over hell anyway, I don't know. The so I found this local news app that I installed on my phone, and this thing now just, like, delights in spamming me. But in particular, this app has figured out that, like, hey. Wait a minute. This guy will click on any Elon Musk story we put in front of him.
Speaker 1:So between that and the best of dying Twitter, which is do you follow the best of dying Twitter, Adam? That is the the one account to follow. Is Tim must've been Is that
Speaker 2:is that a Twitter feed?
Speaker 1:That's a Twitter feed, and it is good. It is really good. Yeah. It is and and the that is, you know, the it's it's just what it says. It's the best of I think it's like the she can always spell Twitter with it is the, I believe it's the woman who did best of next door doing, Best of Dying Twitter.
Speaker 1:I'm lucky. So that thing is is is definitely so when I'm over there, it's only for to to kinda marvel in the destruction of it all. And then, Adam, were you getting ads still when you're over there?
Speaker 3:The the ads are amazing. So first of all, you know, there's, like, a new kind of ad that's sort of like a just follow me ad, click the big button ad, and I just I block anyone who does that kind of ad. But a recent one was a woman saying, hey. I don't wanna I'm just seeing how this ad platform works. Like, don't if you click something.
Speaker 3:Like like anyway, I found that very amusing. Some of the ads are getting so horrifying that they're, like, the you know, if if you kinda wake up at 3 in the morning and the TV is still on, I mean, I I don't have broadcast television anymore, so, this doesn't happen to me. But, and, like, some ad would be on. It's that kind of caliber versus 1.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna I'm gonna put another flavor in here. I I've actually seen some better ads, more interesting ones in in in in recent weeks. I actually, bought a Christmas present for somebody off an ad I saw for a a quirky imaginative product, which is, you know, normally, Twitter ads were the safest brand stuff, you know, drink Coca Cola Fly United, buy Apple. But it is clearly it's clearly not in a healthy state. But, you know, one thing that Twitter is so great at that that I would miss totally, and and I hope I hope Mastodon catches up on this, is, news, current breaking news story.
Speaker 2:Like, you know, when when the Ukrainian army breaks through and is is marching across the the the grain fields of Kherson or, Bali club or something like that. Wow. You know, you can zero in on that in Twitter and you'll find out stuff way before CNN does for sure.
Speaker 1:I I love where an earthquake. Right? An earthquake is the is I I would love to know what was the first earthquake that I went to Twitter before going to the USGS for. When was that? I got no idea of knowing when that was, but, for an earthquake, you're all I'm always on Twitter to see if I actually felt that or if that was a truck going by.
Speaker 1:And so that will yeah. Tim, I totally agree that that's gonna be do you think now do you see Mastodon as being on a trajectory to replace that? Because I'm not sure that it is. Well, at the you know, I I don't
Speaker 2:think there's anything that limits, the technology. I mean, one thing I believe strongly that assuming Mastodon keeps on getting traction, every news organization should have their own instance. Right? So, you know, sally@bbcdot codotuk. Right?
Speaker 2:You know, without this is the BBC reporter. It's not in doubt, and so on and so forth. I would I would think that, every, serious news organization should do that. And so and and nothing there's nothing in the underlying protocols that keep that from working.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll get that curation not from the centralized source, you know, the Twitter was, but from these trusted news outlets that that didn't you're opting into. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's right. But, you know, there's also Amazon already can do hash code following quite efficiently. And, that's kind of what I that's how I was how I was doing it on Twitter. I would, you know, hash code occurs on and track the Ukrainian army. So, you know, I don't think there's any reason it couldn't.
Speaker 2:Will it? We don't know yet.
Speaker 3:Right. And, Brian, I did get one ad I just need to tell you about. Yeah. The ad the ad is in quotes, Moore's Law only stops when innovation stops.
Speaker 1:Is that an Intel ad?
Speaker 3:Intel ad.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. Intel. So Intel is sliding into the dementia at the same moment that that Twitter is sliding in the 8 channel. Like, this is gonna get real, real weird if, if those 2 are going on together. I will say that the I don't know how deeply Twitter needs to descend into 8 chan before it loses the HPE GreenLake and IBM ads, but those 2 are still dominating my feed.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. IBM ads. You know, back in the 19 late 19 seventies when I was an undergrad, You know, I would read datamation and computer world and things like that. And the current IBM ad about well, give employees access to your data is totally out of
Speaker 1:1978. Well, do you also get the the identical twins eating hot dogs at the gas station IBM ad?
Speaker 2:Oh, Oh, but digital doubles or whatever it is? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I it is like this is one of these ads where it's just like, am I and I because I get this ad Adam, do you don't see this ad? I get this ad all the time. And it's like, don't click on the ad. Don't click on the ad. I'm like, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I gotta go click on the ad. And the replies are obviously great. I mean, the replies to the ad. I would pay for the replies to the ad, actually. Maybe that would be that that would be my $8 a month.
Speaker 1:It's just like having people just light up this ad for being ridiculous. For, like, for I like, Ivy, what do you make? What do you make? Where are we? What are we doing here?
Speaker 3:If if I can interject for a second, Brian, I just wanna say that, you know, this is a new system. So if if folks wanna join us on the stage, they can do a request to speak somehow. It's probably a button on your screen that's not on mine. And then, as folks come up, if you if you join us, we might kick you off the stage quicker, but you're you're welcome to come back on just because we have found that there's no good sort of hand system, for for, you know, managing a large group of speakers simultaneously.
Speaker 2:You're not around the subject. And, you know, ask what you ask what you guys think, and maybe somebody else will join in. Do you think there's a place for a paid for Mastodon instance where for some, you know, small amount of money, $5 a month or something like that, you get it and there's no ads?
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I'm but maybe. The thing is I view it kinda like Hacker News where I consume hacker news. I help create content on hacker news. I don't pay for hacker news.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think it'd be interesting to know from a y combinator perspective if they view hacker news as kind of a net neutral or a loss leader. I don't think I would pay for hack. I don't I would not pay for Hacker News. Brian, stay strong.
Speaker 1:You would not pay for Hacker News. The Adam, are you on mute? You?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. That's great. No. Good.
Speaker 3:Good. Stay strong. Stay strong.
Speaker 1:It'd be interesting. I don't know that I like, why am I so against on principal paying, like, $3 a month for although, Adam, you may not have that objection. Do you?
Speaker 3:So I'm I'm paying so you I mean, you're you're I see the bus you're pushing me under, which is me paying $3 a month into until recently for Twitter Blue.
Speaker 1:Just relax and sit down right here in this bus stop. It'll be fine. That's right.
Speaker 3:This is the street. This is not bus stop. So I did cancel that just so you know. And, but but I I'm also I'm paying on Patreon. I have to make a Patreon account for my Mastodon instance.
Speaker 3:So I am paying. And, like, I pay for the New York Times. We pay for the Washington Post. So there's, like, stuff in that realm that I'm paying for. So, yeah, I pay I pay for I do pay for our Mastodon instance, I guess.
Speaker 3:I pay for additional news curation, But I also, like, pay for, you know, some independent journalists and stuff because I like that kind of content, and I know what a shitty, like, tough profession that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I don't I'm trying to imagine what the future looks like. And, you know, the obvious thing that if Mastodon really gets traction, what will what will happen is that, you know, Reddit will start talking the protocol and, you know, you can follow people on Reddit, on Mastodon, and and your Gmail address will become a, a, a master, Fediverse handle. And, you know, all these things can happen. So I I you know, some of those people who are currently ad supported are gonna stay that way.
Speaker 2:And then if you get a master on account for being, you know, on Stanford faculty, okay, you're not paying for that obviously. But is there, something in between that? You know, people who want to have an ad free, progressively managed, tries really hard to suppress Nazis, instance. Would you pay $5 for that? I I would for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and maybe this is like email. Right? I mean, that is kind of what, you know, what you're describing is exactly the historical route that email took, and plenty of people did and do pay some number of dollars per month for email. And then plenty of others are willing to use Gmail or what have you, complimentary if you are an individual with with with limits.
Speaker 1:So yeah. Yeah. Maybe that that will be the future. Certainly, I think that that recognizing and, you know, Chris, I thought made the Anova made a good this great point, Adam, in our, in our space in Oxide and Friends last week on or 2 weeks ago, just about the, you know, folks kind of feeling that kind of civic connection with their moderators that, like, your your moderator is not some faceless human. It's an actual human or group of humans.
Speaker 1:They got a particular disposition. And I think, you know, humanizing that moderation, I think is actually really important for us all to be on. Because I think we need to be on better behavior also. It's like, can we maybe make this moderation problem slightly less burdensome by actually collectively being on better behavior? Like, isn't that possible?
Speaker 1:Can't we all get just get along? Am I No.
Speaker 2:Not not in the slightest. Because Exactly. Some people are garbage, and then there are organized attackers who are being paid to do it. And and by the way, this is an area where Mastodon is currently weaker than Twitter. Substantial number of people from, you know, the kinds of of demographics get oppressed, people of color, gay people, trans people, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Women, go over there, and they start soaking up, start getting, you know, really obscene egregious abuse. Chanda Prescod Weinstein, the famous, physicist who is black and Jewish and female and loud, went over there and just couldn't stand it. She came back to Twitter. So so there this is not a problem that's solved and it wants need one that needs to be solved. It's I would say maybe the biggest outstanding problem, in in Mastodon right now, and I'm optimistic that we can, that we can build the tools to to to to, you know, address this, but it's it's it's an issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think it so maybe this is a good time to get to, and I wanna get I know folks have raised their hand. Wanna get them on stage as well. But maybe this is a good time to get to some of Steven's objections. Steven O'Grady, is supposedly at re Invent.
Speaker 1:I don't you know? I don't know. But the no. Steven O'Grady's at reInvent, and he, he I think he was trying to convince Adam Jacob to to take on the, the the role of the, the the mastodon skeptic. Although, I wanted to ask Steven, like, what are you what position do you oh, here and here's Adam.
Speaker 1:So, Adam, maybe maybe you can channel Steven and, although, again, I'm not sure what position he thinks that he's arguing against because, certainly, it is my position to me love to know your perspective. But I Macedon, I don't think is going to replace Twitter. I in fact, I don't think there's a single replacement for Twitter. I think Twitter is gonna be like the nightly news. I think it's just gonna be something that goes away.
Speaker 4:I don't I don't think it's gonna be something that goes away. But I, Yeah. I I I don't know how much I can channel for Steven. I That thread, he did summon me, and I and then I was like, I don't think I have an opinion, and then I, like, fucking went off on a big rant. So apparently, I did.
Speaker 4:I I mean, I think there's a couple of things. One is the the shape of mastodon and the shape of, like, a public square, which which for as much as that gets painted about, I think is what Twitter really became, is not the same. So and when you think about it as one, like, what you wind up with is a lot of, like, hyper connected famous people that then bridge conversations. And so, especially in that, like, middling tier famous. So, like, I think about Kelsey Hightower a lot in the middle tier famous, You know, he's about as famous as, like, Laura Jane Grace, who is in, like, a famous punk rock band, and she can, like, fill a venue.
Speaker 4:You know? Like, and but she's not as famous as, like, you know, like Scott Hanselman, who's about as famous as Sammy Hagar. Right?
Speaker 1:What kind of Hanselman you think is is famous as Sammy Hagar?
Speaker 4:On on Twitter, he is. How? On Twitter, he is. He has about he has roughly the same number of followers on Twitter as Sammy Hagar does. So, yeah, his reach
Speaker 1:I nothing against Scott Hanselman, obviously, but that's I have yeah. That's high praise for
Speaker 3:I love this kind of hot or not metric. It's horrendous. What what musician has the same number as followers as you?
Speaker 4:It's it's an interesting question. I I have about half as many as Brian Cantrell. Right? So I'm I'm, like, still working it out in bars, you know? Like, I'm like I'm like beloved in the cult, but, but I the the thing about those numbers is when you I read the activity pub paper while I was, like, in bed drinking coffee this weekend.
Speaker 4:And, like, woah. Woah. How bad that's gonna work if you wind up with, like, Kelsey back in the 100 of 1000, and he's and there's any kind of rational engagement, like, woah. It's gonna go so badly. And that's I mean, look, that's a technical thing.
Speaker 4:Of course, they can fix it. You know, Brian Cantrell, Adam Leventhal, and Tim Bray are on this call. If they decide they wanna fix Mastodon, like, my belief that's gonna happen is quite high. But, like, the the Twitter had this has this low barrier to entry. It did become quite reliable.
Speaker 4:The that ability to then communicate with people who were outside your circle and were and and how to reach that you didn't have when you may or may not have known who they are. Like, think about all the people who their tech career took off in large part because they talk to people on Twitter. They didn't know who were at that middling level of fame. And like through that middling level of fame, they became known inside a much wider network that then allowed them to express themselves in a way that they couldn't before. That all happened for free.
Speaker 4:Like, if you think about what happens, you know, for like like, Tim brought up the identity function of Mastodon, which I think is such a cool idea. But, like, you know, the amount of data and the size of an instance, like, we're talking about, you know, would you pay for Mastodon? Like, you're gonna pay for Mastodon. Or you better start paying for Mastodon because the amount of data storage and the inefficiency of that protocol, like, someone's paying for Mastodon. Like, Chris Nova, god bless her.
Speaker 4:She's doing like, like, you know, they, they just crushed, they got 25,000. I'm sure many more folks on that instance now. Right? Like, and one computer. God help.
Speaker 4:And one computer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. God
Speaker 4:help her. God help them if Kelsey Hightower joins that instance. Right? Like
Speaker 1:Did you
Speaker 3:guys see this Jamie Zawinski piece called I post in chat, called the mastodon stampede, where he's basically, like, d o DDoS ing himself every time he he links a blog post.
Speaker 4:There's been several of those, and it's terrifying.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And Yeah. And let
Speaker 2:let let me speak to that. I I when I published the buy Twitter thing, it immediately got up on Hacker News. And at the same time, it was going around Mastodon, you should have seen my server logs. It was it was insane because you know, Hacker News gives you a pretty big traffic surge, Literally 3 or 4000 Macedon instances. I'll I'll pulling it up.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it's it's actually, you know, look, I love rails. I think Rails I think model of the Rails applications are the right way to do things, you know, within limits of scale and performance, but Mastodon is a monolithic Rails where stateful rails application. And, you know, that that's not correct. Okay? I think we can all agree that's that's not the correct implementation for for for that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So, so yeah, you're right. But, but we will fix it. I mean,
Speaker 4:and I mean, of course, of course they might, but like in the meantime, essentially, the community I've seen leave Twitter for reasons that I think are, you know, justifiably your own. Like, if you if you can't support a world where Elon Musk owns Twitter, because now it's like a farm for all right Nazi trolls, like, by all means, like, leave Twitter. And also, like, we are leaving behind, like, we have both the privilege of being able to leave because as a, as a group of people, like on this call are some pretty incredible infrastructure folks, right? Like Brian runs a computer company. Like we know what to do.
Speaker 4:Like and we think it's kind of fun. So, like, I'm stoked that I'm hanging out on hackyderm. That thing's fun. Right? It's it's I think it's great.
Speaker 4:It reminds me of bulletin boards, and I loved bulletin boards. Like, my whole life has been because I love that moment. So I still feel pretty connected to it. But, like, we are there is there is a lot of folks that we are leaving behind in that conversation in a way that I think is is a real bummer. And and when we talk about the sort of gleeful demise of it, like, it is fun to watch Rome burn or whatever, I guess.
Speaker 4:But but there's a thing there that's special that I don't think Mastodon replaces. And I think mastodon's own shape is interesting and fun. And I think it's like I'm there and it's engaging and also we're losing something that mattered. And I think the idea that it can't be replaced, that's also sad. Like and I hope it's not true.
Speaker 4:Like, if it needs to go away, and I'm not seeing it go away in other communities I follow. Like, the the community I follow that's this one, this community definitely is leaving. The the that was full of, you know, SREs and ops people and distributed systems people and, engineers and systems administrators and DevOps people like fleeing Twitter a 100%. Every other part of the communities I follow, no.
Speaker 1:And I'll be interested to say because, I I mean, I think that it's also quite possible that there's just not gonna be one answer for all communities. I mean, this is why when I say that Twitter is going away, what I actually mean is that the idea of having this single platform that is kinda catering to all of society is one that and then when you try to monetize that, and when you monetize that by getting people upset, you are actually naturally selecting for those that are divisive to their marrow. I mean, I think when history is writ, we will view Trump as the Twitter president. And Trump Sure. I mean, I mean, I don't think do you think that Trump could have risen to the presidency without Twitter?
Speaker 4:I don't know. Probably. Like, the and and and when I think about the, like, like, for all of the Trump's that happened, there's, like, there's a million other connections and a million other opportunities that were built and created for people because that public square existed and was a public square. And, like, you know, is is everything that you're saying about the, like, engagement and, like, hate tweeting, like, how many how many long arguments have we had on Twitter, Brian? Like, just because it was fun and it was fun as we were doing it.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 4:And like, and, and like, I like, I think there's some truth in that, but like, you know, one thing that Twitter still does better, even with the reduced size of my feed, like my feed doesn't look like the ones you guys described. Like I get, I'm getting ads still from, for sports stuff and for random content. Like I'm, they did, it does not look like a weird, like bottom barreled ad hellscape for me, which doesn't mean it doesn't look like that for you, but it doesn't look like that for me. And like, I think the, I, I really think that there is a thing that we're losing and, and that our willingness to abandon it, I think is interesting. Like, and, and it's not because there's not a good reason to abandon it.
Speaker 4:I get it. But like,
Speaker 1:I just feel like I I don't know that I'm actually running away from it as much as I'm just finding that the interaction on Mastodon is so much better, honestly. I think that the the the 500 character limit is I mean, I'm just finding that I'm getting more better engagement on more stuff on Mastodon than I'm getting on Twitter. And I think that, like, a lot of those discussions that you kind of alluding to on on Twitter, Adam, I think that those are gonna that's Mastodon is actually a better spot for those discussions.
Speaker 4:But it's only be, I mean, maybe because, because right now you're seeing a pretty high degree of the, of, of the, in the know folks who have, who are moving those networks and they're actively engaged in it because it's like fun and interesting. But like, you know, the reliability problems you see, like there's world class SRE is trying to keep, keep Hachoderm alive and it's not going well. Right. And like this like the central instances, like, all that stuff's gonna have to be fixed. We'll sweat it, and it's it'll be fine because we're technical enough.
Speaker 4:We understand what's happening. We know what's going on. But like, I don't, I don't know that the slicing of that community in that way is, is to our benefit. I understand. I understand why you can argue your way into the fact that it is because the because it sucks to get, you know, I don't, I don't like seeing Nazis in my feed any more than y'all do.
Speaker 4:And, like, my desire to, like, my desire to argue with them is incredibly high. And, like, and and it means I'm on Twitter all fucking day, like, you know, hunting for the dopamine that comes from finding someone who says something wrong that I can then be a jerk to. And like, that's awful, and I wish that wasn't I don't think that's my best self, but like, yeah, I don't know. I feel like, I feel like the loss of that is, is meaningful. And while it's, while it's understandable that we're losing it, I I don't think it was all bad.
Speaker 4:And I think there's a lot of folks who got a lot of value out of it and whose lives were fundamentally altered because of the shape of that network. And and
Speaker 3:Look look where we are. Like, we're we started this in a Twitter space. We started because it was a great community of folks to plug into.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, it was exciting, and it was a new format that dovetailed into the existing format. There was a lot we like. So I I agree with you, Adam, just that this is as much as there might be a Rome burning schadenfreude associated with it, Like, this is a loss.
Speaker 4:And and I was in a We'll
Speaker 3:find alternatives.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We'll find alternatives, but, like, I was in the community. There's a website called meme pool. And if you guys don't know
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. MemePool.
Speaker 4:But it was it was like it was like Hacker News back
Speaker 5:in the day.
Speaker 4:Oh. And Yeah. Definitely. Joshua Schachter, he built
Speaker 1:Delicious
Speaker 4:later on. I got you. So he made the mistake once upon a time of building a mailing list for a meme pool. And me and my friends wound up on this mailing list, and we took that joint over. Like it became its own subculture completely disconnected from meme pool, and it drove Schachter nuts.
Speaker 4:It he like and he to the degree where he was, like, writing custom code to mess with the mailing list and, like, shadow ban people and add random footers. It was nuts. But that group of people, like, refused to budge. Like, they just refused to get off his lawn, because it was our lawn, you know? The fact that he owned it was irrelevant.
Speaker 4:Like, we we were we were squatting. Eventually he and and eventually he just shut the whole thing down. He was like, these jackasses gotta go. And so he just turned the mailing list off, and that was the end of that. And years ago, I met him in person and was like, hey, sorry about that.
Speaker 4:And he was like, that was you? You know? But, the reason I bring it up is I I think it's interesting that our our collective feeling of ownership over the public square is ceded that Twitter is was ceded so trivially because it changed ownership. The idea that your participation in that public square was linked to who owned it. Come on.
Speaker 4:That's not
Speaker 1:come on. That is not linked to who owned it. He like, if you could not run this thing into the ground faster than he's running into the ground. It's actually I
Speaker 4:you know what? It's I I would Cheers, Brian, but it's still I I I'm I'm not saying any of that was good or bad.
Speaker 1:I was totally happy, by the way. And then And it's obviously bad. I mean, we did a Twitter space on the night that he took over, and there was interesting to kinda get everyone's perspective on. And I was very happy to have the bull case. I the bull case being that that the the supervillains are not released back onto the platform.
Speaker 1:This is absolute malpractice, wall to wall malpractice. It it is Yeah. I mean, the the the what he's doing in terms of skirting regulation,
Speaker 4:we've turned it into a tacit endorsement. If you haven't left, like, the number of folks I've seen say, oh, if you haven't left Twitter yet I'm not you are you are at
Speaker 1:that point yet.
Speaker 4:I know you're not.
Speaker 1:But but we are But,
Speaker 4:like we are getting But that point's but that point's happening quite a bit. Well, and like And like I'll
Speaker 1:tell you how it gets there. It gets there because Gap was a joint customer, and we did not realize what Gap was. They were just a customer that swiped a credit card, and it wasn't until the Squirrel Hill massacre that we realized that that had been that had happened on Joynt Infrastructure. And the the moment that that happens, and we are we are not far away from that, by the way, where you have someone who is getting ginned up on social media to commit an atrocity. The the I mean, the I don't know if you saw the the news about the the more video from Christchurch was uploaded and was on Twitter for hours before it was being flagged by the New Zealand government.
Speaker 1:We are close to that happening. And when that happens, you you will cross a Rubicon, and that Rubicon will be Apple is forced to pull it. Google is forced to pull it. Payment processors are forced to pull. We know what gap looks like.
Speaker 1:We know what 8 Chan looks like. They are not businesses. So, I mean, I think it's a mistake to think that anybody is leaving Twitter because of its change of ownership. I I am leaving
Speaker 4:I under I I under I understand your point. And also the that and and I I even I'll I'll even grant you that it's happening. And, like, this is very dangerous. It's a very dangerous position. I'm not putting
Speaker 1:this on Twitter. Yeah.
Speaker 4:No. I just I just wanna put out I just wanna, like, make it known that, like, I'm way out on a limb here and, like, I might everything in me is crying to crawl back on the other side of the limb, but but I'm just gonna stay here for one more second. Because Steven O'Grady put me up to it. And then if it ends badly, I'm gonna be like, this is on you, buddy. But like, but like I those the idea that there was a, like, there were many things that happened have happened over the life cycle of Twitter and, and that life cycle of, of, of main characters and bad actors and, and, and poor behavior and social media, like corruption and the way the algorithm boosted certain voices over like all of those things.
Speaker 4:Like they were things that happened to us collectively and that the, the continued existence of that, of us in that place as part of the public square is part of why those things stopped. And this, the the the ceding of that power is what's happening right now by saying, look, this guy's a jackass. He did nothing but the most jackass of moves that it's it's allowing all of this awful stuff to come back. It's moving backwards from where it was, and the right thing to do is leave, like, okay. And and also don't be surprised when what's left is the exact hellscape that you predicted.
Speaker 4:And you can congratulate yourself. And I'm not saying that that's the reason the hellscape will happen. Like that's, that's obviously not, you're not in control of Twitter. Like that's not what I'm saying, but like our, our mass decision that that's no longer a place for us means that everyone who would want to communicate with us for whom that was the way that they got to us, it's no longer a place for them either. And, and that's, that's a real impactful loss
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 4:that doesn't, and I don't think we're weighing that in the same way that it's very easy to get yourself self righteous and I'm like, self righteousness is, like, my maximum drug. Like, if there's a thing I can channel for myself, it's self righteousness. So but, like, but, like, oof, you know, like, I think I think there's I think there's something bad.
Speaker 2:Let me butt in here briefly. So I I don't think there are many people who are actually happy to see Twitter circling the drain. Speaking of somebody who just rage quit, I'm not. You know, I think that it's a tragic side effect of some of the pernicious aspects of capitalism, and it makes me unhappy. You know, my decision to walk away from it, okay, we can argue about that, but I'm not walking away in happiness.
Speaker 2:I wanted to to address one little corner of what you said there, Adam, which is, okay, if you go look around Amazon, it's a pretty geeky place. Or not Amazon, Mastodon. If you look around Mastodon, it's a pretty geeky place. Well, you know, so is Twitter in its early days. So is Facebook, for gosh sakes, in its early days.
Speaker 2:You know, we're the first people to have computers. We're the geeks. And to I get the web. We're geeks and so on. So so that's not a negative indicator at all for me.
Speaker 2:I I think that, you know, it's perfectly reasonable to expect geeky people to be the first ones up on the beach of the of the new thing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:That would happen.
Speaker 2:If if somebody could come figure out a way to come back, you know, and there may be a way through the fire. I mean, maybe it goes into a nasty bankruptcy, you know, Tesla slot stock crashes. You know, Elon walks away $30,000,000,000 poor. Somebody else takes over sort of on a caretaker basis. A lot of people come back to work there because, you know, it was not that terrible business.
Speaker 2:And Twitter eventually is reborn, but maybe in a more, I don't know, in a in a still useful shape. So it could happen. I I wouldn't bet on it at the moment, but and and that would make me that would not make me unhappy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would be fine with that. Just to be clear, I think it that is gonna be really, really challenging. I have not deleted myself from Twitter. I'm still there.
Speaker 1:I have locked my account to indicate that that my own, dissatisfaction. Also, I was finding that that, essentially, a 100% of my new followers were bots. I mean, the irony is that the bot problem seems to have gotten way, way, way, way, way, way worse, in the last couple of weeks. So I I have locked my account for that reason. But, yeah, I would welcome I I mean, it would be fine for me if if Twitter pulled out of its nosedive.
Speaker 1:I don't think it will. I think that it is, when I don't know that Musk has worked in a truly declining company. It is really, really, really hard because every quarter is worse than the one that came before it. Giving up this much top line, I think, is is nuts. And, I mean, the war that he's about to pick, with with Apple, I think, is is very, ill advised to to put it mildly.
Speaker 1:But I if if he can somehow come out of all this, fine. I just don't think it's a practical matter. I just look at my own my own teenagers, and, you know, as I as I wrote yesterday, my teenagers view my kind of, being transfixed by what's happening with Twitter as I might view someone else after LinkedIn is purchased. If if Elon Musk were to purchase LinkedIn and drive it into the ground, like, I wouldn't even register with me. I'd just be like, alright.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I gotta shoot. Fine. Sure. And that's how they view this.
Speaker 1:And I think that the Gen Zers are already very like, are already post Twitter in terms of post this this centralized spot for all social networking. And they're already on the they're already on their own Discords. They're already on I you know, my my 15 year old was asking me why we hadn't done this on Discord a long time ago. I actually don't have a good answer for that. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure what the so I I this is part of the reason I think that it is just structurally not something that is gonna be really accommodated by by the future. This the the this kind of single spot in part because we the the incentives were so misaligned. So, Adam, I totally agree that it gave us great things, but it also, it gave us some not so great things, and then it is it it is more than it is being the way that it is being run now. It's just, I mean, it's just just remarkable. Every time I think it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Now I've seen truly there's nothing else I could okay. No. Never mind. Okay. Though there's something else.
Speaker 1:Toaster said, I know you're here. I wanna get Toaster said here to, Adam, how do I there we go. Did you do it?
Speaker 4:Thanks. Bye.
Speaker 1:Okay. You bet, Adam. Yeah. Good. Good.
Speaker 1:Great talking with you. I hope we can still argue on Twitter.
Speaker 4:We can argue on masks.
Speaker 1:It's all good. That's good. Okay. That's good. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna argue wherever. I come into Discord. It's gonna give
Speaker 1:us arguing? I didn't view them as arguments. I'd view them as discussion.
Speaker 4:No. We don't really argue that much. I was just using it for return.
Speaker 1:Okay. I feel fine. That that's a relief. I was a little bit worried, actually.
Speaker 4:Yeah. No worries. You're you're wrong about everything. But other
Speaker 1:than that Awesome. Thank you. How do we kick him off the stage?
Speaker 3:Party shot.
Speaker 1:I'm getting. That's right.
Speaker 5:We, in Europe, we've been using MASON for a bit longer as we have now. We had for a longer time the data protection issues with the US. So we already have government instances going. So the German government has an instance going, which has a lot of associations and things on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's interesting. Yes. And Because and I do think this is a dimension in which Europe really led the way because I feel, you know, Tim, I was like you. And I think, Adam, you're the same way that we joined that.
Speaker 1:I joined Mastodon whenever it was a top hacker news story in 2017.
Speaker 3:I literally have no recollection of joining it. Like, I it it must have been in a fit of insomnia or something.
Speaker 1:When you joined it in your sleep. You know, did I tell you that my 15 year old I guess ordered a pizza in his sleep? What was that? What was the what I noticed?
Speaker 5:Yeah. In in Europe, there was, a tech conference, the the year end conference, the congress, c three congress, and it was heavily advertised there. So, we have for the Computer Congress instances with a couple thousand people on. And we or, apparently, there is also some other, performance metrics that they are finally writing up now from a lot of hosting providers, that we have here. We have the small associations that, pretty much run it.
Speaker 5:I know pretty a lot of Swiss, like, associations have been active from the very beginning. Now with Musk taking over, this has been like, now we're also finally the Americans have joined us.
Speaker 1:Well, look. We're you know, some odd some things, you know, we're leading the charge and other things we're a little we're a little thick here. So I I I'm glad that so yeah. And is your so so your take is clearly that that Mastodon's got a a pretty good future, and I think it sounds like you're expanding on what Tim was saying about the the kind of the different instances really becoming different kinds of identities.
Speaker 5:For 1, the the other thing that we're trying out right now is how much we can get away with hacking.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:We a friend of mine recently has, added the master done JSON routes to Pelican, so the static, block site. So you can get away even if you don't have a server, you can basically have people follow you on your blog,
Speaker 1:and
Speaker 5:then they see the blog posts in the timeline. And the fun fact is the protocol ActivityPub does not have a character limit. This is a master DOM Instant setting that you can set up. So you can actually you can also get the article type, which then gets you this giant part with the read more in the timeline. And technically, this was fought for blocks, and I'm thinking about setting up my new block software to see how much Jason
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Tim, do you do you do you do
Speaker 2:this? Yes. Sorry. Go ahead. So Matt Mullenweg says he's gonna put, the protocol in Tumblr.
Speaker 2:So Tumblr becomes essentially a looks like a mastodon system.
Speaker 1:Tim, do you remember us adding the tweaks that we needed to detrace to allow a to generate an RSS feed. Do you remember this?
Speaker 2:I do not. But I
Speaker 1:can't believe it. No. Because this is your idea.
Speaker 2:Do you remember this, Adam? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, Tim, you had this idea of, like, hey. It's like, could I have a d script that it generates in our speed? And we're like and there were some actually, some really things that's preventing it that we fixed. And we're like, alright. Great.
Speaker 1:Now we can have a d trace script generated in our SSD. It's like, won't we use this for a tip? I'm a read to be like, I don't know, but it seems neat. Like, it does seem neat. I don't know what we've been using for.
Speaker 1:I don't think we've done too many RSS feeds with but, yeah, but to your to your point, that's just about the these open protocols do allow us to plug in different things. And so, Tim, do you think that the Monowag thing I mean, that that kind of thing could be a real game changer if you have a big player do that.
Speaker 2:You know, in my experience, when Matt said he's gonna do something, he doesn't. And, you know, he's been pretty close to the Tumblr team. So if if there's a good reason why that wasn't possible, I kinda suspect that he wouldn't have gone ahead and said that. So I I expect that'll happen, and, I I expect a lot of other social presence operators are going to be watching that with close attention.
Speaker 1:I saw Don McCaskill talking about Don McCaskill, I think, owns Flickr right now. Am I making that up? That I think that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's he's from SmugMug, but SmugMug bought up a bunch of the other, photo sharing things. So, yeah, that he has Flickr.
Speaker 1:He's got Flickr. And so Don has been talking about actually, adding what it would take to take activity pub and get that. I mean, so it's there's a bunch of interesting stuff happening out there. And so, yeah, and and so, Tim, where do you kinda see things in, in 3 to 4 years? I mean, do you because I think it's you can also paint a picture where Twitter pulls out of its nosedive, but Mastodon and the Fediverse and activity pub still flourish.
Speaker 1:That that's actually not impossible.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm also influenced by my experience with Blue Sky. So I was in the early Blue Sky conversations with Jack and Parag and those people. And they were saying, you know, the actual business of just lining up feeds and delivering them and and tracking follows and likes and and so on, is, boring. The if there's really business value add there, it's in curation and and, filtering and and things like that and and abuse prevention. And they say, from that point of view, we would win if we opened up Twitter to be, you know, a protocol peer, a whole bunch of other people, because that would give us more stuff to, you know, to to make money by providing a high quality service on it.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a very compelling line of argument.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now blue sky seems to have kind of been sidelined by activity pub as it as it as it hurdles by. And, but but but but, you know, here here's the thing. Clearly, there is a hunger for the kind of things Twitter did. Right? And that's that's not open to debate.
Speaker 2:And it seems that there's a good chance that the provider, Twitter itself, is is is flying into the side of the mountain. And it seems very, very unlikely that any other single entity will be able to step in and assume that that role, which by a process of elimination leaves Federation. Yeah. And, you know, email, you know, despite its base being based on fairly clunky protocols scaled to the entire human population and huge traffic rates. And, you know, now, you know, activity pub is really a lot like email.
Speaker 2:And so I think that by process of elimination, we're going to end up with something federated, filling the important functions that Twitter did. And right now, Mastodon and its buddies are the leading candidate. So I've I've no hard data, but that's mine.
Speaker 5:There there's a couple of data points here to add. The one of the creators of the activity pub standard is further enhancing the standard still. So, there is stuff coming down that pipeline also outside of that standard. So, there is a little bit of a embrace extent going on from side of Mastodon. And, apparently, the standards creator now goes the other side where they have, like, an experimental standard and then have more things they can add to the spec of activity pub.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, Tim, I I think that those pillars are definite I I those pillars, those three pillars that you mentioned, that that Twitter is valuable, and that this is a it serve a valuable function, and it seems like it's it is not going to it quite possibly is it is flying to the side of the mountain, as you say, feels, that that feels pretty, indisputable, and that it's gonna be something else that that comes in and fills that void, because it is valuable. I think that that that's definitely important. I wanna get, Ragi, you wanna get up here? I know Tim's gonna have to split here in a little bit, but, maybe you wanna you've got a closing question or comment.
Speaker 1:Or did I
Speaker 3:You just clicked the button, and it is thinking about inviting Raggy up. Oh, here you are.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I just wanted to sort of add in here. There's a lot of, like, concern around scaling the the federation side of things, but it actually really looks like push push messaging and push services right now. And when I think about, like, the kind of, like, what would it look like if news organizations took it on, like, an interesting option would be, well, the way that Activity pub currently works, you could actually get a paid subscription, and they could post the paid subscription to your inbox. And the cost of doing that is no different from them having their own app and pushing a push notification to you.
Speaker 6:So I'm not sure in all cases that it scales worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Well and I think also one thing that I definitely do love about Mastodon is and and, Tim, I don't know if you I can't remember if you you picked on this in your blog entry. But some of these apps that are trying to replace Twitter that then don't have any web accessibility, that seems bonkers to me because of the all this Yeah.
Speaker 2:That was VWO pointing out that.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's like I isn't the web a good idea? I thought we agreed that that one was a good one. That was wasn't that a keeper? I thought we were gonna that wasn't the keep pile, but I don't know. It it it feels like that's another the the you know, when you kinda opt in because, right, I think part of what the the point you're making is that when you opt into these broader ecosystems, you get to leverage a bunch of it.
Speaker 1:You don't have to have a dedicated app for the Washington Post. You could actually, you you you've got a different way of delivering that same functionality.
Speaker 2:So let me say before I go, let me say a couple of things. We've got a pretty geeky audience here. So so let me go out with geek for a sec. Mastodon has an API. It's a nice API.
Speaker 2:I went and looked at it. It it's got excellent documentation, lots of examples, reasonably straightforward, no big abstractions. It's something anybody could I close the tab quickly because I do not need programming product at the moment. Item 2, activity bugs pretty simple. It's a well written spec.
Speaker 2:It's easy to figure it out. You know, I encourage anybody who, you know, who isn't frightened of reading specs and thinks, hey, maybe there's something unique I could do on this to go and, and read that spec. Okay. 3rd thing I wanted to say is, Mastodon itself, as I said, is a stateful rails implementation and not a small one and not a simple one. And, you know, I think there would be a real, steep learning curve to getting into, to making contributions there.
Speaker 2:And, and also, as I've said, I'm not crazy about the idea of rails as a supporting architecture for this. There's another implementation of essentially Mastodon of activity pub called Pluroma, which is implemented in the elixir, turns on the Erlang VM. And then there's a fork of that called accoma, which is the same only better in in some respects. And that strikes me as an immensely better, sort of programming platform model for building this kind of thing, which is all about shuffling messages around lots of them in parallel. Hey, Erlang.
Speaker 3:That's, you
Speaker 2:know, that's what Erlang is for, and it worked great. You know, WhatsApp runs on Erlang. RabbitMQ runs on Erlang. And Elixir is a really cool, cool, cool, ultra cool programming language. So if I were a bright, eager geek who wanted to maybe get in there and do something interesting, I would probably go start by looking at, at Pluroma.
Speaker 2:So there there's my my technology contribution to the
Speaker 1:Well, those are are great. And as you know, I I often tell people when they kind of it's easy for us to kinda look back at the past and to think like, boy, I wish I'd been alive then because it seems like stuff. And and as I always tell people, it's like the you know, that's that's happening all around you. You're living in a new golden age. You just it's for the things that are forward looking, and I think we're living in a new golden age of federated social.
Speaker 1:And, Tim, those are great recommendations for technologists to go check out. And, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna I'll hopefully, I'll be able to close the close the tab quickly, but I wanna go look at that. Adam, have you looked at the API, the MASON API?
Speaker 3:No. I haven't checked it out. I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna look at the tab where I'm looking at it right now.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, be careful.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's I think that's a great note to end on. Tim, thank you very much for joining us, for our inaugural post Twitter spaces space or whatever noun we end up using. This will be this is recorded, and it will become a, the Oxide Friends podcast. And folks, if we'll definitely leave the channels open here for a little bit if, if people have I'm gonna we're gonna leave the stage here, but, if people have thoughts for us on on how we're running this, we'd love to hear them, but thank you so much for all of you for, for joining us for our inaugural Discord, Oxide and Friends. It's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Oh, before you close, there is a huge body of traffic in the chat that's attached to this.
Speaker 1:Yes. I just Yeah. There's a lot.
Speaker 3:Yes. We've been keeping we've been keeping an eye out. People have been answering their questions, annotating with, some of the things we've been talking about. Yeah, we'll be keeping an eye on it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna keep leave that open for a little bit here. So if folks have got kind of parting questions, but, I think we'll we'll leave the stage. Adam, thanks for setting this up. Also, huge thanks to Steve Glabnick who's been who's been helping us out and educating us about what's a joystick versus a console versus whatever this icon is.
Speaker 3:And if you go to the welcome, channel, it gives instructions for how to subscribe your your calendar or whatever if you wanna pick these up. If, you know, if you're not following us on Mastodon or missed the notification, that's a good way to get notified of future ones.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Cool. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Tim.
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