Pieter WuilleDec 18, 2022

So... this seems like a good time to start experimenting with Mastodon.

I'm very skeptical about the chances of getting enough network effect to bootstrap a new social media site in general, and even more for distributed/decentralized/non-commercial ones.

Still, recent events on Twitter make me believe there is a chance, and I'd like to help make that happen.

Show threadMatt CoralloDec 18, 2022
@pwuille it’s definitely splintering communities - infosec Twitter is dead, people see substantially more engagement here. Russian war Twitter is still mostly there. Bitcoin Twitter is half-foot-in on nostr, crypto Twitter is on farcaster… :(
Show threadEthan HeilmanJan 11, 2023
@matt @pwuille There is less engagement here but also much less noise.
Show threadMatt Corallo
@ethan_heilman @pwuille Twitter is like all bots now. I have no idea if there’s any engagement because my mentions are flooded with garbage.
Jan 11, 2023 at 4:18pmWeb
Show threadEthan HeilmanJan 11, 2023

@matt @pwuille in terms of infosec and cryptography, 80% of the signal moved to mastodon and 100% of the noise stayed on Twitter. This did significant damage to the signal to noise ratio on Twitter.

Assume pre-Musk twitter has a 70 good tweets to 30 bot tweets ratio. Tweeter shows you 100 tweets per day and 70 of them are signal.

Assume post-Musk lost 80% of good users. So you see the same 30 bot tweets you would have seen before and 14 good tweets then twitter fills the missing space with bots tweets.

This triggers the content-exodus death spiral:
Bots get more eyeballs per tweet --> users leave platform
--> ratio of bots increase --> Bots get more eyeballs per tweet --> ...

Show threadMatt CoralloJan 11, 2023
@ethan_heilman @pwuille don’t forget that, on top of that, there’s way more bots than there used to be. But I also think we underestimate the amount of signal on mastodon. Lack of algorithmic timeline means there’s a ton of signal you miss cause you’re offline or it just got like’d not rt’d.