Ted UnderwoodMy main anxiety about Mastodon right now is that the private-sector AI world is poorly represented here. Over time that could lead to ideological sorting that would make this space less appealing for ML-positive folks like myself. But idk, I’ll give it time. Twitter’s decline may play out over years rather than months.
Otoh I’m not sure anyone is ML-positive enough to tolerate the endless series of engagement-baiting listicles about GPT-4 on Twitter right now.
Nicholas Guttenberg@TedUnderwood ML positive doesn't have to mean ML company PR positive...
@nichg I think a huge portion of it is driven less by the big companies than by people shilling a start-up or trying to make money as YouTube thinkfluencers
@TedUnderwood Big companies, small companies, either way... the culture of trying to make money off of a thing and the culture surrounding the thing itself can be vastly different.
Ben Grosser@TedUnderwood with that so well represented on twitter i appreciate that mastodon has a different feel (though don’t underestimate EM’s potential to drive many more communities away). but i do understand if a site trends away from your own angle … ever since beeple’s $69M sale, my twitter community has been invaded by NFT evangelists and converts that bifurcated much of the digital art discourse.
@bengrosser yeah, I mean Twitter definitely does dramatize the dangers of the other side: “How I save 6 hours every day using #ChatGPT to make to-do lists and you can too 🧵”
@TedUnderwood it def has that
@TedUnderwood to be more clear, i didn’t mean i appreciate mastodon being different on AI specifically, just in general that it’s not a dupe of twitter conversation
Pamela K Gilbert@TedUnderwood do you think so? I figured it would either collapse or stabilize in a new normal in a matter of months?
@PamelaKGilbert I can see it being really slow. Lock-in means inertia is strong. But the company is losing money. So they do lots of little cheesy monetizing things—cutting out third party clients, etc. None fatal. Maybe Musk gets bored enough to resell it? Brand identity could really stink a year from now, but it’s still 10x the size of Fediverse. Meanwhile, our growth could be contingent on platform changes that take lots of time.
@PamelaKGilbert One good sign is that the fraction of disparaging posts about Mastodon on Twitter is now roughly equal to the fraction of ones about “the bird site” here—and we also no longer feel compelled to call it the bird site.