back to indexThe Utopian Alternative To Twitter?
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro
2:36 Cal revisits his 2019 New Yorker article
5:35 Mini-Twitter
10:30 Twitter replacement
00:00:03.060 |
- All right, well, let's go on to our deep dive. 00:00:05.420 |
I'm calling this one a world without Twitter. 00:00:13.260 |
of checking in this week on media coverage of Twitter, 00:00:18.260 |
Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, what's going on there. 00:00:25.040 |
I kind of want those 30 minutes of my life back. 00:00:27.540 |
Here's what I noticed in my cursory examination 00:00:50.160 |
is just everyone lining up to take their shot 00:00:56.100 |
So there's a pinata hanging, a proverbial pinata hanging, 00:01:00.300 |
and there's a full consensus that this is a bad pinata 00:01:06.140 |
So I don't know where you buy your pinatas from, 00:01:09.060 |
And everyone's just lining up to take their take. 00:01:14.740 |
as if this consensus of he is bad guy number one 00:01:32.980 |
So it's this weird sort of incestual circularity going on 00:01:37.420 |
where all these reporters are obsessed with Twitter, 00:01:41.060 |
that obsession with Twitter is fueling their takedown 00:01:44.080 |
of Twitter on which they're seeing what the reaction is 00:01:46.820 |
to their takedown of Twitter, all of it's all mixed up, 00:01:59.700 |
is will we see a viable alternative to Twitter emerge? 00:02:04.240 |
And in particular, there's a strain of conversation 00:02:08.300 |
will the potential fall of Twitter lead to the rise 00:02:13.300 |
of one of the independent social media alternatives? 00:02:17.920 |
So these independent social media alternatives 00:02:24.320 |
Now, I don't wanna act as if I'm ahead of all trends, 00:02:27.620 |
but I do wanna point towards an article I wrote 00:02:38.880 |
This was actually my first article I ever wrote 00:02:51.740 |
So the point of this article was to look at this subset 00:02:55.580 |
of the social media universe which had been overlooked, 00:03:00.500 |
small, often open-source social media alternatives. 00:03:04.540 |
At the time, there wasn't much discussion of these. 00:03:08.040 |
And in particular, in the last new cycle or two, 00:03:13.020 |
on one particular independent social media service 00:03:20.400 |
to show you that Mastodon is something I mentioned about. 00:03:28.760 |
"between centralized and decentralized social media." 00:03:44.520 |
more independent alternative to what Twitter was doing? 00:03:56.380 |
And then I'll return to what I wrote in this article, 00:03:58.340 |
and we'll see how my conclusions from back then 00:04:29.420 |
that, hey, this code comes from the Mastodon project. 00:04:40.520 |
they essentially just stole all the code from Mastodon 00:04:48.580 |
Anyways, so anyone can download the software, 00:04:51.540 |
So Jesse and I could put a computer here in the studio, 00:05:03.840 |
and what the server implements is something like Twitter. 00:05:07.080 |
You can post things on the server, up to 500 characters, 00:05:11.260 |
and you can see what other people have posted 00:05:23.480 |
It has a similar follower dynamic to Twitter as well, 00:05:26.760 |
"Well, here are the people I wanna actually follow, 00:05:32.200 |
"I don't wanna know about that person," et cetera. 00:05:41.400 |
Typically, the way these servers are supported 00:05:45.320 |
I mean, it's not super expensive to run one of these servers 00:05:50.880 |
So that's a nice benefit from those who are concerned 00:06:01.320 |
"Hey, users on my server, can you chip in some money?" 00:06:17.920 |
and there's whatever, 100 users who use this server 00:06:23.640 |
You can follow people on other servers as well. 00:06:32.720 |
who you find to be more interesting than Jesse and I, 00:06:37.600 |
"You know, I kinda like the Cal and Jesse server. 00:06:42.140 |
"Not so sure that I only wanna hear what they have to say." 00:06:45.960 |
But someone else we like is on another Mastodon server. 00:06:50.680 |
And this protocol, what it will do is basically 00:06:53.000 |
your server will then talk to that other server and say, 00:07:00.440 |
And so now I can see posts from other servers 00:07:11.900 |
So I can see what people post on other servers 00:07:14.480 |
if I choose to follow them and send a request. 00:07:23.820 |
So traditionally, each individual Mastodon server, 00:07:26.760 |
which are called instances in Mastodon speak, 00:07:44.280 |
We get these very specific community standards 00:07:47.860 |
As it's become clear in the recent news cycles, 00:07:50.800 |
it also has very powerful banning type features. 00:08:05.280 |
and I don't like this rival Harry Potter server, 00:08:13.360 |
is allowed to follow anyone from that server. 00:08:16.720 |
No one on my server can follow this particular individual. 00:08:24.520 |
but who the people on their server can actually follow 00:08:30.360 |
All right, so that's basically how Mastodon works. 00:08:34.760 |
So it is Twitter, but it has its own thing going on. 00:09:06.040 |
and the one found on existing social networks 00:09:19.040 |
Very specific niche communities, very specific rules, 00:09:44.720 |
about quirky things with other quirky people. 00:09:48.240 |
Recently, when I logged into the Mastodon instance, 00:09:56.560 |
I found a photo of someone's blooming spider plant 00:09:58.840 |
next to a conversation about the consequences 00:10:00.760 |
of ethical transparency and hierarchical systems. 00:10:07.800 |
So that's what Mastodon looked like to me in 2019. 00:10:13.760 |
The following between servers didn't seem widespread. 00:10:39.880 |
some sort of a utopian alternative to Twitter? 00:10:43.080 |
Can these good vibes I picked up in 2019 scale 00:11:02.380 |
and as I've talked about before on this show, 00:11:08.440 |
because it is a finely tuned engagement machine. 00:11:15.560 |
but at the core of Twitter's success is three elements. 00:11:21.820 |
that includes many potentially interesting people 00:11:43.220 |
So you have comedians, you have expert commentators, 00:11:53.960 |
Number two, Twitter has this massive social graph 00:11:56.780 |
where all of these people have painstakingly defined 00:12:00.320 |
these one-on-one dyadic follower connections. 00:12:03.620 |
This creates this densely connected social graph 00:12:13.440 |
I just, all these subtle things I know about you 00:12:21.120 |
and they come together to give you this sort of emergent, 00:12:31.240 |
Then you have the cumulative impact of 237 million users 00:12:34.720 |
clicking retweet in this complex social graph. 00:12:39.800 |
filtering function where stuff that's engaging 00:12:43.940 |
As a result, if you click that Twitter app on your phone, 00:12:49.760 |
its ability to show you thing after thing after thing 00:12:55.540 |
that you could lose hours into, is almost unparalleled. 00:13:09.440 |
They've replaced this human centric distributed curation 00:13:28.600 |
almost everything I see scrolling on this app 00:13:35.980 |
It doesn't have enough critical mass of interesting people. 00:13:38.960 |
It doesn't have this existing deep complex follower, 00:13:49.600 |
there's a few choices that they've made specifically. 00:13:52.080 |
And by they, there's an actual founder, Eugene Rochko. 00:14:04.320 |
It's difficult to spread other people's things. 00:14:12.300 |
You have all this dynamic of very niche content moderation 00:14:15.520 |
and banning back and forth between different people. 00:14:19.520 |
You don't have the core of interesting people. 00:14:21.360 |
So what you don't get on Mastodon is that experience. 00:14:30.000 |
which I think is true of the experience today, 00:14:31.600 |
is you enter a conversation with a community. 00:14:34.160 |
Most of the stuff you see is not that interesting. 00:14:36.500 |
It's more about going back and forth with people 00:14:54.120 |
No one is gonna fall down a Mastodon rabbit hole 00:15:01.360 |
it's actually kinda hard to spend a lot of time on Mastodon. 00:15:04.300 |
It's like a Usenet news group in the early days. 00:15:22.720 |
I don't think we need a replacement for Twitter. 00:15:25.940 |
There is a great danger in taking essentially 00:15:33.320 |
and putting them all together on a homogenized interface. 00:15:37.020 |
Everyone has easy access, the exact same accounts, 00:15:42.280 |
the network of connections through which information 00:15:44.640 |
is being amplified, the curation is happening 00:15:46.780 |
on the scale of hundreds of millions of users. 00:15:54.700 |
It does not play well with the human social brain. 00:15:57.500 |
It create, the virality dynamics create these, 00:16:08.540 |
but Twitter over the last three or four years 00:16:13.840 |
It's more about watching gladiators from your tribe 00:16:17.060 |
do battles from gladiators from the other tribe, 00:16:19.340 |
reveling in the outrage when someone from your tribe 00:16:22.060 |
is being unfairly speared with the proverbial trident 00:16:26.020 |
and the people commenting on how unfair this is, 00:16:27.920 |
celebrating when your team gets someone from the other team. 00:16:35.320 |
It's spectacle, it's a spectacle of the elites, 00:16:46.000 |
Journalists like it because it helps them find 00:16:52.020 |
because the side effect of you all using the same platform 00:16:58.480 |
what is our particular tribe in the world of media 00:17:09.440 |
It all just breaks, balkanizes into three viewpoints 00:17:13.100 |
So I don't care if it's harder for you to find news. 00:17:16.620 |
Yeah, it can help you connect with interesting people. 00:17:19.080 |
There's other ways to connect with interesting people 00:17:21.000 |
that aren't gonna put your blood pressure through the roof. 00:17:24.420 |
That's not gonna give you a low grade anxiety disorder 00:17:32.500 |
If affinity groups are related to things you care about, 00:17:36.880 |
you can build really interesting relationships there. 00:17:39.060 |
It's a small scale, it's a human style scale, 00:17:44.200 |
That's brilliant social internet possibility at work 00:18:09.620 |
So I don't think Mastodon could replace Twitter, 00:18:11.560 |
but I don't think we need anything to replace Twitter. 00:18:31.700 |
But then I conclude, despite its advantages, however, 00:18:35.280 |
I suspect that the Indie web will not succeed 00:18:55.880 |
Remove the addiction and you might lose the users. 00:19:02.260 |
Those existing giants were fantastically effective 00:19:25.540 |
the role that their smartphones play in their lives. 00:19:39.120 |
some people who are into social internet stuff 00:19:41.560 |
can find actually healthier, more community-driven, 00:19:47.320 |
online communities, and I'm glad those exist. 00:19:52.080 |
I'm not gonna sign up for a Mastodon instance, 00:19:56.080 |
to hear the birds again and see the sunshine. 00:20:03.900 |
No, we're not gonna see an obvious replacement 00:20:06.080 |
for Twitter, and I don't care that that might end up 00:20:27.900 |
Putting those aside, it's an engagement engine 00:20:37.840 |
or have too much self-respect to be on TikTok, 00:20:39.800 |
it's the next most addictive thing to have, right? 00:20:43.880 |
especially if you're a well-educated, upper-middle class, 00:21:02.120 |
And a lot of them relied on first mover advantages. 00:21:05.680 |
237 million users that include all these interesting people, 00:21:19.640 |
like the tech crashes and he says enough of it, 00:21:26.600 |
- Yeah, his debt service on his Twitter acquisition 00:21:39.320 |
and it's something I talked about a while ago, 00:21:48.540 |
a couple of billion dollars a year in revenue, 00:21:50.760 |
pretty sleekly with really high profit margins, 00:21:56.320 |
So once you lose that ambition that Facebook has 00:22:02.920 |
which was their ambition before the wheels fell off. 00:22:06.000 |
"We don't have to be a trillion dollar competitor to Apple." 00:22:09.180 |
Once it's, "Hey, this thing generates 2.5 billion a year 00:22:20.920 |
and it makes good profit for the people who own it." 00:22:32.320 |
It's hard to tell because everything's so negative 00:22:34.440 |
I mean, if he's literally losing his grip mentally, 00:22:42.040 |
I don't think it's that hard to make this a sleek, 00:22:54.200 |
and generates like a reasonable amount of money