Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find his attitude pretty positive. You all act as if you would have know what twitter would become from the beginning and you would have done better, I've been in infinitesimally smaller projects with pressures that have nothing to do with building Twitter and still I thought like I was losing control of the direction the product was going.
It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes especially in big companies. A company is like a cthonic beast with many writhing tentacles that is in fact composed of thousands of cats. A black mass of cats, writhing, seeking, crawling toward anything that will increase its share price or get a cat promoted…
A CEO is just an employee, paid by the shareholders to do the job shareholders want him to do. Usually, the job is "get us rich". The CEO can do a lot of things regarding the company direction, but it has to match the shareholders goals.
Generally, if it doesn't make profit short term or long term, it is unacceptable, and here, Jack Dorsey essentially wants to kill Twitter as a company, so of course he can't do that. For the same reason I won't let the mechanic I hired to maintain my car destroy it instead just because he thinks my car is bad for the environment or something. He may be right, but it is not what I paid him for. And if I discover he actually destroyed my car, not only he won't get paid, but there are good chances I will sue him.
That is true, and underappreciated. But it is also worth noting that he tried to be CEO of two companies at once - so in a very objective way he obviously could have done more to improve twitter.
It’s not that hard. Dorsey was off being a Bitcoin evangelist and running Square (now Block) instead of focusing on Twitter. He’s a narcissist and egomaniac so of course his attitude is that this happened to him rather than the reality of this happened because of him.
I'm interpreting it otherwise because the conversation is superficial to the point of being meaningless. Akin to "hey I have an idea, why don't we make it better?" "That's a great idea, how do we make it better?" "Well let's improve some aspects" "Super interesting idea!"
So much so that knowing both of these people have seen how the sausage is made, makes me wonder if it wasn't a conversation that was entirely intended to end up on the internet.
My initial reaction was indeed very positive ( I take open protocol over corporate-owned fiefdom any day ). Then the obvious question came why this was released and how. Is it PR campaign ( Dorsey - and Musk especially - were being hit in press a lot lately ) and this is just one way to help their image?
I don't know. I would like to hope it is more than just image clean up.
For those scared of all the links, here's a simple summary from someone who runs a server with an instance of one of these applications.
* ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content
* The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to
* these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol
Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.
It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he really wants this? None of it makes sense to me and I wish he would speak more plainly on the matter.
The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.
He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.
He said earlier that he wants to do it differently.
Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be bob@example.social. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers.
Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity.
It is actually very easy to move your identity along with follows and followers from one Mastodon instance to another. I did it a couple times to finally land on my own instance I have running on a Raspberry PI.
Identity is always an issue in a decentralized systems. DNS can be used but not everybody owns a domain name. Ultimately if you want to keep your identity over a federated network you have to rely on an identity provider : Government issued, centralized platform that act as Id Provider (facebook, github, google, etc). I'm not aware of decentralized provider, maybe in a blockchain, there are a lot of writings on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...
I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me.
So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join.
Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
For someone invested in decentralized protocols, it just sounds like people trying to reinvent the wheel. "let’s make it decentralized" "wow, very cool idea".
Those guys are business guys but they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know the first bit about technical decentralization, about prior art, about the politics involved.
They are so close of realizing that their companies are Frankenstein monsters they don’t control anymore. They are so close of getting the whole idea that Stallman is trying to articulate for the late 40 years. But they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that.
God forbid someone learns business and has produced multiple successful businesses in some of the most forward looking, technical fields. That does not immediately disqualify their ability to know technical topics and if even may signal quite the opposite. This level of elitism often among the HN crowd creates an echo chamber that stifles innovation since it arbitrarily discriminates the dissemination & mixing of ideas that aren't fully "technical". These guys understand the concepts and can communicate with each other with that shared understanding and constructs. It's wild but that's how the top people within the field may chat, simply, efficient, and pointedly.
Considering Dorsey's active participation and evangelising on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, I expect that he will be working in that direction; building a messaging protocol based on the Lighting Network that allows users to upvote with satoshis. This monetises the user engagement and makes bots less feasible, aligning user incentives.
It's called the Media business model where we get the user to trade privacy for features and earn revenue on abusing privacy.
Given Apple's moves in the iOS app space and the way young people talk and behave; the next social media platform will be a low paid app that has full privacy and is non-ad revenue based and is centralized.
It will be some company that is super transparent but at the same time has figured out that one can provide paid services of value user of social media would pay for.
It might even be one of us that is reading this message that goes on to form such a social platform.
That's because he is the brains behind a lot of innovation. If you're looking for companies which had plenty of technical talent but no one of his calibre providing a coherent and technically sound vision, there's a whole graveyard of e.g. private space companies out there, and a hospice full of ones that will inevitably end up in the ground soon.
Crazy conspiracy theories, eh? People running those companies routinely talk to one another. When it seems they act together, it's often because they actually do act together.
I have to admit this is a bit surprising from Musk. I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. I note he's not agreeing strongly with Dorsey, with the strongest phrase being "I'd like to help if I can".
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?
>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
Well personally I don't believe that because I watched his ted talk and it didn't seem like he had spent more than a few minutes thinking through the specifics of what his implementation of free speech would mean.
It seems like a lot of people (Rogan, the Thiel guys, Calcanis) are coming to him talking about free speech, and he kind of nods along, but I didn't really see anything that demonstrated his own passion for the topic. He seems primarily motivated by a belief that Twitter is poorly run as a business, and that it will be difficult or impossible to turn it around as a public company.
Because this viewpoint isn’t consistent with his actions; he has a long history of retaliating against anyone who criticizes him, including attacking journalists and threatening them with lawsuits as well as firing employees who raise issues within his companies.
Because if that's his real motivation, it's more efficient to build a competitor. It would probably be even more efficient to put polish on existing competitors like Mastodon. Buying Twitter is one of the silliest possible approaches. Thus, skepticism.
It’s likely 99.9% of Twitter’s user base does not care about this issue. Would be hard to build a product that is compelling enough to overcome the extreme network effect of something that is arguably a utility.
network effects are overcome all the time. all the social networks are dying sooner or later. even facebook is panicking because they're losing the next generation and instagram is panically trying to emulate tiktok or whatever because they have _something_.
Even if you require ID, the internet will always feel less personal.
This started because of anonymity, but it could very well be embedded into the culture by now. Just because we feel that 'things on the internet do not count'. That is caused by anonymity; but also obscurity of your actions; the impersonal connection; the fact that you are communicating to the entire world; the fact that your interlocutor is someone you barely know, a lot of 'bad' digital communication is the first and last time two people are talking at each-other; and the fact that a lot of communication on the internet is largely performative because it is public.
In summary, removing anonymity alone will probably not get close to fixing things.
Anonymity is a design choice of HTTP. What if there were a different protocol where the users are never anonymous. You never have to transmit ID in that case because sockets are only established between trusted end points
Musk and his team put together a fundraising deck and were actively looking for investors. It was never vanity for Musk. The deck was pretty clear about what Musk thought Twitter could become.
It's so obvious that Musk was not really interested. The social balance was totally non-existent in this conversation. Musk's one line replies sound so generic. Seems like he wanted to keep the door open but Dorsey hadn't convinced him really yet. "I'd like to help if I can" is such a without obligation sentence. Then Jack replies with another well-designed text.
Have you listened to Elon speak? He’s not exactly gifted when it comes to conversational skills. His texts read pretty typical for someone more interested in working out details than wasting time on small talk.
What/who is Dorsey referring to when he says "Back when we had the activist come in" ? It's cute Musk thinks decentralised Twitter is a 'Super interesting idea' - come on, really? It's like two people discussing Blockchain when it first entered into the Zeitgeist a decade ago.
> Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists...
Or like most US presidents discovering the war on drugs is a scam and the military-industrial-entertainment complex is out of control only after they leave office...
I don't think that's old age. a young president could serve a single term, lose re-election and still be under 40. In their post-presidency they have the freedom of not pandering in order to be re-elected so they can speak freely. But this is independent of their age/mortality.
Remember, this was not intended to be public. You read this as a public statement when it's really just a leaked chat conversation. Your version might still be true, but this is not proof for it.
Agreed. He's milked this cow for a decade and now wants to pivot in to being one of the good guys (TM), and show us cool new things about decentralized computing, by ignoring all the projects out there 10 years in.
Readit News
Generally, if it doesn't make profit short term or long term, it is unacceptable, and here, Jack Dorsey essentially wants to kill Twitter as a company, so of course he can't do that. For the same reason I won't let the mechanic I hired to maintain my car destroy it instead just because he thinks my car is bad for the environment or something. He may be right, but it is not what I paid him for. And if I discover he actually destroyed my car, not only he won't get paid, but there are good chances I will sue him.
Dead Comment
That batch of messages in isolation are really promising.
I don't know. I would like to hope it is more than just image clean up.
Just look at Mastodon[4, 5] if you're looking for something like twitter without the centralization and the corporate greed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub [2] https://activitypub.rocks [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) [5] https://joinmastodon.org/servers
* ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content
* The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to
* these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol
Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.
https://pleroma.social
For those of us who haven't been following Mastodon closely, can you list some of these features?
(My own point of view is that in communication products, like in programming languages, creeping featuritis can be a symptom of poor overall design.)
Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity.
There is a github issue for this that is open for 5 years but not much has been done https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
It solves this problem of being tied to a domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)
I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me.
So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join.
Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
I find this very ironic.
Obviously a different approach is needed to replace Twitter. Mastodon is a dead end.
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Those guys are business guys but they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know the first bit about technical decentralization, about prior art, about the politics involved.
They are so close of realizing that their companies are Frankenstein monsters they don’t control anymore. They are so close of getting the whole idea that Stallman is trying to articulate for the late 40 years. But they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that.
Dorsey seems to have figured it out.
I mean, Twitter is an internet version of Post-It notes. I don’t even know what he means that it started out as a “protocol”.
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Dead Comment
Given Apple's moves in the iOS app space and the way young people talk and behave; the next social media platform will be a low paid app that has full privacy and is non-ad revenue based and is centralized.
It will be some company that is super transparent but at the same time has figured out that one can provide paid services of value user of social media would pay for.
It might even be one of us that is reading this message that goes on to form such a social platform.
I hope to build a competitive system as I think I know how to bring it together with a workable business model. When I have the time...
Musk: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program manager / MBA types of people
Agrawal: In our next convo- treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and lets see where we get to.
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Musk: I basically following your advice!
Dorsey: I know and I appreciate you. This is the right and only path. I’ll continue to do whatever it takes to make it work.
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Marc Benioff: Happy to talk about it if this is interesting: Twitter conversational OS- the townsquare for your digital life
Musk: Well I down own it yet
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Satya Nadella: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!
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Musk: Please send me anyone who actually writes good software
Steve Jurvetson: Ok, no management good coders, got it.
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
Yes, because bulletin board systems famously had no moderation whatsoever.
Wait...
Dead Comment
The internet was, is and always will be a cesspool. It comes with anonimity and plausible deniability.
This started because of anonymity, but it could very well be embedded into the culture by now. Just because we feel that 'things on the internet do not count'. That is caused by anonymity; but also obscurity of your actions; the impersonal connection; the fact that you are communicating to the entire world; the fact that your interlocutor is someone you barely know, a lot of 'bad' digital communication is the first and last time two people are talking at each-other; and the fact that a lot of communication on the internet is largely performative because it is public.
In summary, removing anonymity alone will probably not get close to fixing things.
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Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists...
You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better
Or like most US presidents discovering the war on drugs is a scam and the military-industrial-entertainment complex is out of control only after they leave office...
edit: I don't think these guys are good guys but people are able to change.
It's certainly a profound statement you make. But the world isn't entirely kind to the ones that start out as philanthropists either.
Dude is 45 and healthy - ageist much?