It sometimes feels as if the medical and scientific knowledge of people who are hardline against animal testing at all is exactly that and only that thinking, yes.

Always test in production!

Extra environments cost money. Testers cost money. Users pay to use your software and test it for free!

If tiktok is sa social media platform, then so is youtube/

Sure, but as you cannot know the future, it’s a bit tricky to pick a successor you want to support based on that, instead of absolutely right-now-essential things such as “Where people actually are”.

It’s also important to keep in mind how long Twitter’s run was: It was originally founded 18 years ago. I’d be okay if every 10-15 years I have to get a new Twitter, tbh. I buy a new phone every 4-5 years, a new car every 15-20, I’m alright. It’s cheap to go onto a new Twitter, I’m far less resistant to change with that.

That is to say: Sure, maaaybe (again, can’t truly know) Mastodon is superior on a technical level. But not only is that absolutely not how social media operates, and second it really doesn’t matter if a sucessor also goes down in 10+ years. People won’t be able to care any less if a successor lasts that long, and considering how quickly Mastodon has turned into a semi-ghost-town once Bluesky got big, I kinda know what I’d put my money onto.

Of course all of this ignores a central problem with the entire category of services: They don’t conduct conversations well, even stuff like Misskey or Mastodon.

I mean, as long as Twitter goes down, who exactly gets to do the killing blow among all the individual blows doesn’t truly matter now, does it?

That the guy making the table is pulling things out of their arse, basically.

I mean hyperloop is just “train, but bad”. No clue what people ever saw in that “tech”.

I don’t want to follow random people though? Twitter was useful as a way to follow specific companies and people to know when say, a service goes down or an update is released.

These people and companies aren’t on Mastodon.

But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they’re followed by decline. That’s not a recipe for sustainability.

You mean after a surge there’s less active users than before?

There’s just not many people on there. And I already never used Twitter except to read in-time updates from people and companies, so naturally with many of them being on Threads or Bluesky, that’s where I’d go to get that information.

I mean it’s just normal to have a “social” part to social media, no?

From a privacy perspective it’d be annoying if the default weren’t one-identity-per-website, though. That’s how it ought to work. If the user then wants to instead use a single one (akin to how OAuth logins allow you to use a single identity for auth purposes) that’s on them, but it should not work that way without explicit enabling.

Yeah I was going to say, is there a tool for keeping multiple of these pods around so I can use different identities for (some) different sites?

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Yeah it’s a weird internal problem. It has to exist for understandable reasons, but also naturally makes it so that nobody will want to join any but the very largest instance, automatically centralizing it all again.

In fact, the very reality of there being a three hour video of someone talking (as in, in written text this’d be a maximum of 10 minutes of reading, for a slow reader) about a supposed onboarding problem with the fediverse is irony at its finest.

Yeah… sure… if you always expand 10 minutes of content into 180 minutes using a wrong format, you might fuck up getting anybody to do anything. You seem to not want them to get what you’re trying to teach, maybe.

No but you bring up a good example: You don’t get your sub for donating money to Subway. You have to pay them to get it. But in return, it provides a - questionable, some would say - service to you by providing you with food.

But recently, they’ve started putting some of their articles behind a paywall. Since I was already donating, I automatically have access.

In that case I don’t see a problem. In a lot of ways your donation became a subscription, but then again, news cost money to make. This was true during the print days, and is no less true during the digital age.

There’s the compounding issue that something that seems simple on the surface, say, pairing a pair of bluetooth headphones, is a convoluted mess of super-complicated shit on a technical level.

And to even handle that, the engineer making the app that handles these does not know about how to sync an L and an R headpiece. And the person who knows about that does not know how to establish contact via bluetooth. Etc. It’s layers upon layers upon layers of tricky technical stuff. Each of which has the ability to propagate buggy behavior both up and down the layers. And each engineer probably cannot easily fix the other layers (they’re not theirs), so they work around the bugs. Over time this adds an insane amount of complexity to the code as hundreds of these tiny adjustments are spread everywhere.

Ah, sorry if that wasn’t clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.

A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.

I mentioned that basically because I feel that’s a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, not my primary language.

Oooh, I did not know that. TYVM!