Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better
- Reference: 1668418210
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/11/14/opinion_column_twitter/
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But within weeks of his shotgun wedding to Twitter, Musk has alienated advertisers by yelling at them, blown up verification, [1]shilled NFTs on the platform, [2]sacked thousands , seemingly at random if you judge by reports they were asked back, and [3]banned people he doesn't like in the name of free speech.
Did you know Twitter has an open-source arm? This is what it's been up to [4]READ MORE
That was just for starters. Last Thursday, we learned that his chief compliance and regulatory officer [5]quit , as Musk has indicated he intends to ignore the law however he wishes to make money out of his users, with internal lawyers recommending staff to self-certify as compliant with regulators and register as whistleblowers.
Whether Twitter [6]exists , and what it might look like, by next Thursday is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t really matter. By taking on many billions in debt to fund the purchase, Musk has guaranteed that the company will fold, with any conceivable revenues being swallowed up by repayments and interest. The future is written in stone and ends in dust.
This unparalleled act of destruction of value and brand of both Twitter and Musk himself is both horror show and high farce. It would be so were Twitter a music service or an infrastructure provider. It is, however, so much more. The social media platform has become intrinsic to politics and media in many countries, and an indispensable tool to many professions, creative communities, and minorities. There isn’t one Twitter, there are thousands, with users finding their own mix of professional, personal and political circles. As a space for discovering, filtering and acting on news, and communicating between and within hierarchies, it is unparalleled. Now, it is doomed.
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As a result of Twitter’s civic importance and vulnerability to toxic capitalism, the question of lifeboats and where to steer them is paramount. In Germany, the data regulator has already advised state and public bodies to move their social media activities to open platforms, with many already starting up their own [8]Mastodon instances . Many communities and individuals have made the same move. Can it work? If Twitter never really made money despite its huge resources and focus, do open platforms have any chance?
Making a FOSS of social media
The parallels with FOSS are many and obvious: open standards, community agreement and donation of skills and resources to build value for all. Yet at first sight, the economics of open platforms and open source seem entirely different, in a way that makes life very hard for the platforms.
A FOSS project needs an upfront investment in designing, making and testing software, but then only intermittent attention and expense. An open social media platform needs to be running 24/7, actively supporting many millions of users and burning fat wads of dollars in constant operational expense. It’s possible to run a library through volunteers and donations – but try operating a 24-hour national news TV station on that basis.
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Yet the actual difference between open platforms and software isn’t one of intrinsic form. Both involve creating, curating and distributing human focused data. The difference is latency. A FOSS package still needs to be distributed widely via servers and networks that cost money, and it needs ongoing attention for security and updating throughout its life: the economics of these are viable because almost none of it has to happen instantly, and storage, connectivity and human attention are much, much cheaper when very high latency is acceptable.
The low latency of social media platforms needs fast storage, compute and connectivity, and paid staff on call at all times. Crucially, the first three need to be rapidly scalable – the most expensive combination in infrastructure you can find.
[11]Free enterprise systems management tool Uyuni releases stable version
[12]Quill users advised to export chat history before servers turned off for Twitter buyout
[13]Slack-for-engineers Mattermost on open source and data sovereignty
[14]Some FOSS gems: Franz, RamBox, Pidgin and more
Mastodon is the flagship of federated social media, the smartest compromise so far between the needs of open platforms and their viability. The "fediverse" expects instances, small local pools of low latency, where communities who talk to each other a lot can live, with slower, sparser links between instances on a per-user follower, search or timeline basis. Scaling happens when users start their own instances.
It sounds like, and is, a classic hierarchy of expensive fast local to cheap slow distant resources. It is elegant. It's also a terrible fit for real humans, used to multiple overlapping communities and unsure why they have to pick one above all. “It doesn’t matter, they’re federated” is the reply - so if it doesn’t matter, why make it compulsory?
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The federation also breaks when lots of new users pick the same instance, and centralized security, policy, and moderation is hard to agree on, let alone implement... Instances can vanish by fate or whim. All these erode the user experience and thus trust, the sine qua non of social media. As Musk is currently and oh so expensively demonstrating.
There is a halfway house between capitalism and communitarianism, and it’s called the state. The allocation of resources to the public good in a regulated but liberal environment has made FOSS work, but the same ideas have produced such things as the BBC, which has survived a hundred years of attacks from all sides and its own incompetence, by inculcating trust.
The German state is paying for Mastodon instances as a social good, and there’s no reason that has to be limited to state entities. We pay for small theatre companies, artists and galleries; why not for social media people and places?
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If social media can become so thoroughly intertwined with the workings of civil society as Twitter has, and be the most efficient way to communicate amongst people and organisations, then it has earned its right to exist as part of the fabric of society, and not as a billionaire’s chew toy or an arm of autocratic propaganda.
Federated, open platform social media works. With the right technical, social and practical resources, it can be designed to be that bit more human, and be as scalable as any properly planned infrastructure. Latency just low enough to work well needs proper planning, but that can be part of the support. It can have the judicious mix of regulation and freedoms that create and promote trust. It can move social media back into society, where it belongs. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/10/official_twitter_musk_payment/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/twitter_warn_act_lawsuit/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/07/parody_twitter_accounts/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/05/bluesky_update/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/10/twitter_ciso_quits/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/musk_brands
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y3IfzM0IAyEyYxhyQibFNQAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.reuters.com/technology/mastodon-what-is-social-network-hailed-twitter-alternative-2022-11-07/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y3IfzM0IAyEyYxhyQibFNQAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y3IfzM0IAyEyYxhyQibFNQAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/new_stable_version_of_uyuni/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/08/twitter_acquires_quill/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/26/mattermost/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/19/friday_foss_fest/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y3IfzM0IAyEyYxhyQibFNQAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y3IfzM0IAyEyYxhyQibFNQAAAEM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I assume you mean suppressed and not surpassed?
Interesting because depending on which news story they suppressed you'll get large amounts of thumbs ups, or thumbs downs.
Me? I don't think they should be suppressing any news stories, unless they have credible evidence that it's misinformation. And even then I'm not so sure, because I think once people see misinformation enough times, they start to distrust the outlets that are peddling it.
If only that were true.
There is a large swath or US Republicans who still believe that Biden stole the election.
That fact that over 200 legal challenges from Repulicans were all lost is no matter to them.
Let's face it : the Republicans are no longer a political party, they're a religion.
With the NHS and Social Care about to crash through the floor, the UK Goverment would be torn to pieces trying to invest in something to compete with corporate social media
Even if they did invest initially, how long before the funds were cut to the point where security was compromised, and millions who trusted a government run social network got pwned - can you imagine the fallout?
And yes, the BBC has lasted until now, but it won't for much longer under its current funding model
For sure, corporate social media is about as far from perfect as things get, and for sure, there will be some die-hard Mastodon/Fediverse followers for years to come, but like it or not, for the vast majority, corporate social media is where its at - exactly the same as the age-old arguments re Windows vs Linux - (although let's not go there on this thread :) )
If I were Jeff Bezos,...
.... and you know, owned an outfit that could provide compute resources for Mastodon, ... I'd provide compute resources for Mastodon and make sure it was resilient, and see what happened. It would be a perfect snipe.
Mastadon sounds good for my use-case. I use Twitter to get information fed to me about train services and sports. So, if I've understood Mastadon, this would work OK for folk like me; the train company could set up its own federation, I'd join it and the information about late and cancelled trains would still get to me. It might need more work on the part of the train company to set up an manage, but it ought to work.
I guess that the problem is where the money comes from. I expect that the money which Twitter did make came more from the contentious, argumentative and nuttier bits of the Tweetosphere, rather than people wanting to know the footy score.
Not quite how it needs to work - Train company and you just need accounts on one or more servers - neither need to run a server - though if say, all utilities funded a server that would be helpful. Or a big sports club could do the same. Could easily see the UK Uni's clubbing together to run one for Uni Staff for example.
Mastodon more akin to a Twitter multiverse?
Twitter's civic importance
As a result of Twitter’s civic importance
In my opinion it was a mistake for all those organizations depending on communication to ever allow Twitter to take control of it (but that is where a lot of users were).
It is not acceptable to be forced to use twitter and follow public bodies tweets to get official information in a timely manner, neither is it to get customer services provided by a company.
Fortunately Twitter is not that important if the organizations can just switch to other channels like Mastodon.
A the same time they can take back control of their communication channels if they host their own servers.
Mastodon is a bit of a freak show for the uninitiated. But then Twitter was always thus.
It always made me wonder what those 7.5k people at Twitter did though. For comparison (mostly according to WP), Discord apparently serves ~50% of Twitter's traffic to ~50% of its active users from just 30 colos with 600 total staff. Were there just a lot of hangers on at Twitter or was it just really inefficient?
Jack Dorsey openly admitted as such; he let the company grow too fast. Meaning, it took on far more staff than the current or projected growth required, making it a no-brainer for a new owner to axe the hangers-on.
The problem isn't the redundancies, it's the unfiltered nature of the redundancies.
A good brief
About the economics of open platforms. I was pretty much told I was an idiot by my lecturer when doing project management at uni, for trying to run an open platform without having worked out how to sustain it. He was absolutely right, as I found out there years later at my own cost.
As for Mastodon: it's the current hype among certain types ("social justice warriors", whatever that is, far right types, and of course porn purveyors).
I took a look at it last time there was a press fueled moral panic about social media silos (which are of course a problem). A few people sign up at that point, they complain for a while about whichever platform they just "left", and then they just disappear. There is no real content of interest to professionals or even the general public for that matter.
That is of course a "critical mass" issue, but the other problem with Mastodon and associates is its terrible scalability. It's super resource hungry, a pain in the arse to set up properly, and the underlying protocol, called activity pub is, IMO, way too chatty and inefficient.
The really sad thing is, we had NNTP, which worked fairly well and piggybacked on existing infrastructure (email). I'm sure that given a quick refresh it would do a *much* better job than mastodon in terms of resources usage and the general economics of it.
"It is, however, so much more."
Is it really - or was just people who didn't understand the issues at stake that made it so?
Relying on a single private platform for public announcements was plain idiocy from the beginning. It is true that many non-tech people are making the same mistake over and over - i.e. Whatsapp for messaging, and grandstanding people like big stages.
Journous were part of the problem too - because of course was much easier to follow a single news stream instead of having to look for them from different sources - risking to miss some - but hey, that's plain laziness, and the emperor's new clothes are now shown for what they are.
If (or when, probably) Twitter tumbles and falls will be a good lesson - unless now someone advocates it is "too big to fail" and thereby forces some kind of bailout.
But freedom of speech is not protected by having a single private Moloch forced to publish whatever it is fed - until it becomes called MiniTrue- it's stimulating the presence of more news feeds.
But this have nothing to do with FOSS - it's just about messaging/data exchange standards if we really need to get news feed the same way from different sources. The fact that software serving them is proprietary or not really doesn't matter. And the more FOSS you dream, the more it will be controlled by some another huge Moloch making money in a different sector and using FOSS as a weapon to keep on making those money - there are no free lunches - remember it.
"banned people he doesn't like"
Twitter has been doing that openly for about 3 years now, but I never heard many people in the media make a fuss about it until it was Musk doing the banning. I mean, it was happening ALL THE TIME to people who said things that went against the mainstream narrative, same thing on FB, LinkedIN, YouTube, etc.
I hate to defend the man, as I think he's a total wanker and was just in the right place at the right time (Paypal) and he's got a really nasty steak (pedo guy), however it would be nice to see a little BALANCE in the reporting. Why do you (all the media pretty much*) ignore the banning of accounts by Big Tech, except when it's Elon doing that banning (and really he's only banning parody accounts, to deter them from abusing the blue tick scheme).
*apart from a few.
The time for regulation was before Twitter surpassed a legitimate news story that would have been harmful to their preferred election candidate, preventing real journalists from a real newspaper from tweeting about what we now know to be a true story.