Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch

sexy_peach@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 155 points –
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone joins board of Mastodon's new US nonprofit | TechCrunch
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Biz Stone, who allowed Nazis to run rampant on Twitter, so he could monetize it and sell it to Elon Musk? That motherfucker? Man, Mastodon first selling out to META in a closed door non disclosure pow wow, now this. The Mastodon folks wanna get paid. Alas, and so it goes.........

Were Nazis allowed to deliberately ‘run rampant’ on Twitter pre-Elon? That’s a hot take.

Musk’s buying Twitter had nothing to do with it being ‘monetised’ as far as I see. Musk just offered such a stupidly large amount that the board had to say ‘OK, sure.’

They absolutely were, without question. That said, there's nothing this guy can do to make that happen on Mastodon instances he doesn't own.

Just a quick reminder that Twitter was banning 10s of thousands of accounts of extremists that breached its terms of service, including a certain ex president of the US. It was imperfect, but ‘running rampant’ is a stretch

It seems like we agree on the facts, and I certainly won't disagree that it's worse now, but I would characterize Twitter's (pre-Musk) response to extremism as "measured, lacking and lethargic", before I would use "imperfect", which still implies "pretty good" and from my perceptive it was not good enough to make me want to use it. I think maybe we just have a different tolerance for hate speech.

How many times did Trump show his true colors before getting banned? Twitter's moderation policies were better pre-Musk but they were far FAR from acceptable.

It's definitely true that Twitter consistently failed to raise the expected profit for stockholders, which is probably why they appreciated the wild overshot that Musk offered. I sort of appreciated that the company could stay so uncommercial for as long as it did, running only on hype.

Did Nazis use to "run rampant" on there before? Maybe not straight up, clear cut Nazis but there were some people who really dogwhistled in that direction going way back.

What do you mean by Mastodon selling out to Meta? Isn't Meta just building an ActivityPub based platform so we can talk to their users as far as I know. If they want to talk to us, then the onus is on Meta to stay compatible. If they aren't, then we just continue on as we have.

Please look up 'embrace, extend, extinguish' Meta should be met with open hostility in the fediverse. Mastodon losing nonprofit status in Germany, moving to the states and then appointing this guy leads me to think that mastodon has been compromised

Don't worry I've been quoted EEE enough times. I really don't think that is the direction this will go down. If Meta actually embraces it, then the whole of the fediverse grows over all. Then, if Meta does extend the ActivityPib protocol in a way the that becomes incompatible with the rest of the ecosystem, we just let them go and do their own thing. ActivityPub already has a userbase, if they join us, and then later on cause problems then everything just goes back to how it is right now. The final E can't realistically happen because the existing ecosystem will just carry on exactly as it is now. If people on Threads want to communicate with us, then they need to speak the same protocol. If they don't, then they don't get to participate.

Do you genuinely believe that the whole community of the fediverse would just lie down and accept breaking changes to the protocol without resistance? There are too many talented and passionate people invested in this ecosystem, the absolute worst case scenario is the protocol itself gets forked, and again the exist communities just carry on. There is no extinguish time line. Everyone points to how Meta handled XMPP, please compare the user bases of ActivityPub vs XMPP. The world has changed a lot since then. Another example I'd like to point out is Hashicorp's Terraform. They explicitly tried to EEE, and the moment they attempted the final E, it was instantly forked, and the open licensed fork was adopted into the Linux Foundation and the ecosystem carried on.

Take that what you will, but I am reasonably convinced ActivityPub has enough support and community that any EEE attempt will inevitably fail. The front ends will change, the hosters will come and go, the open standard is here to stay.

The whole community won't lie down, but a lot of the visible members will spread their legs. This is the nazi at the table situation, and for a project that was supposedly created to get away from the toxic model of facebook and twitter this is something like a parody. The only people who get something out if this are the people who are not us. Now maybe you are right, maybe the community will prevail. It's just that it doesn't have to shoot its own feet every two minutes in the dumbest fucking way possible

That's sorta the curse of an open protocol is that anyone, even your enemies, can use them. I am no fan of Meta. I am a big fan of open standards, monkey's paw and all. It is not a case of tolerating the intolerant. To restrict Meta out of using ActivityPub is against the spirit of open standards. The protocol is no longer open, and THEN we really have something to worry about.

Sure, but I would make an exception for meta because they are genocide enablers. Even if that's too much I don't understand people who keep saying it's all fine, it's great even.

OK, but did you read the comment you were replying to?

You're correct. ActivityPub is an open protocol and Meta, or more importantly anyone else, can use it however they want.

I view the bigger issue as Meta is hostile towards humanity's privacy and freedom, and Mastodon leadership view Meta joining the Fediverse as an unqualified win. Meanwhile, I don't think Meta is interested in ActivityPub as a protocol to make Instagram Threads more appealing, I think they're overall much more interested in what data the can gain, and sell, analyzing the interactions between their own user pool and the rest of the fediverse that user pool interacts with.