I'm kind of shocked that Bezos hasn't commissioned an ActivityPub/federated network (mastodon instance) that obfuscates the decentralization (for easier onboarding) and gives you some kind of "deal" for having Amazon Prime.
Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).
I think the reason so few are getting into the thing is that Twitter never showed the concept to be a particularly profitable business in the first place, and it couldn't seem to grow beyond a certain small size (in comparison to other networks).
So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?
I definitely agree that Twitter, as a proof of its concept, failed pretty spectacularly. But I also feel like that was due to a confusion of focus at the company, realized as a desire to be an ad-supported platform that championed a libertarian ideal of 'free speech'. That dissonance hurt them a lot, to my mind.
Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.
I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.
But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug
I think there are tons of brands that could launch a Twitter clone right now while the dumpster fire is hot. My guess is that nobody wants to run a social media site these days… not even Elon Musk.
Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.
Content moderation is a hard, stressful, thankless job. Having built several moderation tools for large sites (large for back in the day), I for one am enjoying the debacle that is Elon and a cadre of Yes Men thinking they would waltz in with no experience and shake it all up with no consequences.
I have no experience with content moderation but thought that the bureaucracy Twitter had in place was really a response to genuine market imperatives. I mean, remember the site was a leading recruitment site for foreign Isis fighters, to give an extreme example. The Elonites and the resurfaced 4chan types have this picture of faceless ‘woke’ elites who came from nowhere but the general elite miasma —- and sensibly cast aside by free speech Musk. But in fact it was a gruesome business and technical problem; in the end it will only end up being reproduced.
That's like saying "Postfix isn't scalable like Gmail", comparing two completely different things. and in fact the fediverse is far more scalable than any single service like Twitter can be.
The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).
One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.
So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.
Not necessarily a single big instance. Just one big implementation; that may use multiple instances under the hood. The centralization of Amazon allows it to polish up some kind of "portal" without worrying about the traffic concerns, and then use that to let users connect to internal instances, seamlessly, and external instances in common federated ways.
I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.
Reminder that with Mastodon, more than with other services, you have to know and trust the server operator to respect your privacy and also to not act arbitrarily if you have a different political stance on an issue than they.
It's significantly easier to find who is responsible, and to sue them or arrest them. You can certainly afford to sue them more than a $20B company.
In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.
Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.
Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).