People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.

Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.

Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.

  • @PorkrollPosadist
    link
    44 years ago

    I will give Twitter some credit in the fact that running such a busy platform with international networks providing high availability, replication, mirroring, and caching is no simple feat from an engineering perspective. It is a bit more involved than spinning up a VPS with the latest version of Mastodon. On the other hand - yes - it is a very top-heavy operation with an inordinate amount of resources dedicated to developing and honing features which are harmful to the platform’s users, and marketing those anti-features to ad agencies, investors, and other malign actors.

    It turns out that message boards are nothing new. People have been setting them up for their own enjoyment since the dial-up / packet radio BBS era. Many of the technical challenges in running massive platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter only became problems because these companies sought to monopolize the entire Internet and consolidate hundreds of thousands of subcommunities into one platform. Many of these challenges can be avoided through decentralization. This also frees up resources to respond to the needs of the sub-community rather than attempting to standardize and commoditize all forms of communication under a universal model.