stormbrew

17.577 million hectares have burned so far this year. If 2023 were on that graph it would be a skyscraper towering over every big fire year in the 80s and 90s.

This year is unprecedented. And it isn't even over yet and the fires are still burning.

I think that's true, though I also think the fediverse (but not necessarily Mastodon specifically) will outlive threads.

But I think the really big question will be: in 3-6 months is meta putting out DAU and/or MAU numbers for threads separate from Instagram's?

Until then you can only guess how "big" it really is. I don't personally find the numbers so far all that impressive: it's a sub-10% conversion rate from insta daily active users and I think behind the celebratory face they're putting forward that might not be what they were hoping for.

But mostly I see this trend everywhere where people give a lot of latitude to things like threads and Twitter and then give the most pessimistic read of the state of Mastodon.

If Mastodon were a startup and "centralized" its growth, bumpy as it is, would be the darling of the tech press. This is really obvious because every article about the fall of Twitter lists at least one and often several networks that have worse numbers and worse growth than Mastodon as if they're the next big thing.

Though maybe that'll change now that threads has bought its first 100m users.

The Mastodon corner of the fediverse is also ridiculously more well run and diverse than xmpp outside the big players ever was.

Like, when threads joins it's far far more likely to be a net contributor of spam and abuse towards the rest of the network because the people who run Mastodon instances generally actually care.

Even Mastodon.social (the biggest instance currently) routinely gets silenced or blocked temporarily by other instances when it lets spam get out of control, and that is generally considered a good thing by users.

Honestly that's gonna be the main reason threads gets defederated after the first round of ideological blocks: self-defence against abuse.

I'm sure all the script kiddies who loved to take over channels in netsplits are gonna be disappointed that they never actually did that now.

More seriously, this is the second time I've seen someone on here characterize IRC in this (very wrong) way in the last day. Where is this coming from?

IRC networks are made up of servers that relay (hence Internet Relay Chat) with each other. You connect to one server and you can communicate both with people local to that server and people on other servers that are part of the same network (including ones that server is not directly connected to). Channels prefixed with # are shared across all servers in the network, while channels starting with & are local to that server (though rarely used).

> And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.

I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.

> buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life

Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.

And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.

> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.

The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.

Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.

Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.

If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?

Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.

Go check out Mixer and Facebook's game streaming if you want to see how well buying influencers onto your platform works.

It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and creators and users are considerably more stubborn than creators.

In Canada Disney+ is where most of the stuff on Hulu or FX eventually ends up, among some other things, and at this point I think it's actually probably the streaming service with the deepest library because of that, which is kind of funny. It's probably the one I'd be least likely to drop, while Netflix has been on the verge a few times now.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that come into existence now honestly.

This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button.

Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.

Network effects always trump all on these things.