This looks interesting, but if you don't have creepy and opaque admin controls and algorthimic manipulation that create a thousand little tinpot Larry Ellisons, you should highlight that.
Could you please explain exactly why you think no one you know uses Mastodon? I'm trying to figure it out. I, personally am hesitant to use it first and foremost because Mastodon (and many of its lesser known alternatives) is a variant of micro-blogging (I'm appalled how extending character limit beyond 500 apparently counts as a feature in Fediverse!)
The instance owner has absolute anonymity and absolute power to snoop with no access logs and no known identity. CCPA? GDPR? Access controls? Good luck! You can leave the instance, but you're leaving all your data behind for them or any future owner of the instance to do whatever they want with... forever.
And even if you trust them and everyone they will ever meet, people can and do store their server logs unencrypted.
Then argue they can't help it and you don't "get it" because that's just how the architecture has to work in order to... well it's not clear why this is a good design for the user or any better than other social media.
1) You still don't own your data
2) You still don't have any privacy
3) Every single part of the user experience is inferior or confusing and the people making it don't care because they're focused on doing what they can to connect kids with anonymous instance owners.
Yeah but it's not. This a complete contrivance and you're just making shit up. The prompt is much shorter than the output and you are concealing that fact. Why?
Part of the secret to the Simpsons' longevity is that is is something the majority of people on earth can catch a few seconds of in the background and still be able to follow by sheer recognition alone. This was always the majority of television, but the majority of television shows are cancelled and forgotten long before now.
It is now simply an extremely cost-efficient form of content relative to the value of the ad slots and licensing of the IP. People working on it now are technicians delivering a product to spec that is basically a perfect use case for generative AI.
"Hey claude, write me an episode of the simpsons where Homer starts investing in NFTs while Lisa and Bart goes to a comedically sinister horseback riding summer camp with a guest star that has a movie coming out this summer."
Or even:
"Write a skill that creates standard length 22 minute new simpsons episodes scripts and scene video prompts by combining a trending news topic with two or more simpsons characters. IMPORTANT: make it wacky!"
This is an extremely disappointing response. The issue is your dev relations people being shitty and unhelpful and trying to solve actual problems with media-relations speak as if engineers are just going to go away in a few days.
Arrogant and clueless, not exactly who I want to give my money to when I know what enshitification is.
They have horrible instincts and are completely clueless. You need to move them away from a public-facing role. It honestly looks so bad, it looks so bad that it suggests nepotism and internal dysfunction to have such a poor response.
This is not the kind of mistake someone makes innocently, it's a window into a worldview that's made me switch to gemini and reactivate cursor as a backup because it's only going to get worse from here.
The problem is not the initial change (which you would rapidly realize was a big deal to a huge number of your users) but how high-handed and incompetent the initial response was. Nobody's saying they should be fired, but they've failed in public in a huge way and should step back for a long time.
I think the point was pretty clear if you are able to consider more than one point of view. People who are highly motivated and for whom it could make a life-or-death difference have considerable technical skills in this area in Russia consider Whatsapp to be insecure and prohibit its use, just as in the US, their counterparts consider telegram to be insecure and prohibit its use.
Perhaps you're simply struggling with the concepts here: would it help you to understand things better to add that russia and the US ban the use of Signal by their militaries and intelligence services?
Did you detect an implication that can't be extrapolated from the text without metacontext and secondary unstated axioms, or is your mind totally blank and baffled at what these data points could indicate?
What you are saying is empirically false. Change in a single line of executed code (sometimes even a single character!) can be the difference between a secure and non-secure system.
This must mean that you have been paid not to understand these things. Or perhaps you would be punished at work if you internalized reality and spoke up. In either case, I don't think your personal emotional landscape should take precedence over things that have been proven and are trivial to demonstrate.
Nothing changed, but many people struggle to understand their our own degree of relative ignorance and overvalue high-level details that are leaky abstractions which make the consequentially dissimilar look superficially similar.
The deeper issue is that your product is one of many chatGPT wrappers with no unique hook, not that users can find out you're one of many chatGPT wrappers with no unique hook.
Very curious to know where you have been in the last few years for your to regard openai.com/chat as something known only to specialists and wholesalers. To stick with the sausage-making analogy: this is like someone selling costco hotdogs in the parking lot out of the back of a van for 25% markup because they pre-squeezed the ketchup on it.
How many people in the costco parking lot do you think there are that want costco hotdogs but are unaware of the existence of costco, costco hotdogs, ketchup, and what they cost?
but users do care eventually. they just don’t yet have the vocabulary that “other sausage makers” do. dismissing these concerns implies that outcomes matter and provenance doesn’t, which may be convenient if you’re building wrappers, but it’s corrosive if you care about ecosystems, incentives, and long-term quality when the app is compared to others in the market.
that app is not the only app in the market that focuses on conversation. feedback like this is worth taking seriously rather than waving off.
Cute parable but most rely on child sweatshop labor. Users express "thoughts and prayers" level of care if pressed, but not take up a trend of sewing their shirts to spare kids they will never meet RSI.
Noting competition exists seems focused on the outcome of making money. An obligation that exists in an exploitative economy. Where's your concern for the provenance of such obligations?
Yeah. Every expression of concern is probably something like social desirability bias, appearance of concern while sticking with status quo real effort of zero change. Low effort rhetorical "care".
People express concern about global warming and drive off in their SUV. They're just parroting social script.
I really appreciate this comment. So much of marketing is "puffery" or based on what would be best for the app creator for the audience to believe. Sometimes that lines up with reality, sometimes it doesn't.
In this case the marketing copy seems more like creator wishcasting or living in the past. I've fallen into this trap before too, of creating things as if AI was a secret in my basement and not something of intense focus by a plurality of 20 million+ software developers. Rarely does a technology landscape change so fast.
How you're framing it is helpful as well. Instead of saying "this already exists (so you shouldn't do it)", I think it's valuable to highlight what a competitive space this is. The creator will need to think hard about what they can do to differentiate their offering in 2026, both in marketing and functionality.
Because that's why no one I know uses Mastadon.
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