Twitter is easier for new users to join. If you aren’t on Twitter and want to be (or have left and want to give it another try), the flow to create a new account is really easy - go to twitter.com, and then the sign-up flow is pretty standard, something almost everyone nowadays is familiar with.
Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance - there are so many to choose from. If you are joining Mastodon because a lot of people you know/follow already have, it makes the choice easier-just join whichever one they are on-but then what happens if it is closed to new registrations? Whereas, if you just heard about this Mastodon thing and want to check it out, a lot of people (especially your average non-technical person) presented with “choose an instance” are going to respond “er, this thing looks too complicated, I can’t be bothered”
> Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance...
This is one of the essential problems that frustrates normal users from moving to another social network. We are yet to talk about the mediocre 'search' function, co-ordinated instance-level bans, rouge moderators, instances shutting down / falling over, etc.
Techies love discussing about how complex something is, where as the majority of users do not care especially normal users moving from Twitter to Mastodon which from the looks of it, was no 'mass migration'. As many instances have closed registrations, if the largest instances re-opened them it further defeats the purpose of federation and encourages instance centralization.
We haven't even mentioned the strong network effect of Twitter being the major reason why little to no-one other than the 'screaming techies of the Twitter apocalypse' got angry, packed their bags and moved to Mastodon. The event was as if it was a leaf falling out of a tree.
Want to join Email? First you have to choose a server ...
No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.
In the early days of email, most people got an email account automatically from their work or school. When it went mainstream in the 1990s, most people got an email automatically from their ISP-and a lot of older people (like my parents age, who are in their early-to-mid 70s) still rely on that for their personal email. Then along came independent free email services such as Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail, which either started out being owned by famous mega-corporations, or were taken over by them not long after they got started.
Mastodon isn’t really comparable-how many people get a Mastodon account from their work or school? From their ISP? From a major well-known corporation (whether paid or for free)? Unless the answer to any of those questions becomes “yes” (on average, not obscure exceptions)-onboarding Mastodon is going to remain a lot more difficult for the average non-technical person than onboarding email ever was
In the early days of social media, most people got an account on the nearest BBS. When it went mainstream in the 1990s, most people automatically got a Facebook account and a lot of older people still rely on that for social media. Then along came independent free social media services such as Twitter/Discord/TikTok...
It's exactly comparable, just a few years down the timeline from email.
> In the early days of social media, most people got an account on the nearest BBS.
The majority of people never used “the nearest BBS”, only a relatively small percentage of the population ever did. Even in their heyday, they were mainly popular with computer enthusiasts, who have always been a minority of the population. Many computer enthusiasts find technical complexity intriguing, the average person finds it off-putting
> When it went mainstream in the 1990s, most people automatically got a Facebook account and a lot of older people still rely on that for social media.
Who “automatically” got a Facebook account? The vast majority of users had to go to Facebook.com and sign up. People got an email given to them by their work/school/ISP, I’ve never heard of someone being given a Facebook account by any of those (Workplace doesn’t really count.) And unlike Mastodon, Facebook never asked its users to “choose an instance”
> Then along came independent free social media services such as Twitter/Discord/TikTok...
All of which are big commercial services, and none make you “choose an instance” in the way that Mastodon does when you sign up for them
> It's exactly comparable, just a few years down the timeline from email.
It’s completely different; it’s only “exactly comparable” if you ignore many key details
You say that only a relatively small percentage of the population ever used BBSes, and that's true, but what is also true is that only a relatively small percentage of the population ever used a social microblogging service, whether it was Twitter or not.
You're really leaning in to 'choose an instance', which has only really been a problem for tech experts. Everyone I know on Mastodon just clicked one of the listed instances on joinmastodon.org and never thought about it again.
And no, most people didn't have to go anywhere to sign up for Facebook. For an extremely long time, there was a LinkedIn-like email invitation system, and when you made your account it suggested "people you may know" and generally guessed right. Literally all you needed to do to get a Facebook account was make up a password. I'm not familiar with whatever the current growth hacks are.
Anyway, it's easy to make comparisons by ignoring many key details. You did it too, you just described those key details as "obscure exceptions" or saying they don't "really count." I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to get from your text except that you're really stumped about decentralization.
To this day people have to "choose an instance" to sign up for email, because people use email before they get jobs and they can't hang onto primary-school accounts after they leave school. Sure, most people sign up for GMail or Apple mail, because their phones tell them to. That's still choosing an instance, and Microsoft, Yahoo, Fastmail, and other providers continue to exist and turn profits, even though their users had to battle the indominitable hellscape of having to choose an instance.
There is a meaningful difference. Right now, we have Twitter. This is more like using a bulletin board now that Reddit exists. Sure some people do; but it’s far more niche than just having a Reddit account.
The friction that prospective Mastadon users have experience is the knowledge that an easier option exists.
before gmail and the like people didn't choose a server.
the majority of email addresses people got from the institutions they were affiliated with. their university, their job, their isp.
and when they switched their isp or their job, they also had to switch email addresses.
it wasn't until gmail and other independent email services that people actually got to choose.
the only exception were those people who got their own domain who either set up their own server or used the email service offered by their registrar.
email was already ubiquitous before people even had a choice, and when those choices came available there were only very few because the majority of servers were and still re restriced to the members of the institutions they belong to. so for email paralysis of choice never was a concern
It's more centralised now after several decades because monopolistic companies saw commercial value in squeezing out the competition. Plenty of technical folk have given up their own servers because the dominant providers ruined the system by blocking their emails.
I think that’s another big issue with Mastodon - poor accountability.
I know some are going to view “accountability” as an oxymoron when it comes to Musk-owned Twitter. But, while Musk positions himself as a maverick who couldn’t care less about what the media thinks (and the “mainstream” media especially), it seems likely that their negative feedback played a significant role in the reversal of some of his dumber decisions. His whole “I don’t care what the media thinks” routine resembles the poop emoji with which he responds to their inquiries-such a juvenile response is a sign he really does care about what they say, even if only to a certain degree-if he completely didn’t care, he’d just ignore them entirely, or even have some intern respond promptly with inane non-committal unquotable PR blather
So yeah, the media provides some accountability for Twitter, however imperfect-even under Musk. By contrast, the media provides very little accountability for Mastodon-it is very fringe, the average person has never heard of it, why would they pay much attention to it? And its decentralised nature makes accountability by the media potentially even harder, since there’s no Musk to ultimately hold account, just an opaque collective of obscure individuals who wield power behind closed doors
Another dimension of accountability is regulatory-for better or worse, social media is an increasing focus of regulatory attention worldwide, and you can guarantee Twitter is near the top of the list. Musk may try to dodge them, but he can only dodge so much, and in many cases (especially those regulatory requests which don’t appear to be associated with his political opponents) he may just comply from the start. By contrast, most regulators are going to ignore Mastodon, because it is too small to merit their attention, and its decentralised nature makes it much harder to regulate.
Of course “if you are unfairly banned on one instance you can always move to another”-but that’s at the minimum a major inconvenience, and what about the problem of cross-instance bans? I know they are claimed to be only against the far-right; but even if that’s true, what’s to stop “ban the far-right” from evolving into “ban the moderate right” and then eventually even “ban lefties who deviate too much from the party line”? Yes, that’s a slippery slope argument-but accountability mechanisms play a big role in stopping people slipping too far down life’s many slopes
If you trust the average Mastodon administrator is on roughly the same page as you, maybe you don’t have much to worry about; if you lack that confidence, is it still worth investing your time in it? With Twitter, even if you don’t trust Musk to do the right thing, at least you know there are real (however imperfect) mechanisms to hold him to account. The same mechanisms for Mastodon are arguably a lot weaker
This is definitely the moat against having another Twitter but a lot of things have a lots of users.
There's something else about it, a culture which tells what people should expect from it maybe. There must be something else because anyone with lot's of users is supposed to be able to inflate and take over everything but this is not happening.
Depends what your purpose is. If you want to be a broadcaster, have a message to sell, then there's a larger audience. If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. Who talks to millions of people in a lively back and forth?
You want the right people such as experts and industry leaders. Those are on Twitter. If you want to hang with average Joes then you have a random Discord service, forums or anonymous people on Reddit. It's not the features that makes microblogs great.
I disagree that "the right people" are on Twitter. I will grant that Twitter has historically been the high water mark for having the largest number of those people in one place, and also that a disproportionate number of people who need broad public reach as an intrinsic part of their career will also be their (eg. celebrities and journalists).
But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.
Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
You can either go hunt down very specific narrow spaces where perhaps some special people have gathered. Or you can go to the site where everyone who wants to be in public having interesting engaging discussions with smart people already are.
There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
Everyone sharp was not on Twitter, there was always a majority that were not. Like I said, in terms of a single platform it was a high water mark, but it is incredible confirmation bias to claim that everyone sharp went to Twitter.
I would never say this for real, but in my head I've always asked, how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
I agree that the majority of the world or even sharp people weren't actually there. But in effect, every other place for conversations was a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter's ocean. Finding some good inspiring informative people to follow, & look up other potentially interesting conversationalists as you go, and you'd be hella winning.
Twitter enabled following & expanding your network intelligently nearly infinitely. Every other place, you will be bound to whomever you can attract.
> how smart can you be if you're turning your nose up at or not joining in the most interesting open active conversations in the world?
Frankly, I tend towards the opposite view. How smart can you be if you spend any significant amount of time engaged in the worst platform for intelligent conversation on the internet?
Well, clearly there are plenty of smart people in either category, but we can objectively say there are a lot more smart people that don't use twitter than do.
There's a worldview that proritizes/heavily weighs cost, and there's another that prioritizes/heavily weights opportunity.
This continues to strike me as passing up on something amazing. Most issues with birdsite depend on where you tread. The forum itself is not exceptional but really people just make such mountains over little molehills. Just learn to unfollow & trust your own judgements. Focusing only on negatives is a "whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you're right".
You don't have good conversations with those people on Twitter though. 99% tweets directed by unpopular account to popular are going into a black hole. It's not a "good conversation" where you write something with 1% chance of getting something back.
If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.
> It's not the features that makes microblogs great.
Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.
> On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'.
On the contrary, algorithms are to a large extent irrelevant. You see what the people you follow tweet and retweet. No algorithms involved. What made Twitter special is rather that you can interact with anyone. You can live in the middle of nowhere and still share knowledge and network with the best in your field. Making a copy of the platform but removing the people, also removes the whole point of Twitter.
> It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter
Do you though? If you're unlucky with your instance of choice, there will be as much "organic interaction" as in an abandoned mining town.
Coupled with aversion to search this makes Mastodon "organic" only on large instances and/or only if you specifically know which people on which instances to follow.
No, you have to build your own network first. That's the main difference to Twitter, where the algorithm throws people at you (including the toxic ones to maximize engagement). It is more representative to real life that way. If you move to a new city you will have to give some effort to build a relationship network. By doing so it is likely also to be a more intimate and qualitative one, providing more value from the time you spend there.
It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.
It depends on the industry. The ones I'm following mainly are: infosec - almost every single follow I had is on mastodon, and gamedev - different people but there's still a big crowd.
Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)
I would suggest most people don’t care about broadcasting or having a conversation. They want to get “important” information from people they’re familiar with (news services, celebrities, etc).
>If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people.
I still need quite a few of them to have interesting follows. I'm following 180 accounts on Twitter but only 20 on Mastodon. And basically all of those on Mastodon are tech people.
Not that I really want to follow people on Mastodon anyways. I'm hoping that Bluesky is gonna become the go-to Twitter replacement once it opens up.
Twitter actually has a bunch of killer features when compared to Mastodon, to a degree where "toots can have a content warning" seems trivial. One massive one being "able to search tweets".
If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.
I'm of the #opinion that this isn't a #great #way to #implement #search #inside a #product. #Hopefully #whenever a #service goes #down, #people will #remember to #add the #required #hashtags for #other #people to be able to #find them using #search. #Personally I've seen #very #few #posts on my #Mastodon #feed use #hashtags, so #searching is nigh on #impossible, and I don't #think that's #because they're #avoiding #dogpiling.
If #people don't want #other #people to #dogpile their #social #media #accounts, perhaps they should just #make their #accounts #private. #Mastodon has #private #account #support, right?
Keyword spamming has been uncool since the 90s, when search engines were naive. Making every word in your post a keyword defeats the purpose - in Mastodon's case, it also makes it look ugly, I consider that a win
Search, or the lack thereof, is my least favorite thing about the fediverse. The federated nature means it's not feasible to search across all instances the way I can search across all of Twitter.
I mean, the Internet is decentralised and we still have Google and friends. It might be harder to implement than Twitter, but it's surely not "not feasible".
Yeah, this is it. Otherwise you'd think the non federated Twitter alternatives that popped up recently (Cohost, Post, Hive, Substack Notes, etc) would be lighting the world on fire and taking lots of Twitter's disgruntled users.
But they're not, because the majority of Twitter's users haven't moved over. And without the majority moving over, said majority has no reason to.
Federation is basically irrelevant to the success or failure of a platform, since the technical details of how its implemented don't matter to 99% of the userbase. If their friends and idols use Mastodon, they'll learn how to use it. If they don't, they won't.
twitter has a bunch of 'conversation quality' features that they've amassed over time and which now make up their 'expertise' on this kind of social media format. and yes, that includes stuff like quote tweets, which mastodon for whatever reason stubbornly opposes and refuses to implement. like, wouldn't it be better, that if someone decides to talk about something, for there to be a definite link to the original? instead of just, having them vaguely talk about 'something someone said' without an actual exact reference? but nope, mastodon just kinda...doesn't think that through. not even on the 'what would disabling/not having this feature result in' level. and then they pretend like 'that's the solution', but it's just not.
1. I (almost) only see content and topics from people I follow. Which means everything is specific to the interests of the people I choose to follow, and that list needs to be curated well
2. There are no ads, anywhere. Nothing. It’s so strange to experience this and so refreshing
It’s definitely a little quieter than Twitter, which is also quite nice. You can read your feed once or twice a day and be caught up.
On Ads, perhaps you have an adblocker on your desktop, but on mobile you’ll end up forced to use an app, and given twitter’s api is now pretty much closed off, there will be ads in those clients/apps.
Elon needs to make money, and you will eventually see ads or give him money if you use his platform
Before Elon, Twitter needed to make money too; it had long distanced itself from its pre-2010ish self in mission and leadership, though that statement suggests at least some independence over the drift of the population during that time.
> 1. I (almost) only see content and topics from people I follow. Which means everything is specific to the interests of the people I choose to follow, and that list needs to be curated well
Why "almost" though? Does Mastodon shows tweets from people you don't follow? Or is that a preference setting for this?
It's like Twitter used to be. The feed is time sorted. You can filter by hash tag. There is no AI driven second guessing of what you may or may not like to see.
The amount of users who care about Mastodon is negligible when compared with the amount of Twitter users. People have already voted and Mastodon got the thumbs down.
I doubt that the vast majority of Twitter users made an active decision of giving Mastodon the thumb down. They just didn't hear of it, or had no impetus to find a different option. I think that's an important distinction.
The format of the fediverse is anti-virality and anti-discovery. It's also anti-index. It's a joke that anyone thinks it could ever compete with Twitter. It's not for a lack of interest or advertising.
That's maybe the sentiment of the users, but the implementation details allow indexing of public content very easily.
Anyway, the purpose - at least in my eyes - is not to compete with twitter as a whole, but to offer alternatives to people that desire it. And to this end, I think Mastodon, and I hope the rest of the fediverse proved quite successful.
The amount of people who eat wonderful, nutritous food is negligible when compared with the amount of McDonalds diners. But people have already voted and McDonalds got the thumbs up.
As someone who almost entirely moved over, I’d say you are right on average and wrong in practice - most of the tech people I follow are more active on Mastodon, and right now there is only a handful of people I actively go back to Twitter to read.
The amount of users who care about Hackernews is negligible when compared with the amount of Reddit users. People have already voted and Hackernews got the thumbs down.
Strangely enough there's in those few millions there's enough people to have interesting conversations with. ~12 million is larger than population of quite a few countries, where people still manage to have social lives somehow. With just a relatively small amount of followers you'll have engaging conversations on Mastodon/Fediverse. While on Twitter/Birdsite the engagement, unless you are an influencer, is surprisingly low and responses are very low-quality in my experience. But YMMV of course.
You are right. I was off by few million, according to below stats counter. Note that any count is an estimation due to the decentralized nature of the network and instances not counted. I've seen other higher numbers too.
I think you are 10 million off, since the monthly active users shows who is actively using the platform on a monthly basis, not total registrations.
If I was to bring up Twitter's total registered users to date, it would be close to the billions. That doesn't mean there are billions of users using it monthly, this is why total registered users as a metric is irrelevant.
Twitter's DAUs are in the hundreds of millions (over 220M+). Since that is the case it is clear that the MAUs are even higher. Mastodon's 7 years of existence vs Twitter's 7 years of existence is not even close and is no contest, with Twitter at 90M+ daily active users at the time.
The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it.
Mastodon is social media, but it is not a product. While indeed no one wants to be on dead social media, Mastodon is perfectly fine at a "stable condition". If your friends are on it, why would you leave?
for a product with angry VCs breathing down your neck, yes. For a protocol/ecosystem run without profit motive? Not really. IRC has existed for how many decades now? And of course those stats are misleadingly timed given that it's up about 3x compared to a year ago.
> Why would I spend time on a social network where few of the people I know or interested in are present?
Heard this argument more often. I find this a strange perspective. Say that you are living in a country with the same amount of population as the Fediverse has. Would you say generally speaking it is hard to get to know people you are interested in? Of course for niche interest areas mass networks help find a larger group. But among millions there's quite a few people to have nice engagements with already.
I'm probably too old, but I seldom get to know people on social networks. More often I know them from my offline life, or know their books or software they created, and use social networks to connect with them. When I do learn new people on social networks, it's through other people I already know.
I don't have a Twitter account though, so my usage patterns might not be relevant.
It depends on what you are interested in of course; but let’s say one has an interest in politics, society, culture, world affairs, etc: a lot of recent growth in Mastodon seems to be due to progressive-leaning people abandoning Twitter because they don’t like Musk’s politics/personality/antics; meanwhile, most conservative-leaning and very many moderate/centrist/apolitical people haven’t bothered. Not only haven’t they bothered, I think the impression many people get of Mastodon (fairly or unfairly) is that it is a hyper-progressive space, and if someone is more moderate-to-conservative, or even just interested in experiencing ideological diversity, jumping ship from Twitter to Mastodon would be a waste of their time.
This is nothing about the far-right as such; Musk has allowed neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin back on Twitter, but I doubt anyone is going to encounter their content unless they are actively looking for it. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of mainstream centrists-to-conservatives, and even what one might call “dissident progressives” (who criticise mainstream progressivism from the Left-e.g. the classical Marxist who condemns “wokeness” as a capitalist plot to divide and distract the working class), who are happy to maintain a presence on Twitter but don’t feel like Mastodon would be a very welcoming place for them.
Like Twitter-and unlike Mastodon (or at least how it appears from the outside-I am going by its reputation, not personal experiences with it)-this site has a great deal of ideological diversity, from the far-left to the far-right, although my impression is the majority of users skew centre-left. Most of Reddit’s big subs are dominated by mainstream American progressivism, but niche subs contain a much wider diversity of viewpoints and ideologies. That said, dang is much more reasonable than Reddit’s admins, and while Reddit’s admins can at times be arbitrary and capricious, many believe that capriciousness has a political slant to it
for the same reason you're talking to me here on HN right now. Because a personal community of a 1000 people you vibe with is better than an entropy machine of 100 million. Can you even call something a social network if it makes the people on it anti-social?
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
> > The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.
> > Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:
> > So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
> where few of the people I know or interested in are present?
They never said larger, and yes, more is not always better. There are simply more interesting people I want to hear from on HN than on Reddit. But this is also true in my case for Twitter over Mastodon and is one reason why I stopped using Mastodon.
Fediverse isn't VC funded and isn't a 'product' in the sense that Twitter is. Obsession with eternal growth is a function of the funding model. Those putting money or time into this are not looking for a financial return - they are trying to sustain a public service.
There is a reason why WhatsApp is still being used widely when there are better alternatives it's because people don't switch apps collectively at once.
Did you know that the Macintosh Performa 6400 was the PC to have in 1997 if you wanted the best combination of performance and high quality software?
That's what this blog post reminds me of. I loved my Macs in the 1990s, but I knew I wasn't going to have access to a fraction of the software available to Windows machines at the time. Access to a wide-range of software was the killer feature of PCs, back then.
And in the case of social media, access to as many eyeballs as possible, reach, is the killer feature. Everything else is just features that add to or subtract from accessing that reach.
I created a Mastodon account, in some server that I can't remember now. I tried to follow people but couldn't figure out how to follow them if they were in different servers (back when the Twitter exodus happened, the main Mastodon server stopped new account creation). I gave up after a few more days of trying and went back to Twitter.
Why the unnecessary aggression (with "dumb" and "retards")? People use twitter for fun, maybe they don't want to struggle with complex UX when they have a perfectly valid alternative (Twitter) already.
Instead this should make you wonder - if smart and technical people (like NH visitors) have problems with Mastodon UI, what chance do "normal" non-technical people have? Toxic attitudes like yours are a problem in many tech-heavy communities.
Unless you want a walled-garden experience for hardcode tech people only. That's fine too. That's how IRC is nowadays and it's OK. Just be honest about this and don't call people outside of that bubble "retards".
What makes you think that all hn visitors are "smart and technical".
And what makes you think that mastodon is walled by hardcore tech people only ot is a tech heavy community? My experience with mastodon is that it is used as much by non technical people as well. Your comparison with irc is not valid [1]
[1] although I would say irc used to be used by a lot of non technical people in the late 90's and early 2000's initially via web portals but many switching seamlessly to desktop clients such as mirc. While icq and then messenger were used for private communications with people already knowing each others well, IRC was the goto chat solution for people looking to meet other people with matching interest. Also acted as tinder before it was a thing.
> There's no way to set up your own instance, and you're basically stuck on a single instance of Twitter. That means there's no community moderators you can reach out to to quickly resolve issues. Also, you can't de-federate instances with a lot of problematic content.
I honestly have no idea what this says. Why would I care about "instances"? Why would I care about de-federating? I don't even know what these words mean.
Someone in a friend group I'm in was complaining that the mastodon instance they are part of was shutting down because the admins just didn't feel like running it any further. He was distressed because we won't be able to easily export all of his posts. Meanwhile, I'm just disenfranchised because it's the third instance this year to have that same fate.
If I ever create a mastodon it'll just be me, on my own VM.
Except you know…the actual amount of users that make the social media platform worth using…
We get it, you hate Musk and Big Tech. Nobody outside the tech world wants to “spin up” a protocol instance, and not enough resources would host all those people for free.
Mastodon is a wasteland. It can't compete with the engagement and exposure you can get on Twitter. For a social network, any feature parity is irrelevant if it can't reach critical mass.
It might or might not, other counters show 11 million accounts, who knows how many active. Which metrics do each counter use and why do we believe they're representative of what we care about?
WhatsApp took half a decade to get dark theme, voting implemented. And they still don't have pinning messages possible. Or fast switching between chats....
> Twitter has this even more advanced feature called self de-federation. You activate it by simply scrolling away, closing the browser tab, taking a break, or even... going outside..
It seems the majority of Mastodon users have already utilized this feature of Twitter. Some have even shut down their Twitter accounts.
“Mastodon” as a product name, to me, doesn’t sound inviting at all. Evokes associations with masturbate, Mammoth and the general sense of something big, dark and clunky.
If you have used the product and like it, I’m sure you won’t care about the name, or even come to like and cherish it. But for an outsider who just hears about this thing I would argue that it’s not very approachable.
Open source people a notoriously terrible at naming thing, Mastodon is a prime example of that.
Too many syllables, too much negative phonetic connotation and any focus group would tell you there's about 3 people that know what a Mastodon was. Should've gone with Mamood or some such romanticized version of an elephant thingy.
Apparently my mind isn't in the gutter like yours, but after using it, it's vastly better than Twitter ever was, and I left more than a year ago so I can't speak to what Twitter is now, but I hear it's going downhill.
I shared a personal perspective, while allowing that people using and likening the service might see things differently. Your response is that you disagree and therefore your mind is better than mine.
Quite strong a judgement about another person based on a sample size of two sentences.
