from Hacker News

Mastodon Is Awesome

by idonov on 11/7/22, 8:46 AM with 75 comments

• by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF on 11/7/22, 9:22 AM

  I finally gave Mastodon a try because many interesting Twitter accounts I follow moved there, or at least got active on it and broadcasted the fact. I have to admit I am positively surprised so far. Very much so.

  Now everything depends on how much activity remains once the current dust settles.

  Will Mastodon overtake Twitter? I still doubt it, but honestly I really can't imagine why I would care about that as long as Mastodon manages to establish, nurture, and retain a healthy userbase. Which is all I would need to keep using it.

• by bluesign on 11/7/22, 10:28 AM

  Unfortunately with its current design it will end up being "echo chambers".

  There are two main problems needs to be solved.

  - Identity ( it shouldn't be tied to a single server ) - Federating with selective servers ( more importantly "not federating" with some servers )

  Only solution now is to keep your own server ( and federate with other servers that interests you ) but I don't think it is scalable.

• by savolai on 11/7/22, 10:50 AM

  I bumped into this in safari on ios. Okay, I could try to follow this. I have the mastodon app.

  https://social.network.europa.eu/public

  Copied and pasted the first handle I could find. It was cumbersome since it is also a link so long pressing on it initiates link actions, I have to start in a location elsewhere and manually narrow down the selection afterwards.

  But oh, this is a server with many users, how do I follow them all? Copy paste all the handles by hand?

  These are the kinds of UX use cases that need to be solved at a bare minimum.

• by greg7582947 on 11/7/22, 3:43 PM

  How long until these shill posts end?

  I can't help but wonder why people who supposedly want to protect democracy are fleeing Twitter because it was taken over by someone who wants to bring back freedom of speech.

  Mastodon seems to make sense for these people though. Breaking up the service into different moderated servers makes it more difficult to regulate with pesky laws like the First Amendment. If one server gets too much freedom, users can easily flee to another warm, fuzzy, safe server where opposing views are censored as "conspiracy theories".

• by baxuz on 11/7/22, 11:21 AM

  As far as I see it's no better than subreddits. If anything, the barrier to entry is a lot higher.

• by poulpy123 on 11/7/22, 11:46 AM

  Twitter puts you in contact with everyone, and you depend on a centralized and scrutinized organisation. Mastodon put you in contact with little people and you depend on a very decentralized and autonomous organisations. I really can't see the second one having the same success than the first one

• by angrycontrarian on 11/7/22, 9:26 AM

  I am still struggling to understand how migrating to a censorship-resistant platform will mitigate concerns about a lack of strict content moderation at twitter.

• by jonathanstrange on 11/7/22, 9:38 AM

  I've tried Mastodon for several months, using three different servers (or how these are called), and for me personally the experience ranged from useless to unpleasant. I got a horrible mixture of open source programming and pedophile manga culture in one home feed, and tons of Nazi posts with Pepe the frog memes in another. I never saw anything interesting in months, even after changing home feeds several times. Most of the discussions were about topics or memes I didn't even know. It was boring and I opened my client less and less often.

  To be fair, Twitter offers essentially the same experience to me. Although you can see a glimpse of reason from time to time in between, because there are some experts on it, it's mostly about vitriol and passive aggressive trolling. I've heard you can adopt it by blocking and subscribing strategically but this never worked for me in the three months I've tried it. I've deactivated my Twitter account, too.

• by audessuscest on 11/7/22, 9:57 AM

  All these posts regarding Mastodon start to feel like spam (or at least forced promotion), nothing really interesting in that post...

• by tibbydudeza on 11/7/22, 5:40 PM

  https://hub.fosstodon.org/why-is-fosstodon-down/

  Seems like a lot of tech savvy folks are checking it out.