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Comment by Sea_Wulf | Hacker News Reader

I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.

* Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.

* Creating interesting communities that can interact with each other -- See IRC, Slack, Reddit, forums, Wordpress blogs, etc.

Honest question: what problem are they solving, and/or why should I use Mastadon instead of older platforms such as IRC or Reddit?

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there are some awesome mastodon communities that have moved off twitter because they are trolled too frequently on there, and aren't empowered to make their own rules to prevent that. If you're discussing somethign PTSD-inducing, for example, this struggle is so real and hard.

There are communities, for example, that block other communities that are 'freespeechers'. i.e. communities that don't ban people for sayign things that the former community operator deems as racist. At first I was like, "that's messed up, it's too subjective". But then I remembered that actually, unlike Twitter, that decision to block the people didn't affect me. They're allowed to create their own community how they want, and I'm empowered to join or self-host my own.

Pretty cool that vulnerable and very very helpful communities have tools like this.

How well has that worked to combat harassment?

Pretty well in my experience.

If a particular instance is harassing you, ask your admin to do something about it, they will ask the other instance to stop and if that doesn't work, block the entire instance.

Additionally, you can set your profile to locked so people cannot follow you without permission.

> I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.

Many aspects of Twitter-the-service are wonderful, but in many people's opinion the service's creator has shown (and continues to show) poor judgement and an apparent inability and/or desire to moderate bad actors. For example, Chris Sacca has been a prominent critic[1], and there's a long history of Twitter's somewhat-abusive history with developers[2].

[1] https://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/technology/12twitter.html

> Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place.

Decentralized services don't preclude that — see Google and websites, Apple and podcasts, etc. An open ecosystem means that one company doesn't have to solve every problem, and that multiple companies can compete to solve the same problem.

I run a Mastodon instance. This is what I have on the front page to explain what the hell Mastodon is and why you’d want to use it, in place of the standard text about that.

—-

What's Mastodon? Mastodon is basically Twitter, except with less trolls and Nazis. And longer tweets.

It’s also Twitter without a whole bunch of VC investment that it needs to try and pay back by monetizing your eyeballs and keeping you on the site for as long as possible, regardless of whether that's by making you happy or enraging you.

And finally, the last big difference is that instead of living on a bunch of computers run by people working for Twitter, Mastodon lives on a bunch of computers run by whoever feels like running an “instance”.

Each instance can set its own policies. If you really want to be a jerk to people, you can find or start an instance that’ll let you! But people on other instances can very easily filter out not just you, but your entire instance. The hope is that this will keep things more civil than what Twitter has turned into. The reality is that there are probably exciting new failure modes somewhere in the future.

The policies of this particular instance can be found here. The TL;DR version of them is "Imagine you have a cool queer aunt. Don't do anything that'd probably piss her off."

> Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.

Mastadon is a federated platform using the OStatus protocol, so you an interact with anyone on any server using that protocol (Mastadon, GNU social, etc.). That means you can follow anyone, boost (re-tweet) any message, and even see a feed from the whole fediverse.

Now, it is possible to block some servers from your server and vice versa, but this just allows you to find a community that shares the same values as you or even setup a server of your own if you can't find a server you like.

Correction, Mastodon has used ActivityPub instead of OStatus since version 1.6, only using OStatus to communicate with software such as GNU Social that doesn't support ActivityPub.

Ah, good to know, thanks. I knew it supported it, but Wikipedia made it sound like it was more secondary.

Your first point on Twitter's appeal is valid, but I don't think this is necessarily restricted to centralised systems. Discoverability is something decentralised networks struggle with - look at the role the very centralised (albeit endlessly mirrored) pirate bay plays, despite efforts like btdigg - but I think it's very solvable. Somehow. With some effort and ingenuity.

On your second point, the IRC comparison makes sense, but Slack and Reddit are locked in ecosystems. Don't see how they compare.

Mastodon is basically IRC with Twitter's format.

Saying that Slack and Reddit don't compare because they're "locked in" really misses the point that most users don't care about that.

Users care about lock-in. The fact they may not seem to care at the adoption point is more a case of lock-in, by design, being relatively opaque for most users, but they care when restrictions become apparent. Of course the nature of lock-in is that that's too late.

Censorship.

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