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Comment by pard68 | Hacker News Reader

I joined a server. It was alright. Then I looked at the federated timeline and decided I did not wish to be a part of Mastadon.

Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.

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I don't understand this. The Federated timeline is always going to be full of the same kind of crap that Twitter (and other social media) has. The whole point of Mastodon is that you can avoid that by joining an instance that matches your interests, and then only look at your notifications and the local timeline.

By doing that you can see only things said by, or boosted by, people who you have chosen to associate with. Then you get most of the benefits of social media without getting the crap from the uncontrolled firehose.

But sure, if you want it to be like Twitter, and then reject it because your experience is like Twitter, then by all means. I just don't understand your reaction.

Can you join multiple "local" timelines? Ie, lets say you join an OSS dev focused federation and you like it. Down the line, it grows and becomes less HN, more Reddit. Okay, you say to yourself, time to move to the next HN-like you find. So you do that, but it's small, and feels dead.

Seeing feeds from both the old, somewhat bad and the new, better but still too small would ease migration woes. Is that possible?

You can start a new account on a new instance, watch the old account on the old instance, see which people are still worth following, then follow them from the new instance account. I've done that and it worked a treat. You can also export the list of people you follow and import that into the new instance, then unfollow anyone who says stupid things.

My experience is that all platforms reward putting in a small amount of effort to curate those I follow and engage with. Unless you do that you end up with the shower of complete crap hiding the nuggets worth having. With a comparatively small amount of effort you can get a high-quality stream with very little crap, and then you can block or filter that.

isn't the point of twitter that you follow only who you want and other people's garbage doesn't show up if you don't want it? what makes mastodon different in that regard?

The idea that even Twitter itself has forgotten by insisting to show me garbage people I follow have liked with no option to disable it.

> Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.

Thanks for virtue signalling. Ironic.

>> Too much hate and virtue signalling. It was like what Twitter already was.

> Thanks for virtue signalling. Ironic.

Thanks for virtue signalling. Ironic.

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