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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at all that would convince any of Kim K or Kylie Jenner's followers to go take a look at it. I'll even go a step further and say that Mastodon is probably more for fringe groups than for the unwashed masses those fringe groups are trying to influence.

Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Is there some triple-I indie game that Mastodon will allow me to play in my browser? (Or triple-A non indie? I'm not picky. Just don't show me a point and click please.) Post the link for that game, you'll get a lot more people trying Mastodon. Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Or is there a new generation of FIFA stars on Mastodon? Or new generation of NBA stars? I mean, even a new generation of "It" Girls chasing NBA stars would be better for attracting users than "thoughtful and local uncommented retweets". Which is not only what you're asking me to get excited about right now, but is likely not even true. Boosts will be no more thoughtful than retweets, likely a good deal less thoughtful since Mastodon seems to be on a road that relegates it to fringe groups.

Right now, it's like buying a large tract of land in Kansas and saying that you've started a new municipality. No we don't have beaches, or theaters, or parks, or much of anything else, but everyone here is more thoughtful. so we're much better than Miami, San Diego, or Minneapolis.

I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"

View on HN

I think you nailed the USP of Mastodon. Keeping out the marketers, advertisers, vanity metric chasing or fandom makes Mastodon that peaceful scenic beach where your fellow beach goers say hello and share some of their food with you.

I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.

People often forget that at the beginning none of the current giants were "mainstream", in fact what made them attractive was the fact that they had a unique audience that formed a strong community amongst each other.

The idea of "mainstream" is dying, and will continue to do so. What we're seeing is a deep cultural fracture where communities, ideas, and people do not form the kind of stardom or centralized propagation of ideas that the previous decades were known by. As production gets cheaper, and getting an audience becomes easier, people will begin to form seamless self-sustained communities that support each other (think patreon).

If video killed the radio star, then the internet killed the star, and fractured it into infinite pieces.

I'm a daily user of Mastadon. But... People were saying this on newsgroups and gopher, then on message boards, then about Friendster and all of the social platforms that followed. If the platform becomes popular enough to reach some sort of critical mass, then that mass will drag along all of the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram stardom with it. Some people actually like their celebrities and they expect to see those celebrities on their platform of choice. And, inevitably, the marketers will follow.

Yah. Some people like their celebrities, however those celebrities are also now facing competition by other stars which have far greater community outreach, and influence.

Who do the kids of today look up to? Those are your next celebrities.

I'm afraid that's "youtubers". Both big international ones like Pewdiepie, as well as more local (national) ones.

Many of these youtubers are actually somewhat surprised about the size of their following and the fact they can actually make a living with the profits from their channel.

I'm not sure if there's any other place besides youtube where they can monetize their channel in such a successful fashion. They don't really talk about how much one earns as a youtuber, and I suppose it varies wildly. But otherwise, they're not really tied to their channel, just tell the fans where you're heading and they follow.

You read it here.

It's hard to see how this is the future without experiencing it in some way personally.

Facebook Groups connected me with fans of a particular kind of fringe art about 4 years ago and made leaving Facebook really difficult. This might seem exceedingly anecdotal, and I get that, but you have to realize that, before Facebook, it would have been impossible for any of us to even know this interest existed; much less that there were others also into it. Nothing in the cultural canon quite sufficed, although some trends in music and literature had come close, none of them quite articulated the thing. Finding the thing was a necessary part of a certain stage of my life, and gave me a psychological grounding that something mainstream might never could have. I think admitting so actually devalues the spectacle in question, but I can't deny it. There was a value in the fact that this small group of people spoke this unique language. We became something like a tribe.

Attention economics are strange and only beginning to define our lives. Younger people will depend on fringe engagements to achieve a sense of self-identity that used to be a given. Life experience is going to take a new shape accordingly.

I think early evidence of this is in music scenes, which is haphazardly often the case with forms of sociocultural influence. No conventional wisdom can explain the proliferation of indie music and things like tape labels but these things are massive forces. They just genuinely don't care what you think. They have an audience and it's up to you to be a part.

Mastadon is strangely ahead of the curve and probably doing a poor job of meeting in the middle. I think it would benefit from shoving everyone into Mastadon.social at signup and letting them learn about instances from there. Finding a home is too difficult as it is. But, eventually, it does look like the future.

Why did the other reply to this get killed after only having been posted for eight minutes? Seems inoffensive and like perfectly valid discussion from where I'm standing.

Is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here?

Users flagged it (I'm not sure why) and then the author reposted it using a different account. Normally we would unkill such a comment when we review the flags, since I didn't notice anything flaggable about it either, but we're not going to do that when there's a duplicate.

Here's a tip: general explanations like 'is drawing attention to the "attention economy" taboo here' are basically never the answer. It's almost always something much more mundane. You could also know the answer to your question by using HN search to find any of countless threads that discuss these questions extensively. Even "attention economy", though that isn't one of the more common phrases, shows up quite a bit: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22attention%20economy%22&sort....

just thought it strange since I often read HN comments when an article is just posted and rarely see longish, wholly inoffensive comments such as the one in question here get downvoted to [dead] within eight minutes; usually that's reserved for politics etc.

I have the options to see dead/flagged posts enabled and don't see anything, what do you mean?

So do I, the post has since been un-[dead]'d, which is why there's seemingly two duplicate comments now. It was really shocking to see the comment become [dead] within EIGHT MINUTES of having been posted.

That's so for me as well. I've never been able to stand Twitter. There are too many idiots, and even seemingly sane folk all too often act like idiots. But then, I can't stand Reddit, either.

Anyway, I've been tempted to try Mastodon. But I don't like the idea of joining a particular instance, and being unable to change later, without more-or-less starting over. If I or my instance got blacklisted, how would I be better off than being banned from Twitter? In either case, I could come back with an new identity, with new credentials.

The typical reply to your concern is that you have the freedom to initiate/manage your own instance. (Yes, there is also the possibility that you can join an instance and simply export your followers list, etc. But managing your own instance is far more resilient.) Now, as far as managing your own instance, admittedly, this requires skills, money, and time/attention...and if you lack any of those (or reasonably don't wish to invest time/attention), then managing your own instance isn't ideal for you - so I understand your dilemma. If, as you stated that preserving your identity (without having to re-create it often), is essential, there is no better solution to creating and managing your own instance. I do this myself; not because I care about re-creating my identity, but because i like to have control over the servers where i project myself, and also because I am admittedly a technologist and love to play with new software. It might be work - and it certainly is not free - but i do encourage you to at some point consider managing your own instance. Maybe play around a bit by first setting up a test instance with a fake/test identity for yourself, and connect with other users to test things out - for sure other users will definitely be willing to help. Then, you can determine if the investment (yes, in time ANd money) is worth hosting your own instance. Good luck!

That is kind of funny, because Twitter can totally be that, if you want it. You have to be liberal in your usage of the block button, but the advantage is that you have so many genuinely interesting people to follow and learn from. I wouldn't have 1 in 1000 of those on Masterdon, and with their doubling of tweet size, I don't see the problem with arguments.

Before anybody goes about the ecochamber: I ban obnoxious people, self-promoters, bad arguers, I don't ban for sincerely held, well argued politics. I follow a former cam girl, a couple in the rational altruistic movements and a Catholic, pro-life convert.

> I don't ban for sincerely held, well argued politics.

But that's subjective, so you'll just end up reinforcing your own opinions, which is exactly what an echo chamber is, unless I'm missing something...

I tried that, but I failed to learn anything interesting in 140 (or even 280) characters.

“Rational altruistic movements” puts a hole in your armor here.

You might. Most others won’t.

You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it.

In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032

The internet and a social network are two different things.

The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful.

The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump.

I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.

The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.

Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front.

Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc.

Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).

I don't think the majority of people care, most people don't follow twitter, they might have a user but they don't use it that much. In many non anglo parts of the world most of the conversation is in whatsapp groups which is part of facebook and telegram

"You say problem, I say advantage."

- What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?

> What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?

I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger.

If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares.

At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.

That is probably true in general. It certainly is true for some social networks. It is absolutely not true for Twitter. Twitter is supposed to be the "massive public square" of social networks. There are plenty of other social networks for interacting with specific and well defined groups of people. Twitter is for interacting with the world at large. If you want to replace Twitter you need a way to get the world at large to use your platform.

The problem is that there's a catch-22. Mastodon is actively trying to get more users when more users will inevitably mean a worse community.

Sidestep. That profile Pic (gif) made me have to read that post three times.

`We're sorry, but something went wrong on our end.`

Reloaded.

Ah, there it is.

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter

I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter.

My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of toxic elements (dog piles, turning everything into angry politics, new "features" designed to increase engagement/number of ads you see, etc.). I'm guessing that "Twitter, but without everything you hate about Twitter" is enough to overcome the network effects, especially as Twitter keeps finding new ways to annoy its users for money.

But maybe I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

Ideas for killer features:

Feeds. Creators collect and filter on subject, importance and volume. Follow a Feed instead of a person.

Locality. Connect people in an area, like Facebook starting in schools. Use age and membership (church, work, school) for getting people onto a server where they know people.

Events and Calendar. Instead of posts with date/time information, make a different type. Let people view aggregated calendars with multiple filters, and make Feeds for calendars.

Private chat groups with their own invite and moderation choices. Put keys on mobile devices so the server doesn't know; can't be available on a website client.

Minor suggestions: Make moving accounts dead simple, and with that, have a global registry/dns for names. Change the name "toot"; isn't "tweet" generic at this point? A tagline of "blow your horn" with a mastadon tusk as the horn.

Using “tweet” infringes on Twitter’s trademark.

(IANAL, but former tweep)

You'd have to think that the trademark would be sufficiently diluted by common usage by now that it was heading rapidly towards invalidation (cf hoover, xerox, etc.)

You go ahead and start selling copiers branded Xerox and tell us how diluted that trademark is. It may be a common term, same as 'googling', but the test here is whether the company is willing to actively defend the trademark. I can assure you that all of the companies you mentioned would certainly have lawyers ready to prove they hold a valid trademark.

What he's saying is that's not a good enough reason to switch. Regular users simply do not care about any of that, and that's where 90% of your base comes from.

I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.

Comparing buying books online vs at a physical location isn't even in the same universe as retweeting something but without a message attatched

Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?

To simplify the issue here: Amazon made buying books 10x easier, and expanded the easily purchasable selection by more than 10x.

Mastodon doesn't make anything 10x better or easier. It will never gain mass adoption accordingly. Mainstream users will never care about it, not under any circumstances.

It'll languish as just another techie fantasy, with every other decentralized premise (not one of which has ever acquired mass consumer use, not in decades of trying). It's the standard techie failure to understand average users. The same reason techies for nearly two decades have been baffled as to why average people haven't adopted command-line Linux - they can't be objective and properly put themselves into the shoes of other non-tech people.

>>It's the standard techie failure to understand average users

You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.

Except those techies fail all the time. But they are big enough that the fails don't matter on the long run.

Everything I hate about Twitter is getting content pushed into my timeline that I don't care about.

I unfollow everyone who becomes overly political or comments on every outrage-du-jour. These people are inviting the bullshit. They're not making important contributions to political discourse. I don't care if they get dogpiled for it.

As a result, my Twitter experience has been smooth.

This has been my same approach lately. I'm noticing certain friends are constantly the ones either starting arguments, or their posts are the ones that frequently get bumped back up to the top of whatever the hell Facebook's "timeline" thinks its doing-because there's a small arms conflict going on in the comment section.

Even though in many cases, I would otherwise be in complete agreement with the core argument being made. The vitriol and vociferation is vexing though (sorry about that).

For all the shade I throw in its direction, the 'snooze' and 'unfollow' features have been more than welcome additions to Facebook as far as I'm concerned.

Gotta be honest, I never thought I'd see the day where "First day of school" pics and statuses actually get engagement from me--they're so much more pleasant and calming than "($CONSERVATIVE_PERSON| $LIBERAL_PERSON | $GROUP | $PARTY ) DID A THING, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT IT, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HEAR ABOUT IT".

> "($CONSERVATIVE_PERSON| $LIBERAL_PERSON | $GROUP | $PARTY ) DID A THING, I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT IT, AND YOU'RE GOING TO HEAR ABOUT IT".

This phenomenon is more concisely expressesd as "boo outgroup".

I suppose if you are beholden to oversimplifications, sure.

I see it more as reification of a concept than an oversimplification.

You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities.

Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in.

With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other.

I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed.

A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress.

This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system.

No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.

>The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them.

I think this is untrue. I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

Your "100%" implies that everyone on say Facebook has to have the same belief system, when that obviously isn't true. You can state many belief system on Facebook, except hateful ones that target swaths of people.

This won't create a Myspace situation, it'll create a 8chan/voat situation.

> I think social media sites are removing people at .1% outlier belief system that most people deem disgusting enough to warrant taking action to not have associated with their brand.

I don't think that's true. Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population, yet he was banned from Twitter.

> Tommy Robinson's beliefs about Muslims are held by a good deal more than 0.1% of the UK population

Do you have a source for that number?

My main reason for that claim is simply that I live in Britain -- anyone who has done so for a significant amount of time would know that sentiment against Muslims is is a lot more widespread than 0.1% of the population, so I don't think the claim needs defending, any more than the claim "people like sex and money" does.

But I had a look at specific opinion poll results and this one https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson suggests that 17.4% of people see Tommy Robinson favourably.

> My main reason for that claim is simply that I live in Britain

Me too, currently coming up to 50 years.

> https://yougov.co.uk/opi/browse/Tommy_Robinson

That's favourability of Mr Robinson, not his beliefs though.

> That's favourability of Mr Robinson, not his beliefs though.

True, but 17.4% is a much larger number than 0.1%

Thanks for finding numbers, but I worry about this one confirming bias against Muslims. For example, one could assume that a 60% approval rate among Republicans of Trump means that 60% of Republicans don't like Muslims, but oftentimes in conversations in my home town in Texas I'll hear something like "oh, he's definitely a jerk about the Muslim thing" or "even if he's racist, he's at least doing something about the economy." So I hesitate to assume that "support" means "wholly support."

In any case, I feel this is splitting hairs over numbers. If 30% of the UK hated Muslims, Facebook still wouldn't be requiring "100% silicon valley values" to use the platform. You just can't post racist stuff on it. I.e. those racists have other aspects of their worldview they'd be welcome to bring to the table.

I suspect the number who hate Muslims is small, maybe 1-5% of the population. The number who have misgivings about the behaviour of some Muslims is clearly a lot higher.

>In 10 years, noone will care about twitter.

If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users?

It’s also not true of all tech platforms. It’s not true of desktop operating systems for example. Today the desktop is dominated by Apple and Microsoft. Who dominated it 30 years ago? So there’s nothing inevitable about these things.

> If they won’t care about Twitter, why should they care about an open source clone with no users? That’s the worst argument ever.

You’re just assuming the alternatives will have no users. That’s the worst argument ever.

It's actually in Mastodon's best interest not to attract users since users will rip apart their kind, loving, and neat little community limb from limb.

Or is the nature of social media that people switch to get better filtering and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?

Certainly that got Google search and Gmail started.

If Twitter gets better at filtering, maybe they will be more popular?

One of the ways this ends is that people of different political persuasions set up their own (social) media platforms. This has happened before with print media, where the US used to have and most of Europe still does have media with expressly partisan positioning.

This has happened to some extent with Voat, and if there's really a demand for like minded people to communicate without having their discourse contaminated by opposing partisans then I'm sure the same could happen here.

Maybe, but I heard the exact same argument played out around Reddit and Voat, and we all know how that ended. Maybe if the future plays out in accordance with all of the hysteria and slippery slope arguments Mastadon will take off, but otherwise it’s not replacing anything. While I don’t doubt that eventually a replacement for current social media giants will emerge, I doubt we’ve seen them yet. At the very least, I don’t believe the replacement will be a more cumbersome version of an existing service that appeals to technically minded people, or raving ideologues. I’m fact I think it’s possible, if not likely, that people will outgrow social media as we know it today.

“The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them”

That is a flat-out lie, unless you disagree with the terms of service. Find me one person that was booted that wasn’t booted for violating the ToS.

You might want to get outside of your bubble a little instead of making accusations like that.

Perhaps you could explain the case of Elizabeth Heng, a candidate in CA of the US Congress?

I think you might need to get out of your bubble, if you think that most of these people are just "disagreeing".

As for your example, she violated the ToS. They then changed their minds. I'm not seeing the grave injustice you're claiming.

Take a step back and look at what you're justifying.

A candidate from a mainstream party for US Congress with mainstream views creates an ad about her past that is true and historical, and that gets banned.

Hiding behind vague TOS does not cut it.

If the TOS effectively forbids disagreement, what's the difference?

It doesn't. The question still stands.

And right at this moment, no one gives a shit about Mastodon.

Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.

I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing.

Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free.

As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.

Yeah, but I remember when the same thing was said about Diaspora. I remember when the same thing was said about various indie game consoles. I remember when the same thing was said about a whole bunch of social network alternatives that never went anywhere.

I get the feeling that regardless of how much more growth Mastodon gets, it's going to be around and in active use for a long time to come, if only because it's provided a space that is meaningfully different to Twitter.

Will it be the biggest social phenomenon? Probably not. But it already has the critical mass to keep funding its continued development, and lot of interesting voices, if you know where to look.

But you can hope right? Or are you happy with your communication, content, attention and ideas controlled for profit?

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.

Moderation and content quality.

You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers?

That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale.

If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it?

People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that.

> Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access?

Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can.

I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.

> Moderation and content quality.

Those are pretty much guaranteed to go down the more people would use the service.

If you want to attract a lot of people, you will have to accept a lot of people, wether you consider their content crap or not.

Mastadon instances are designed not to become large.

The platform is still in its infancy, but it's intended that people can migrate around the same way that you might move to a new neighborhood. And this is the feature that Twitter just fundamentally can't copy.

When you're talking about popularity, you have to distinguish between Mastadon as a platform/protocol and each individual instance.

I am (increasingly becoming) convinced that moderation does not scale - you can either have a single large community with no moderation, or you can have a small community with good moderation. This is what's clever about Mastadon. Moderation on Mastadon doesn't need to scale, because instances are fragmented.

Twitter will never be able to compete with that unless they split apart their service, which they will (probably) never do.

Maybe a little harsh on youtube. Not entirely garbage. Lot's of good content actually, you just have to tune out the noise to find them.

That's fair, but also kind of my point.

There's a lot of good content on Twitter too. You just have to deal with nazis to get at it. And a lot of good deals on Ebay as long as you don't mind being careful about scammers.

The question is, do users overall want to have to filter out all of this stuff on their own, especially if filtering means fighting with the platform that they're on? Youtube is a great example of this - tons of great content, but you have to put up with the recommendation engine. You either get horrible recommendations, or you constantly train the platform like a cat.

Getting Youtube to give quality recommendations on the homepage is work.

  >> You know the reason why people prefer reading 
  >> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter
  >> tabloids?

I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.

McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit.

You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption?

What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest."

But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.

Sure, but you did not narrow down the audience. People as a whole, it would seem, slightly prefer checkout counter magazines as opposed to NYT. Likewise, I'm not sure bite-sized bullshit regurgitation services like Twitter/Mastodon are even useful in the first place, let alone benefit from refined moderation.

> "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"

And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers:

https://switter.at/about

Probably blackjack somewhere too

>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…]

Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)

Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.

Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.

You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that).

I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as much a part of the social network as something that was posted natively.

It's very much a work in progress but the promise of Mastodon is not so much replacing Twitter as it is a gateway to an internet-wide social graph with no walls.

Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is.

What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?

It's a nice place to be

No one has to care about which pair of celebs are arguing

No bloody advertising

People are building interesting stuff with it

Third party apps work

It's not run by a guy seemingly at war with his own users

edit: more

Your parents aren't there

The people who left twitter years ago because of all the harassment and you've been missing are probably already there

If you've got a feature request or something, you can just toot Gargron and you will get a reply

Fine, that was technical.

But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user for the entire instance).

If the instance admin becomes abusive, or treats the server like his own petty little fiefdom, what can be done about it? Why should I trust an instance admin?

Hi, I run an instance.

If I start acting like a jerk, them my users will start leaving. Pretty soon I don't have anyone left except people who like being treated like that. In my experience that will probably mean they're jerks too.

And thus pretty soon my instance is "that instance run by that jerk who lets her users be jerks". At that point, admins on other instances stop federating with my instance. Eventually the only other instances who are willing to talk to mine are also run by and full of jerks, and I am amidst a hell of my own creation.

So that is, as I see it, the external forces acting on me to try and be a chill admin who's nice to her users. It's a lot easier for them to leave my server and stay in contact with people elsewhere than it is to leave Twitter.

I thought we were comparing Mastodon to Twitter where what you say is already the case

Moving instances is not a big deal and yes, know your admin.

One of the ways in which admins often treat instances like their own petty fiefdom is cutting off communication with other instances that don't toe the line. So sure, you can move instances - just don't rely on being able to contact your friends anymore if you do. (Some instances even have a whitelist of instances that are allowed to follow and interact with their users, with everyone else blocked.)

It's rare to outright block an instance (for not moderating child porn or something of course but not otherwise really)

Instead most "blocks" are just muting from the federated timeline, precisely so that you're not cut off from contacts.

How do my followers know to follow me to the new instance? How do they know it’s actually me?

You can mark an account as having moved and specify to where.

Not reliably, and unless your followers are watching for it, they might miss it.

In good old times we had IRC, where you could go to channel op and report an abusive message. Or to bot master, or to server admin. Depending on personality of that guy (usually they were guys, not girls), it could end with a ban for the offender or personal attack on you. The problem with actual human is that actually you cannot trust him to govern without being accountable, even if you know him and even if currently you are friends. When I checked several large Mastodon instances (>1000 users), I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy, which means that their admins are not accountable and you have no more rights than a slave of a pharaoh. Mastodon instance may protect you, but is not required to do so and there's no guarantee that it will not support your offender or it will not suddenly abuse you.

> I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy

Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding.

Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they should care, but they don't. They just look at the track record and decide if they trust that person right now.

And right now, Mastadon instances are better at moderation than Twitter. You're worried about an instance admin theoretically not protecting you in the future; Twitter already, today, doesn't protect you.

That's exactly the point: regular users don't care, so they won't consider Mastodon based on whether it can be trusted or not. For those who care Mastodon pretends to provide a trustworthy service, but in fact it's no better than Twitter or anything else. Even if current situation with moderation is better, it's the same as to advertise participating in some deadly stunt on the ground that "noone died yet". Where are the guarantees that an instance admin that is "out of patience" (you can find such example somewhere in comments here) would not decide to ban you from her instance in a bad mood?

But in practice small instances are better at this than large platforms, and in practice flexible moderation policies are pretty observably better at curbing abuse than ridged ones are. The point isn't that Mastadon is perfect, it's that it's better. In business, better is good enough.

A lot of people are OK with a middle ground where moderators remain, but are closely associated with their communities to reduce communication problems and increase their stake in doing a good job. Is it really crazy to believe that someone might want to trust other people, but also want to have more selection over who they trust?

You're here, so I would hazard a guess that you're OK with that middle ground too. HN admins could theoretically turn this site into 4Chan or Reddit if they wanted to. But we both trust them not to, and the fact that they theoretically have the power is not enough to make either of us throw up our hands and say, "well there's no difference, and nobody will care, and there's no reason for anybody post on HN instead of Reddit."

There are a lot of people here posting on a dedicated tech-community Reddit clone about why fringe Twitter is a bad idea.

Mastodon has literally no moderation tools. There is absolutely nothing to prevent impersonation or harassment.

That's incredibly inaccurate. There are a number of different tools available to users, and even more available to instance admins and moderators.

Source: I'm a moderator on anticapitalist.party. AMA.

significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub.

I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.

Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).

the point of mastodon communities is that they are not anarchic. The fact that they're human scaled and moderated is what allows them to impose sets of rules that actually make spending a few hours there palatable. (The same advantage that say, the smaller hackernews community has over a 500k population subreddit)

That's the advantage they have over twitter, they're able to set community rules that fit to the respective communities. It's twitter that suffers from the anarchy.

When twitter users are setting up filters and mass blocks to remove all the nazis and trolls and conspiracy theorists from their feed, they're essentially just trying to painfully recreate what you get in a mastodon sized community by design.

Can you give an example of mastodon community with clearly defined and legally binding policy, that protects rights of regular users? I could not find any (doesn't mean that they don't or cannot exist, of course) and highly doubt that any admin there has motivation or resources to develop it and properly implement. Pure declarations like "we are good fellas and don't allow abuse" mean nothing - they are not enforceable and regular user cannot sue instance admin for violations.

As a Mastodon instance admin, you just made an argument for me to never have a clearly-defined and legally-binding policy. Thanks.

The main thrust of my user agreement is "hi I am queer lady who is out of patience with people being jerks and wants a nice place to talk, if you piss me off you can go find a new instance or start your own". It's not much more formal than that, either.

Sounds more arbitrary and a lot worse than Twitter’s policy.

shrug

You want a more lawyer-like policy with tons of explicit rules for people to try and work around, then run it yourself.

You trust your admin to not screw you over the same way you trust, say, the people who run that chill coffeehouse you’re a regular at.

Coffeehouse is heavily regulated. There's consumer rights protection, all sorts of safety inspections etc. The only thing that requires your trust in a coffeehouse is the quality of their coffee and the only damage you'll get with the breach of that trust is the price of a cup. Being banned from a social network harms you more than that.

Spot on. I left Twitter (well left an auto bot behind) and took my live posts to Mastodon. It's so much more relaxing with masto.

Twitter has been banning people left and right. On Mastodon, you're in control. People care about that.

You're proving his point, count all the techie words you used in your comment, regular people don't know-care about all that.

Yes, that was technical. That's the stage we're in right now because AP is quite new. It will take a while for it to develop and mature to the point where interesting new use cases emerge for non-technical people. Personally I'm excited by the potential, even though all the answers aren't there and you have to use your imagination a bit.

To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business.

And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck.

Technology is not the solution to this problem.

> "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business.

I'd agree with 2/3rds of that. Mastodon is a technology, not a product, and it doesn't have a business model.

But that does not mean that it can't scale and grow—it means that it doesn't have any way to turn scaling and growing into money. email is a technology; javascript is a technology, the microchip is a technology. All of those technologies have seen tremendous growth, and none of them have made money (though products using them certainly have).

I suspect that, if Mastodon grows, it will be precisely because it is a technology, not a product. Making money isn't the only way to grow.

Further: I just looked at Mastodon.social.

No, my non-nerd friends do not wish to "Join the Federation!"

Not to knock what Mastodon are doing, rather to criticise the idea that it's a social network for everyone.

Personally I'm looking at using this with my small network of friends and family and could care less whether or not Kim K joins. What you can do here (and with other similar applications) is share things with your friends without ads and without your data being owned and sold by a corporation.

Only if all my friends and family are on it, and they'll want all their friends and family on it, and they'll want their friends and family... etc...

It's like the value of a social media platform is in lots of people being on it

It's a place you can go to talk with your friends and maybe make a few new ones, without constantly having things that show up that try to piss you off.

And as it grows maybe it starts to be a place where you have to go to find some of your friends. I mean, who the hell wants to be on Facebook any more? How many people still go there because that's where they can keep up with certain circles?

It's also a place you can run for your friends, and kick out anyone who comes in trying to start trouble.

We've got chill. We've got quiet. We've got a place to talk semi-publically without EVERY ASSHOLE INCLUDING A ZILLION BOTS being there, and we've got an overall structure that maybe makes it more likely for people to want to keep things civil.

Arguably, Twitter doesn't have much "regular users" either.

Most people have never logged in to Twitter, and have no idea how it works. Ask around among the normal people you know if they've ever posted there. A somewhat larger number will say they've used it to read messages from famous people but for most normal people, their Twitter consumption consists of media reports of what someone said on the platform.

As someone who uses Mastodon on a regular basis, I can tell you that it's usable right now, and that I have much better interactions there than anywhere else.

At the moment, Mastodon isn't Paris or London, and thankfully it isn't Las Vegas either. And that might actually be why it's such a nice place.

I see this as similar to a Windows vs Linux thing. Where as Mastodon might never be popular there's nothing to stop it existing. People can find their own communities however small and be content in those.

Regular people never used Linux and they still don't use Linux desktops. But there's still lots and lots of Linux desktop distros that people who use love. Not many people have genuine affection for using Windows, but when someone's installed their own distro they have genuine affection for using it. They'll donate hours and hours of their free time fixing issues.

People currently have genuine affection for using a mastodon instance. Genuine affection is a very powerful tool.

Honestly, to a first order, no regular people care about Twitter either. Only journalists, celebrities and a small cadre of tech folks who haven't quit yet still use Twitter. Twitter has only a tiny fraction of the users of Facebook or YouTube.

Has anybody tried business models on top of Mastodon/ActivityPub?

For example, a premium instance. Costs 100$ per month. Gives you 24/7 phone support, a free iPhone X, and the opportunity to toot exclusively to other premium users.

This might not be quite what you described, but masto.host is a hosting provider that specializes in providing managed hosting for Mastodon instances (and they charge way less than $100/month!)

You realize similar dissmissiveness was levied against Twitter before it took off.

It's hard to predict the fate of social networks.

What if I told you that twitter can have celebrity engagement tooling mastodon can be for people actually talking to other humans, and that these are other use cases artificially slammed together by Facebook and Twitter to try and monetize services that no user asked to monetize.

Sit on your high horse until the heat death of the sun, for all I care. But don't think anyone's not noticing you're posting and talking here instead of on a reddit. There is clearly some benefits to sub-selection and partially isolated communities.

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat.

This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/)

By that logic, what did Facebook offer that MySpace didn't? What did MySpace offer that a forum didn't? What did all of these provide that a lot newspaper didn't? A lot of these platforms brought things to the table that weren't direct product features. People are motivated by more than features, though a lot of tech people seem to feel otherwise.

No "regular" person liked Twitter, at least not until it got critical mass.

The entire point of Mastodon is to ensure there is no single instance that can control every other instance. Twitter has real issues. For instance, due to their inability to police truly awful behaviour (in the name of freedom of expression) there is no way of limiting the very worst excesses of the medium.

However, if you localize instances, then you allow people to gravitate to those instances they feel most free to join. It also allows instances to reject other instances they really don't want anything to do with - so Fosstodon would presumably block anything from Stormfront.

Frankly though, your idea of "fringe groups" is wrong - it will probably allow for SIGs. In fact, I'd say that Mastodon in that regard seems to be more like a distributed reddit than Twitter, only it basically emulates Twitter features and UI.

> I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"

That's a bit the selling point of pixiv's mastodon instance. Artists post their art there, including NSFW material and it is more aligned with local moral standards.

Now if you just want discover art it's a terrible tool (just like twitter is) compared to dedicate art hubs like pixiv or dA, but for following individual artists it seems to work.

Meh. I see your points, they are all valid and true.

Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.

You put a lot of trust into twitter dying, but don't seem to concede that inertia is a gigantic part of what holds twitter above water. Users are already too well established on twitter to leave even in the worst of times (see: facebook incidents), meaning I'm quite doubtful it will die in our entire lifetime let alone soon. Social networks haven't been around long enough to be able to tell whether dying is actually even possible for them.

Nobody among regular people cared about twitter at first either, and it was far from the first social media site.

I miss the old internet when we trusted each other enough to trade star wars cards by posting on forums and exchanging mailing addresses. If I tried to do that on today's internet I'd have a SWAT team show up to murder me. And not even because my star wars trades are bad, but because of my support of women's rights. When you have One Thing For Everything, all the wires get crossed. It sucks.

The place where the people AREN'T and the kylie jenners AREN'T is a perk of mastodon to some, not a flaw. It's like the tech nerd version of kids not using facebook because it's their parents' social network.

I just want to share cool pictures of my modular origami and not constantly be two degrees of separation from Trump's latest outrage

Boost!

Mastodon is quite big in Japan for some reason, also sex workers have started using Mastodon as a platform where they can express themselves freely.

Eventually, it could attract the masses.

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