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Comment by ohtwenty | Hacker News Reader

You make a good point (and one that's being worked on being overcome, better onboarding and whatever).

But consider twitter:

>Compare that to getting started on Twitter: pick a username and password, boom, done!

And then what? follow some celebs? Figure out if you know anyone? On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking. I've seen many people be surprised that within an hour or two on mastodon they've had more and better interactions than years on twitter. The experience once you're there tends to be quite good (from my completely unbiased and scientific viewpoint, of course)

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> On mastodon you can use the local feed to find people interested in the same subjects (or same culture), and then you start talking.

People have no problem doing the same thing on Twitter.

Wait, so once you've overcome the off-putting insanely technical (who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?) onboarding, mastodon is a lot better?

It does not make an iota of difference.

>who in their right mind thinks about "servers" outside of tech circles?

the way a lot of subreddits are used, for example, is intuitive enough to people who get used to the concept. 'servers' or 'instances' as a word might be too technical, but the concept of different groups you join, while still being able to talk to others? Of course my experience is 99% people who have persisted and joined, but they seem to enjoy it.

Mostly because you join, you think "this is confusing but I've arrived" and there's a few hundred people on the same instance who are interested in similar things, who know people from other instances who have similar interests, etc. I think it might help build a network quicker (or at least, that's what I've heard from a lot of newer people that have joined since I've been there!)

But you can only create your account on one server. It feels limiting compared to subreddits, which you use a centralized account to subscribe to several.

You can follow anyone on any other Mastodon server with that one account, so it's basically the same. That's what the federation is for.

I had to stop using Reddit with the recent redesign. There's no way to get at a community you like without being stuck on the platform. The growing ActivityPub ecosystem is different. I can hop over to another instance and still talk to the same people.

I can't do that with /r/DaystromInstitute. It's lost to me because I don't want to deal with Reddit. Maybe it's less intuitive--and I think nerds give average users way too little credit--but I prefer it to losing access to a community over platform decisions.

To combine what two sister comments said: you can create multiple, but you can follow people anywhere. So you don't _need_ to create multiple, but you could. Like subreddits. Some people have their "meme/funny stuff" account for reddit, and a nsfw one, and a 'news/serious stuff' account. Likewise you _could_ do that all from one account, but you don't need to.

You can have multiple accounts on multiple servers.

The general public already understands that one can have multiple email providers. Maybe just word this better, but I don't think the concept itself is that hard to understand.

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