Comment by ohtwenty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohtwenty | Hacker News Reader

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>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.

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.

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.

You can have multiple accounts on multiple servers.

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.

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