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Comment by captainbland | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is growing on me. These big ol' VC driven social media giants are all overgrown and the cracks are showing. With mastodon, if one instance screws up, just go to another and still contact friends. I can even choose an instance with the economic and decision making model of my choosing, or run one myself and just engage with the federation on my own terms.

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>just go to another and still contact friends

the only problem is that you can only have friends of the type of people that use Mastodon

are you sure this is not actually an advantage

It is and it isn't. I imagine your humor implies that technical people are using Mastadon, ie the same type that would be using HN, but the reality is that while that is true, Twitter "rejects" are also using Mastadon. Sometimes this means communities filled with very.. controversial people.

Yeah again I guess this is the choice isn't it? Those communities spring up everywhere, but instances can still block one-another. I'd say it's better to have a choice of moderation style than one grand overseer.

>It is and it isn't. I imagine your humor implies that technical people are using Mastadon, ie the same type that would be using HN, but the reality is that while that is true, Twitter "rejects" are also using Mastadon. Sometimes this means communities filled with very.. controversial people.

Mastodon being federated, though, means that while the controversial people may be using it, the rest of the Mastodon-Verse doesn't need to interact with them.

The big trouble with Twitter is that if those people want to harass you, you as a user have very little choice but to sit there and take it.

So my mom and aunt wont be on it? Sign me up

Yeah, exactly. Look at the content Facebook wants you to see. Would you rather consume that?

Have you met people on twitter?

Have you met people?

Much like here, where I only talk to the kind of person who would sign up for Hacker News. Oh, wait... that’s a good thing.

Mastodon will go nowhere unless they fix their branding and user experience first.

Thing is, I've seen performance issues on some of the instances out there. Also, the UI could use a lot of work before it goes mainstream.

That's like saying "I've seen performance issues on websites", of course someone can have poor resourcing on their own servers — I think the biggest barrier for Mastodon is understanding how instances aren't individual monoliths and your choice can directly impact everything you do.

Fail Whale on line three.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

Yeah but Mastadon has to compete with Twitter, which already works pretty well. To go mainstream, they'll need to do better.

Mastodon has no burn rate. It can improve incrementally and snipe valued users.

>just go to another

Does Mastadon have a way to migrate your posts/followers/etc from one instance to another?

You can only contact friends from other instances if your instance hasn't blocked the other instance.

Also most instances are everything but free speech friendly. I don't understand where the improvement over Twitter is. It's a Twitter clone with fewer users, a more complicated UX, and where you can get banned faster.

My impression when I looked into Mastodon was that it doesn't solve any of the issues with Twitter. It's just a bunched of servers owned by different entities, I doubt this will scale socially and technologically

Well it's choice. That's what it gives you. No more, no less, really.

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