Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

You mean, other than Mastodon, which has a few million users and growing.

Mastodon is proof at least that federation doesn't fix the issue of censorship. There's a common ban list in Mastodon that if you don't include, you will not be able to join the "main" Mastodon cluster.

And if your not part of the main group, what's even the point of federation? It's practically "servers" at that point.

It does fix the issue of censorship, in that 'blacklisted' instances can still have a world of their own and use the technology or protocol.

No amount of technology is going to fix the 'a majority of people don't like you or interact with you' problem though.

> Mastodon is proof at least that federation doesn't fix the issue of censorship. There's a common ban list in Mastodon that if you don't include, you will not be able to join the "main" Mastodon cluster.

That's nonsense.

I run my own instance and don't use any sort of ban list, and I can interact just fine with both the "main" instances, and a whole host of smaller, more niche, instances.

Well I'm really glad that that trusted circle of instances exists, I don't want anti-Semitism or racism in my timeline. So far octodon.social has been a step up from twitter for me, because it isn't designed to monetize outrage. The model where admins have to police their community or risk being de-federated with the mainstream means that an instance is limited to the scale they can effectively moderate, which is exactly where other social media platforms break for me.

So basically Mastodon is moderated in exactly the same way as Twitter, with the same set of rules. How is Mastodon more interesting than Twitter then?

the only way you can imagine something like Twitter being more interesting is more content Twitter prohibits?

it's more interesting because the UX encourages different styles of posting (no QRTs for dunks, for one) that people are developing into slightly different social idioms. also no ads, chrono timeline, pick your own image crops...

>There's a common ban list in Mastodon that if you don't include, you will not be able to join the "main" Mastodon cluster.

I run my own instance. As far as I can tell, this is false. There are some ban lists floating around, though I'm yet to see a common, standard policy of blocking instances because they don't subscribe to a particular blocklist.

My grandma will never use Mastodon, but she uses Facebook. Tech isn’t the only audience you need.

I think tech is a tiny minority on Mastodon. From what I can see there are far more queer folk and lefty ppl. Your grandma will never use Mastodon because there are no network effects luring her there, but the UX is about as good as a normal centralized social site.

sorry, but your grandmother doesn't have a few hundred thousand to a few million followers.

media organizations, pols, and public sector institutions do. Your grandma doesn't need to use Mastodon and it's not about her. It's about those who will be followed and have something important to transmit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com