Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

If you want "Twitter" without ads, algorithmic feed manipulated by marketing, actual moderation, and actual community, I suggest joining a Mastodon[0] instance (and you probably already know people who are on the platform, making it easier to choose which instance ;)). It's kinda like using Twitter in 2007, but with way more features. For example, selective permissions per-"toot" ("followers only", or "unlisted" which makes it not show up on the public timeline, but still visible on your profile or to followers), content warning on toots (like a spoiler warning), full image description support, much longer posts...

Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.

Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)

[0] https://joinmastodon.org/

[1] https://nitter.net/

Last year, I throw some significant amount of time, energy, and dev focus to get into this; on the basis that I _wanted_ Mastodon to be a successful thing. To be specific, I've first spent around 2 weeks for "searching"/browsing (there's no search, only tags :/ ), seeking out acquaintances, and looking for topics/servers that would tickle my curiosity/insight senses.

There were none for me.

So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.

Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.

I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but

1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)

2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and

3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.

Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.

Ooh, thanks for posting this analysis. I'd been hazily feeling like I should check out Mastodon, but only for reasons of theory. Sounds like Metcalfe's Law applies here, though, so you've saved me a bunch of time.

“Personally I’m closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon.”

I did this and I don’t regret it.

This. I'm still on Twitter for lol content, but I can dump it at any moment. Mastodon is great.

Mastodon and federation is a very bad solution to the problem at hand and brings its own issues. There are benefits to centralization.

A good solution to this problem (and "growth and engagement" at large) is to make advertising-based business models less profitable (with better and enforced privacy regulation, more liability for the ads they run, or losing Section 230 protection for those who manipulate content's reach to maximize "engagement" as opposed to being a neutral communication platform where the user controls which content is shown to them, etc) so that businesses go back to the old model of the user paying for the service, aligning the incentives of the platform with what the users want.

I don't know anyone who uses Mastodon, and whenever I've tried it every instance seems barren. I would love to ditch Twitter though.

the problem with Nitter is you can see only one user's timeline, I want to see multiple users combined, then I can ditch Twitter site completely just for passive reading, but until then it's still more convenient with one account read multiple accounts in one timeline instead opening them one by one unless I'm missing something and Nitter allows combined timeline from multiple accounts

Nitter supports RSS - just add every account you want to follow as an RSS feed through Nitter.

it supports, but then you need to find RSS reader which will display those feeds in Twitter style, I tried and haven't found such reader

It would be much easier if they allowed to display mutliple accounts at same time, since they allow it separately anyway already

https://nitter.net/handle1,handle2,handle3,handle4

Wow, thanks a ton! Is there a limit to number of handles?

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