Musk's idea is to piss off 10% of the left and right of the spectrum and keep the middle 80% happy.

The left 10% will hang out on Mastodon or Fediverse, the right 10% will go on Gab or whatever. I think what's happenning is great for all. You do you™.

For what it's worth, it doesn't to me.

Discussing Mastodon is hardly "forced" when the overall topic is a new decentralized alternative to Twitter, since Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter that's been around for a while.

It seems unlikely that this is astroturf given that the person who posted it has been on HN for over a decade (though admittedly not super-active) and their comments are on a wide range of topics and not just Twitter or Mastodon.

That could be a hint to reflect on your thought process

Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.

this is written as if you don't understand federated services.

How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it?

Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.

Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.

> Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

Why is lack of moderation a problem on Mastodon?

Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow, that creates a responsibility to moderate (plus they need to keep the advertisers happy).

The Mastodon timeline is direct follows. If I see some stuff I don't like, I can talk with that person or simply unfollow them.

Mastodon has plenty of moderation: every instance has it's own people, when questionable content makes its way from a non moderated instance to others, the moderators of the others can moderate it. If an instance receives moderation requests from the rest of the fediverse and doesn't act on it, it eventually gets defederated.

Having a process that distributes the load of moderation is better, IMNHO, than piling all that work on underpaid people.

What about me, who never used Twitter and wont use this either? Did I make a bubble because I don't want people to challenge my opinions? How many tweets do I need to read a day until I have sufficiently challenged my opinions?