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Comment by r2222 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand what’s the point to this federation thing, other than to offer bad user experince. Shouldn’t “decentralized” be like the number 30 in the long list of things a popular/fun social platform should aspire for, not the number one?

I swear I’ve tried to find an instance but either the focus of the instance is too specific, has only couple dozen people, or doesn’t accept new members because there’s too much of them.

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Mastodon was not made for the moment when Twitter collapsed. It was made as an alternative to (a fully working) Twitter for people who hated the toxic environment. So all of their marketing materials and onboarding process are geared toward helping the kinds of people who transition off Twitter to understand the benefits.

Now that Mastodon is being portrayed by the media as the escape hatch from Twitter for a broader audience, they'll probably start focusing more on making the onboarding process clearer and their marketing less techy-focused.

Yeah I understand that now. I’ve learned a lot about Mastodon in these days and it’s not that bad really. I just had this choice-paralysis as I had this idea that I’d have to pick ONE and that’s it. Kinda like if when joining Reddit you’d have to pick just one subreddit and stick with it.

The big revelation was that it doesn’t matter that much.

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