Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

People have written whole books on how to use twitter. There's a whole generation that needed this kind of introduction to make sense of it, when it was relatively new.

Every time a twitter thread gets posted on HN, there's at least one comment on how difficult it is to read it, for one reason or another.

View on HN

Are you serious? It took me 5 minutes to spin up twitter and post a shitty twit. It took me half an hour to get mastodon and i still dont know what it is, other than a distributed clone of twitter with unlimited powers given to server owners.

Yeah, I don't get the big deal at all. I self-host a Pleroma instance, it took me about 10 minutes of doc-reading to set it up - similar complexity to the IRC bouncer I set up a while back. And if you don't want to self-host, you just sign up to an existing instance.

The threading mechanics of twitter took me a non-trivial amount of time to get my head around.

You are not the average person. This is basically alien language to someone who isn’t tech savvy, which makes it a non starter.

I'm using technical language because I'm on HN.

"You visit a website (or install an app) and you create an account with an email address and password" is something the average person is used to. The UX will be confusing at first - there are new concepts to learn. People will figure it out.

You seem to be out of touch with what the non-technical web users. Practically none will read and implement the stuff in their documentation in 10 minutes.

Even if some do, most of those will run into a tiny random roadblock and will give up.

Nothing as "techy" as Mastodon or the one you mentioned will be adopted at the scale of Twitter.

I suppose if the goal is to emulate irc servers but for short twits then depending on who owns a server and how well they keep things on topic then it could work. Say a mastodon thingie for software developers, than bans any politics or crypto would be nice to have. Ideally something that search engines can index so we dont silo knowledge. I think, i still dont know what this is.

There's a huge difference. Books can be written about Twitter, but you don't need to read any to use it.

The Mastodon registration comes to a halt for many already at the server selection page where you are presented with topics (why?) and list of instances. There should be a default choice in the express signup for people who don’t care about instances at all.

Exactly this. Also, servers should not be topic oriented. Imagine that email services did something like that: "it's email for plumbers and it's plumbers you talk mostly with here"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com