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Comment by peterweyand | Hacker News Reader

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease of use a critical mass of users won't be possible so it won't ever be anything other than a niche product.

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Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.

Are there stats on how much of the network uses managed hosts like MastoHost? That sounds like a giant target.

It's nice that they allow off-migration and don't lock your community in.

I don't think it a large proportion; the vast majority of users are on a few large instances such as Mastodon.social which are not via MastoHost. The owner also stated he would not want to host more than a 4th of all instances

https://masto.host/the-25-percent-commitment/

We will likely migrate to our own cloud setup once size gets stable.

Related to this: fedi.monster is a good alternative provider too.

Yeah, people are using it. Infosec.exchange and fosstodon.org are pretty busy now. I’m on a smaller instance (but still like 10K users) called ioc.exchange and that’s pretty good too (obviously they all link to each other, but I’ve found it is good to be on a server with a fairly interesting ‘local’ feed to have a look through when not much is happening with the people you follow).

I’m in Australia and a lot of people have moved from Twitter to a server called aus.social, so if I was going to tell friends or relatives to get on Mastodon I wouldn’t probably direct them to sign up to that specific Mastodon server, not just say “you should use Mastodon” and then expect them to work it out. That one has a lot more rules than the infosec ones though.

The concept of federation is definitely complicated for most people. Even I dont completely understand the intricacies despite running a mastodon instance myself (link in profile).

However, you can have large general purpose instances which do not have to depend on federation to deliver the value of a network like twitter. Additionally, mastodon itself has grown by leaps and bounds in making the UX easier for the average user familiar to twitter/facebook.

I think its only a question of time before you have large general purpose mastodon instances where users dont have to grapple with federation and the UX becomes familiar for the layman. But at the same time there is space for smaller community focussed instances if someone wants to take their tribe with them.

I think the answer a few weeks ago was ‘no’, but that’s changing. At this point most of the people I followed on Twitter have migrated. Now, I followed mostly tech people, lawyers, and cat and bird photo twitters; someone who uses twitter to follow celebrities may have a different experience. (I do also get the impression that Irish twitter moved maybe quicker that most twitter quasi-communities)

If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening.

Quoting someone sad

Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt

I hope they can handle it well.

I have been using it for a while, and it's pretty good. Only people who want to use it are on it. The feeling of community is real.

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