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Comment by ergonaught | Hacker News Reader

I've taken to suggesting people read https://mastodon.help/ before they bother. It's not perfect, either, but I like to kid myself that it helps avoid the "I DEMAND THAT THIS BE LIKE TWITTER" thing.

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That page looks very helpful!

I giggled at them trying to explain Mastodon, though:

> There is no such thing as a social network called Mastodon! Instead there are thousands of independent social networks called Mastodon Instances.

...three paragraphs later...

> When we say “Mastodon” we mean the whole network of Mastodon Instances

I know what they were going for, but it seems to undercut itself. :)

They do that kind of gymnastics because they can't have (pawoo.net and) mstdn.jp and half of top instances[0] by post counts to be representative of the name. That will kind of push the platform into where Twitter is, just later, maybe following NovelAI.

0: https://fediverse.space/instances

yah, there's no instance called Mastodon, Mastodon we can consider at the meta transcendent level of the universe of instances. The union of each essentially.

I find much the same mindset among many Windows users who try to switch themselves over to Linux. They come in expecting Linux (a Unix alike) to be exactly like a "free Windows", which it simply is not and never was but that's what they think it is for some reason. I always make it a point to explain up front that Linux is an entirely different operating system, and while there will be similarities that will be immediately obvious, Linux is not a Windows-alike, and there will be learning and adapting involved. Folks who go into such changes knowing what to expect tend to cope far better with the differences than those expecting something to be an identical clone of what they're already familiar with. I assume the same likely holds true here as well. Those who go in expecting exactly Twitter, but free and distributed / decentralized are going to be sorely disappointed, but those going into it knowing to expect differences won't be caught by surprise the first time they are confronted with something that doesn't operate exactly as they thought it would.

There's one more https://fedi.tips

This is the website that i share with folks who are new to the Fediverse.

I checked it hopefully... But it's basically a small book, or at least the huge TOC makes it look that way. I don't think I would share that with someone unless they're really interested in mastodon.

Is there a summary that can be read <5 minutes?

Don't worry, it's not that long. Most of the sections are a couple of paragraphs at most, not an entire page's worth of content.

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