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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

First time I’m using Mastodon, and it’s incredibly slow. Is the app any faster than the web app?

Which instance are you on? Mastodon is decentralized, there may be servers that are overloaded whereas other are fast. Like email.

I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).

It's not one app, it's many servers, individually hosted. The one paulg chose appears to be slower than, say, the one I'm using:

https://mas.to/@paulg

https://mastodon.social/@terretta

This. I'm on the fosstodon.org server and it seems to be holding up pretty well. That's one reason I chose it: the people running it know what they're doing.

There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals, give them time or run your own instance and federate

> There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals

Again, Expecting non-techies to self-host their own instances after several of them falling over due to light usage and signups is quite wishful thinking and reiterates the need for users to heavily rely on more centralized instances to on board users.

Well all know what happened to mastodon.technology which was run by an individual. It doesn't look smart to sit on an instance that can barely handle hundreds of thousands of users signing up at once and ends up folding up.

> give them time or run your own instance and federate

Yeah, the journalists at journa.host has never been more alive for journalists and is going just great with a much better reach than Twitter [1] /s.

[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/

[1] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705

Decentrialized network doesn't mean every node is equal in size. Natural user behaviour will still aggregate onto a few larger servers. That's completely normal.

Mastodon wasn't meant to be a 100% replica of Twitter nor has it ever attempted to be. The only reason it's getting such a rapid influx of users is because of Elon's sabotage.

There are many Mastodon providers, just like there are many email providers.

How fast it is depends on the provider you use.

For some reason the link here points to the slowest Mastodon instance in the world. From the one I use (indieweb) it's quite fast:

https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to

That redirects to mast.to for me?

Mastodon servers are self-hosted by various groups or individuals so they aren't designed to be as scalable as Twitter. Today's events caused a large influx to pretty much every prominent server. A few ones I follow have announced they are either going down for maintenance or upgrading their servers already.

Mastodon is getting slammed by the twitter exodus, this is the first time it's being truly tested.

Depends on the instance. I have signed up in hachyderm.io and its okay

It's usually pretty fast for me, but I am also experiencing quite a bit of lag at the moment.

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