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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events.

And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's really extremely usable.

I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.

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Yeah, I run a Mastodon server, registrations are open, and it's never gone down. What I see mostly are people coming over from Twitter and making a go of it. Some bounce, most stay, and some vastly prefer it.

Part of the trick is moving over communities. You don't need the world and its dog. It's working already. It's replaced Twitter for me, and then some.

The pessimism here on HN is bizarre! Isn't this what so many people wanted?

> The pessimism here on HN is bizarre!

This has been my experience on HN in general, though I recognize I've been part of the problem. It's really easy to dump on things and feel smart.

Remember how pessimistic they were about Reddit? And some other successful startups? Someone made a full list of the predictions that were completely off once... No idea how to find that but it's out there.

HN has become The Establishment, it skews older, and thus is extremely skeptical of any change to the comfortable status quo. It's of course supremely ironic in a community that (originally) represented the Silicon Valley startup culture of Disrupt Everything.

> Silicon Valley startup culture

The answer might lay in that, I guess. Mastodon isn't much of a venture capital opportunity. No startup in the space is likely to return billions.

So true. SV-types have been so conditioned to look for the monetization angle and the fediverse has been designed and built to be the direct opposite of that. I think a lot of people are so busy looking for the fame and the money that they miss the point.

It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had scaling up in the first few years of it's life.

Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of years past.

> It's competing against present day Twitter

Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because it's better than the alternative right now.

How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.

Maybe I could pose this question another way, what does Twitter do that Mastodon can't?

If you want to give somebody your handle, you say "@elonmusk," instead of saying "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".

(I didn't think Horseshoe Theory would bring back bangpaths, but here we are.)

Personally I believe a big central silo for so-called public discussions is a terrible idea, but I do understand there is some value to it. However, there will always be a problem with this sort of thing because a very large number of people are morons and/or scolds, and they seem to have a lot of free time.

> If you want to give somebody your handle, you say "@elonmusk," instead of saying "@elonmusk@mast.don.vanity.tld".

People seem to be using e-mail just fine…

Do they? I regularly have people think I work at their company when I tell them my email is <theircompanyname>@<mydomain.tld>. People try an add a ".com" to my 5 letter gTLD, and try and add a ".au" to any "@gmail.com" address.

Normal people struggle pretty hard with email. Or at least a fairly significant portion of them. Giving them something that looks like an email, doesn't work as one, and includes an additional @ sounds like a tech support nightmare.

They're not bang paths, but rather the standard user@host of email. Imagine the absurdity of arguing "if you want to give someone your screenname, you just say SteveCase instead of having to say stevecase@example.com"

What I don't get is why all of these services with the similar format have to adopt their own quirky address formatting, rather than piggybacking on the same format as email. I should be able to just tell people that I'm "someone@example.org", and have that work for email/matrix/mastondon/etc (and be autodiscovered!) with the appropriate hosting setup.

This is much more difficult for normal users.

You'd need to set up your domain of example.org to have some form of SRV or TXT record to say "example.org" points to "mastodon.social", or even records per user if you wanted granularity.

You could also use .well-known or other domain verification/pointer methods. However if I'm joe@gmail.com, how does another user on mastodon know how to contact me? Where is my home server?

Someone could maintain a centralised lookup DB with auth to show you own the address (and I believe Matrix allows for that optionally), however isn't that the opposite of what the fediverse is meant to be?

It only looks difficult because the custom has not been created for advanced users, to then trickle down into functionality for basic users.

If you own a domain, you or your registrar configures the appropriate A/SRV/TXTs to point services at your chosen service provider, just like is already done. If you use something like Gmail, then you're looking at Google to run a Mastodon server or at least a stub redirection server.

On the other hand, your per-server handles can be much shorter. For example, @tim@apple.com vs @TimCook. This also comes with built-in verification; @TimCook@freerobux.com is probably fake.

A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is another question.

For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being closed.

Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all media attached to your toots. I think this point is a big deal. Your content simply isn't safe on Mastodon.

Mastodon has poor on-boarding. You need to pick an instance which a normie doesn't understand. Further, it has no (good) algorithms for recommended content, followers, finding people you already know. You have to bolt and stitch things together. This too is a massive issue in the age of Tiktok, where even the effort of lifting a finger is too much. I think organically building up your feed is actually great, but you have to understand that the HN audience is not the same as the masses.

Mastodon has no consistent moderation. Yes, you could argue neither has Twitter, but it's still consistent-enough compared to Mastodon, where you're at the helm of whichever volunteer runs the instance. Not necessarily an issue for middle-of-the-road conversations, but still a difference.

Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point: Mastodon isn't designed for drama. Twitter is hyper optimized for it. It's quite the culture shock for some.

> Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens.

it's super debatable. i take it most of your Twitter experience is through the website/app, rather than following links posted in chats/elsewhere.

i run a Pleroma server. anything from anyone i follow by default gets replicated locally. if/when those servers go offline, accounts get suspended, etc: the content is still viewable to me.

> Mastodon has poor on-boarding.

Twitter has poor on-boarding. post something as a new user? nobody will ever see it. on Mastodon? any instance < 1k users will have a decent chunk browsing the local timeline and you'll get a few interactions. and a lot of instance admins will "boost" first-time posters specifically to help them with onboarding.

in general though, yes: growing any social circle takes time: in person, or online. there's no real way to speedrun that.

> Lastly, and this is perhaps the most twisted point: Mastodon isn't designed for drama.

at this point it's clear you're playing the "shoot down the new tech" angle, rather than honestly evaluating the two on equal footing.

I feel like you give too little credit to the "normies". My 92 year-old grandmother figured out how to join plenty of forums for her birdwatching and knitting and whatnot hobbies (classic phpBB style things). Choosing an instance is no more complicated than that, but you get the added bonus of being able to interact with the other forums, too.

I suspect we disagree on what a normie is.

I do a lot of tech support for the elderly in my family and they don't grasp concepts a hundred times simpler than a server/instance, and they're in their 70s. It's not an age thing, it's an education thing. The vast majority of the world is lowly educated.

Besides tech skills, the additional issue is that some people are entitled. They reject any service that adds friction, since they're used to zero friction. The Tiktok effect.

Allow users to signup in 3 seconds without "choosing a server".

I'm a server admin; I think there's merit to this thought. There is an initial hump.

We don't want to dump users randomly into a small server because the community aspect is much stronger there. Thus, we should dump them into a big server -- perhaps a randomly selected one, from a list of general-purpose trusted servers (ideally democratically selected, but for now JoinMastodon.org seems to be fine).

Then, encourage people to move to smaller instances, and make it easier to do so. It's currently too hard. I moved because I was envious of smaller server's interesting public timelines which catered more to my interests.

Last I checked, Twitter required SMS phone number verification for all new accounts. That takes a lot longer than 3 seconds, not to mention the privacy invasion.

No, twitter does not require a phone verification.

In theory, it doesn't. But actually, if I try to make an account without a phone number, it will be immediately flagged as "suspicious" and demand phone number confirmation to be unlocked.

People seem to sign up to email just fine.

People will still say the same thing at 80 million accounts that they say at 8. It's easy to be reflexively pessimistic. It's hard to try and see the potential, or even admit the last thousand predictions of doom all the way back to when Mastodon was one server were wrong.

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