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Comment by 627467 | Hacker News Reader

If this was positioned as "20usd/year mastodon account on our cool instance and - BTW - you get free webpage and email forwarding" would get much closer to the audience.

I sense the point of this funny domain is the community, and community is centered on mastodon instance which btw, is not cheap to run as soon as it grows beyond a few hundred people. (I'm including potential moderation costs)

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I think you are overestimating how many people care about Mastodon

I think you're probably underestimating how many people are going to care about Mastodon.

I think we should average out what you are both estimating.

This. Reminds me of [1]. Although I never finished reading it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

I think you could be underestimating it. I’d guess there’s a simmering level of interest among a lot of people, especially those more conscious of moving away from big tech / corporate platforms. FWIW, this tipped me over the edge into setting up a Mastodon account — it was very painless. We’ll see whether I actually start using Mastodon, but it’s a start.

They have grown from 300K monthly active users to 2.5M in December. Nothing compared to social networks at large, crazy numbers compared to the omg.lol user base.

If it was advertised as mastodon I would close the webpage. I have 0 interest in it and I don’t know anyone in my direct tech circle who is on it.

You really have no interest in the concept of a non-corporate / non–billionaire-controlled Twitter? Not trying to bait you, but genuinely curious on your stance.

I believe the issue for many people is not the "non-corporate / non-billionaire-control" part, and more the "twitter" part. It may sound weird to people who use twitter, but much of the world don't have the slightest interest in the concept.

It makes no difference if the person controlling it is a billionaire good guy or bad guy. The result is the same. If you go down the route of mastodon then all you’re doing is segregation.

In scenario A you pool people together into 1 big void and everyone gets angry and both sides consider each other wrong.

In scenario B you segregate people into groups of opinions where the moment your opinion differs you’re kicked from that group.

Either way we are long past the time when you could have an educated conversation and debate.

I have no desire to join a void with single opinions and nothing to discuss.

The whole point of federated activitypub servers is the opposite of segregation - everyone gets to use whatever server they want and they can still interact with anyone else. Servers blacklisting each other (or defederating) is possible of course, but nothing's stopping you from just joining another server, and twitter at this point is just a large defederated mastodon instance anyway.

Server black listing can be copied so servers can get blocked before they are even listed. If an admin doesn’t like you and you get banned then you have to rebuild your social circle. You could host your own but really who wants to do that?

You're misunderstanding the concept of Mastodon.

Not parent commenter but; I personally don't have any interest in what you described. Especially when it's something like mastodon, which is inferior in almost every aspect.

- All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion. - I don't want to maintain and pay for a personal instance - On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers. - Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform. - With these inconveniences (that are not easy to solve without centralization), it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream. It requires a certain level of tech-saviness. Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.

I would be interested in an alternative to Twitter but in its current state, Mastodon isn't that.

>when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow. Too much friction for a simple and one of the most important actions of the platform.

I get that is quite a UX/UI problem. However, given what is now known about FAANG and big tech corp, I would rather have my data unreliable and use bad UX/UI for online exchange then to use the mainstream big corp platforms. Personally I don't want to be a product.

What recent information about FAANG (and presumably Twitter) pushed you over the edge? Genuine question in case it comes across sharp, for all those except Netflix I haven't respected their business practices or ethics for at least a decade.

The UI/UX problems of Mastodon really are due to the federation model, they aren't inevitable when moving away from a corporate walled garden. Bit of a dead horse on HN, but RSS really does most of what Mastodon does better, throw in WebMentions and you have all the social features too. To the original thread here, it's be very cool to see indieweb support on omg.lol since everyone gets a subdomain and webpage already!

Not disagreeing with you that there is an amount of friction at the moment. However, just to provide some counterpoints:

> All clients are straight up bad but this is mostly personal opinion.

There are a _lot_ of new clients in active development right now. I'm on the private alpha of Ivory by Tapbots (who built the popular Tweetbot client), and it's quite good.

> On public instances there is always the risk of the admins deciding not to run it anymore without notice. In that case you lose all your followers.

Agreed that this is an issue, but there are ways around it. I'm a member of a coop-run instance, social.coop.

> Due to how it's designed; some things are very inconvenient. For example; when I click a link to someone's profile on the internet, I can't see if I follow them or not unless they are on my server. Then I have to copy their url, go to my instance, search and follow.

Agreed, but most clients resolve this.

> it's imho impossible for it to go mainstream.

Strong disagree - I think it's already going mainstream, and lots of non-tech people are picking it up every day.

> Even the concept of "choosing an instance" is confusing for most people. I don't want to just follow or be followed by techbros and edgy artists. I like having normal converstaions with regular people.

Agreed, but this is resolved by just picking one of the big, popular instances. I was on universeodon.com first, and was immediately having "normal" conversations with "regular" people.

Again, your comment absolutely rightfully points out that there _is_ friction there. However, I don't think it's at all insurmountable, and I think it will continue to improve and gain traction.

I generally agree, but Mastodon is getting a lot of dev attention right now due to the Twitter problems, and while FOSS tends to improve slower and more incrementally, it also tends to only improve (as opposed to user-hostile pivots and so forth). For this use case, I'd rather use a clunky service that'll be around for the rest of my life than a slick one that might get bought by Elon Jr or whoever.

Not the parent commenter, but mastodon is not appealing if you want a large audience.

This assumes "I" had interest in Twitter at some point.

I don't use mastodon but would love all the rest of it.

All of it is already available on the web, often on a variety of hosts, though

The service has been around for years, the real die-hards are actually on the IRC (which recently got a tie-in with a Discord server for those who want to chat on there without having the technical knowhow to use IRC).

I personally got it for the webpage, to use as an online business card, and have been loving all of the other stuff that surrounds it like the new Weblog feature

I would have no interest if it was "mastodon-centered"

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