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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this one of the oldest discussions on Hacker News? Generally, I thought the reason you can't pay to use an arbitrary third party client on a locked-down service is that the most lucrative clients will disproportionately take advantage of that offer, which makes it hard to evolve the platform, and harder in the immediacy to monetize.

I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot.

Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore.

The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.

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> The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.

Tapbots are also building a Mastodon client called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/

Matteo Villa, maker of the Fenix Twitter client, is also working on a Mastodon client now (Woolly): https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1614888366033539072

It’s good to see that many (if not most) of these affected developers are already working on premium Mastodon clients.

>The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.

I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.

My Twitter TL is a ghost town, my Mastodon TL is... what my Twitter TL was 6 months ago, except better because ActivityPub does long posts.

Are you following the sec/Secops/crypto(graphy) space? I think those were missing from my twitter TL a few weeks ago (the last time i checked).

I think I have about 200 tweets on my Twitter timeline per one Mastodon toot. And the usability of Mastodon is so confusing that it's hard to see people moving. And brands have even less of a chance of moving, so I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking News or the official Steam Deck account there anytime soon.

I think that 200 tweets per toot metric may be accurate tho in my case it's closer to 20 (tools like Movetodon can help get you started).

The difference for me is that those 200 tweets are mostly about the same drama and the replies to every one of them are always full of trolls and genuinely shitty opinions havers (e.g. sports fan bunch of numbers insisting that the police should just shoot protestors) and somehow this stays the same even if I spend ten minutes every now and then just blocking those reply guys.

You can shout "echo chamber" all you want but the lower overall population and stricter crackdowns on trolls and defederation of dodgy instances certainly leads to less noise and more respectful interactions. I'll take one 1000 character reply I disagree with over 200 low-effort trolls and parroted culture war slogans.

Turns out the "public town square" is a much more pleasant space when it's not full of a billion people and their sock puppets shouting slurs at each other all day.

> [...]And the usability of Mastodon is so confusing that it's hard to see people moving

... multiple former-Twitter-app-developers are working on this problem right now. If the apps are user-friendly, it won't matter how esoteric the protocol or web interfaces are.

This might be one of those occasions that we'll look back and wonder why Elon chose to intentionally stepped on this particular rake. Filed under "unintentional first-order consequences". I have a feeling these individually small rebellions will snowball into something fierce.

>If the apps are user-friendly, it won't matter how esoteric the protocol or web interfaces are.

Considering how bad Mastodon itself is to use, I don't have a ton of belief. And I personally have a hard time figuring out how you can make Mastodon user-friendly. Like, what server is Ivory going to default new users to?

Since every is a paid user they should start their own instance

> Like, what server is Ivory going to default new users to?

The instance you're on really generally doesn't matter as much as people on HN seem to think, and you can always move.

>brands have even less of a chance of moving

Good

>I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking

https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot

Not official, but why does it matter?

>Not official, but why does it matter?

Given that it hasn't posted since 2021, I'd say that it matters.

There's obviously the issue of trust when it comes to unofficial sources masquerading as official.

Not much has happened since 2021 really.

I mean, I’m not sure about that; a number of newspapers have mastodon accounts (one or two have instances), and BBC’s always been pretty tech forward.

Isn't it concerning if the BBC is tech-forward and is not on Mastodon?

And the situation is even worse for companies that are less tech-foward.

shrug Not particularly, no. It's tech-forward, but it's not _fast_. I'd be surprised if they're not at least looking at it internally, but things take time.

It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum worth reading. You need the right 100s.

If the argument is that it's "the future", you kinda do.

You can have millions across the fediverse. You don't need to see all those millions on any given instance. Fediblocks are good actually and while some complain about "discoverability", the filter bubble[0] actually disincentivizes the kind of attention-seeking disruption that "engagement driven" platforms like Twitter have ended up optimizing for.

[0]: I'm using the term somewhat sarcastically as the filter is just about whom you follow, not about which views you agree with. If you follow a diverse enough crowd you'll still be exposed to views you may disagree with simply because you follow persons, not topics.

It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum. You need the right 100s.

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