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.
... 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.
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?
The instance you're on really generally doesn't matter as much as people on HN seem to think, and you can always move.
Good
>I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking
https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot
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.
And the situation is even worse for companies that are less tech-foward.