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Comment by hitpointdrew | Hacker News Reader

I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.

Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand. You are either looking for an echo chamber that is tightly censored like twitter used to be (congrats on keeping your ignorance and refusing to listen to the other side all while virtue signaling how open and tolerant you are, when really you are just blowing smoke up your own ass), or you are going to end up a platform that has hardly any censorship at all and allows all the shit you are so mad about that is now back on Twitter.

>To kill it in the same way Reddit killed Digg

Reddit didn't kill Digg, Digg shot themselves in the head.

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Mastodon doesn't necessarily have less moderation, it just has a different set of knobs to tweak to accomplish the act of moderation.

The decentralized/federated architecture makes it simple for admins of instances to ban whichever other instances they see fit. In practice, this means that it's effectively easier to ban unsavory users of certain undesirable types, since they tend to congregate on the same instances.

On top of that, there are traditional ban controls at both the user and admin level.

I've been a Mastodon user since 2017 and I've found it pretty good with respect to moderation and unwanted content. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the instances I've chosen, though.

Mastodon has way more moderation than Twitter, actually. And way better moderation, too. Rather than one universal moderation rulebook there is one set of rules for each instance. And the moderators themselves? In Mastodon land it's members of the community itself, not some poor peon who hates their life and has no connection to the community. I.e. Mastodon uses the original forum moderator model. Don't like the moderation rules? Move instance. (Mastodon makes it easy to do this while maintaining most of your followers). Instance getting too big to moderate? Redirect registrants to some other instance, or assign more moderators from your own community. It's grassroots. It works. It draws from a culture of moderation and community that has existed for thousands of years. Twitter's global town hall doesn't work. No global town hall has ever worked. Empires, monopolies, despots, all sooner or later crumble. Even with a few periods of one-size-fits-all thinking, technology and society always tends towards smaller, interoperable units (think email, phone networks, balkanisation, the web at large, the massive tree of human languages). It may take 5-10 years, but twitter will either fall or get broken down into a federated service itself.

> I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.

It's even more hilarious that the false predictions like this one [0] and exaggerations of Twitter completely collapsing didn't happen.

> Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand.

Well, only the techies here are still pretending that Mastodon is a viable replacement to Twitter when Mastodon is the one losing users [1] because of the same fundamental issues, including less moderation - A inefficient and worse version of Discord.

Just wait until some instances get bought out by companies because of the number of users a 'moderator' has under their belt to sell the instance over. [2] So much for 'Social networking that's not for sale.".

The 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still didn't care to move to something even worse.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...

[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...

> Just wait until some instances get bought out by companies

And then what? You can still use Mastodon, you don't need that company's instance in order to send a message. Mastodon was designed so that, in this express situation, the entire network does not collapse. Twitter did not anticipate it early enough.

People are certainly misplacing their hopes in Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. That's not Mastodon's fault or problem, though. It's a framing device that sets people up for disappointment, and then sends them back to HN/Twitter/Facebook to complain again.

Twitter is certainly doing fine, but that's because betting against the intelligence of the average Twitter user is always a winning bet. Who knows though, maybe one day the internet at-large will learn that trusting a private entity with significant cultural presence always ends bad. Maybe once YouTube capsizes.

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