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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

It's a solid improvement but the move from Twitter to Mastodon is not happening[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34693037

Twitter's replacement will not look like MySpace -> Facebook. It will look like the decline of Craigslist. It will still be here a decade from now, but people will have moved on from a number of different types of reliances on Twitter to a number of different other options.

Mastodon will be one part of that.

I guess it depends who you follow. Most iOS Developers I followed on Twitter have all migrated to Mastodon, as well as many indie game devs. My Mastodon feed is actually significantly more interesting these days than Twitter. For fun I just logged into Twitter and the first 20 tweets I looked at in the "For you" tab were from brand accounts, major media accounts, sponsored tweets, suggested accounts, and tweets others have liked. Over half were from accounts I don't follow. The "Following" tab was entirely brand accounts and media accounts.

The point of Mastodon is not for everyone from Twitter to move there.

True, and good point.

It’s also completely counter to the popular narrative of people who now hate Musk (but lately used to love him).

Let’s not pretend that Twitter hate has anything to do with technology or intended uses.

The point of Mastodon is that it allows for diversity of opinion (even in the meta-level - opinion as to what's allowed/not).

Some want to find their Twitter peeps on Mastodon. You're free to feel othewise.

Our statements are in 100% agreement.

Your comment is tangential at best to the topic at hand. This does not belong in this discussion.

What's the point of automatically finding Mastodon profiles if they're either not there or not posting?

You're assuming that Mastodon users are all Twitter refugees. I assure you, this is not the case.

I know that after initial influx, Mastodon is losing momentum and activity. Both from the article linked and my own experience.

Theoretically, Mastodon could tap some previously untwitterized microblogging niche but I haven't seen that.

my timeline there's is very active, and interact more with my posts than on Twitter. But thanks for your opinion

This changes nothing about my original comment. Whether Mastodon is popular or not, growing or shrinking, "Twitter light," or microblogging-fed is entirely irrelevant to the original topic in question.

If you have something useful to say about StreetPass or social account discovery in general, please do contribute.

That was a funny news story because I'm sure it was a case of Hanlon's razor, but had they talked to any old school fedi admin they would know that the user retention is normally between 20 and 40%. So if that holds true for the latest twitter waves, we won't just lose 30% of active users, we'll lose 60%!

No service has 100% user retention, and unfortunately the Mastodon software was counting each new sign up and login as a monthly active user.

Both are crap now. English and technical people are on Mastodon, while institutions and official bodies are still on twitter.

Not everyone I think. I'm still on Twitter mostly because I for the life of me can't figure out how Mastodon works.

I think I'm just too old for this.

It's actually pretty simple. Just sign up to any instance/server. It doesn't really matter which one. You can follow and interact with anyone, regardless of which server they signed up for. Then it's just like Twitter for the most part.

I feel the "multiple instances" aspect of Mastodon really confuses people. Highlighting it to new users is not working in their favour.

Does the instance one registers on become part of their identity?

I think this is the thing that always made me pause - I didn’t want to pick a server I’d regret later.

> Does the instance one registers on become part of their identity?

Yes. You can't transfer your posts, you can't transfer your filters, and you can only transfer followers if the server cooperates.

> I didn’t want to pick a server I’d regret later.

This happened to me: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon.html

Sort of, similar to how an email domain does and how others might perceive you based on whether you have an @hotmail, @gmail, @outlook address.

I'm using mastodon.social since I signed up years ago, but if I were to create an account today, I'd just look for the coolest sounding instance that has a lot of users. Like the other comment mentioned, you can always migrate to a different one (although you might lose your post history, you'll keep all your followers/followings).

Yes and to my knowledge whomever set up the server will have full access to your private DMs so choose wisely.

If you're on iOS, install the Ivory app from TapBots – I wouldn't be able to use Mastodon without it.

Institutions move slowly.

I didn't deny that, I just described what my experience is. Also many things that move quickly like sport and media accounts are still on Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com