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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right?

No. Some people don't view social media as "debate club". We never signed up for debate club. I personally signed up for Twitter at a software developer conference, and I used Twitter to meet other software developers, social network, and exchange information related to tech. I had no interest in debating politics or whatever. Twitter is possibly the worst possible place in the world to debate politics, given its format.

It's a weird assumption that Twitter is the best or only possible place to have your ideas challenged. Go to school. Ready a book. Talk with people you know. Tweeting sound bites at rando strangers typically goes nowhere fast.

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That's not what I'm saying. It's that the people that were challenged chose to put out their thoughts in a way that welcomed it. If all you're there to do is meet fellow developers and network is should be no issue. I never ended up in situations of devolving debate. Not once. But there's a lot of people who want to put out their strong thoughts without recourse. If you use a public platform to make bold statements which 50% of the world will oppose and it welcomes comments as twitter does then you should expect to be challenged.

Again it's not about saying twitter is debate club. For the majority of people that's not the case for the outliers it is though and they don't like it.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.

If people want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people are debating. If they don't want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people aren't debating. Everyone gets what they want. That's good, isn't it?

Yes people should go to a place where healthy discussion is fostered. I'm not arguing against that. What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter. If you're going to tweet publicly then it welcomes commentary, it's part of the system. If people want to put out their thoughts in an echo chamber then Mastodon is probably a better place for it.

> What I'm saying is there's a group of very vocal people who have left twitter to go start their own Mastodon communities because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter.

Do you have any evidence for this? The proximate cause of mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon was the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.

Elon is a catalyst because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it but it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere. I don't want to point to it because I'll receive a lot of backlash for that but it's happening.

> because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter

> because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it

You're already changing your story.

> it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere

That's your characterization, which I do not agree with. Some would say that Musk himself has a cult-like following. In any case, Twitter and Mastodon have naturally segregated into pro-Musk and anti-Musk communities through no particular design by either side but simply as a result of the acquisition.

Those who enjoy Musk Twitter have no reason to leave and join Mastodon, so of course there would be less "challenge" from them on Mastodon, but whose fault is that?

No I'm not changing my story. You mentioned Elon musk and I said it was a catalyst, not that it was the reason. There's a difference. A catalyst is an accelerant, it's not the source of a reaction. You're removing context by what's convenient for debate. The things you're saying are true but it's not the whole truth. People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned. I'll leave it at that.

> People were unhappy on Twitter before Elon, for the reasons I mentioned.

Yet they didn't leave until the Musk acquisition. Huh.

Again, it's about needing a catalyst. People suffer through much worse. What Elon did and the subsequent behaviour from alt-right uprising was enough not to just cause some people to leave but gave the vocal people with large followers a reason to voice their concerns and use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon. People would otherwise not have followed them and they'd essentially lose the audience they built. The cult leaders still need their followers. Without them, what are they? Crazy ranting folk.

> use it as a means to pull their audience to Mastodon

This is all a very nice conspiracy theory, thank you.

> The cult leaders still need their followers.

People who tweet are now "cult leaders". Ok. By the way, how many Twitter followers does it take to become cult leader? I'm curious because I had over 3500, so I'm not sure whether I qualify or not.

> Crazy ranting folk.

Or HN commenters.

lol I'm not actually calling them cult leaders but I'm giving you a point of reference. People in mainstream media can have a "cult following", a group of fans who are so enthusiastically devoted. We have that for brands, movies, comics and whatever else. Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories. Pulling your audience to Mastodon isn't something villainous. It's an opportunity to remove a lot of the noise on twitter and focus people on your message and community. That could be anything. Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument. It's just human dynamics.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether people use Twitter or Mastodon or whatever else. We're transition between platforms every decade, some people stick it out for the relationships and other people move on to new things. That's life.

> Today people become personalities on twitter that end up with a similar cult following.

Do you have any evidence of this? Name one Twitter personality like this who isn't famous outside of Twitter, and who moved from Twitter to Mastodon, bringing their "cult followers".

> Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories.

Your whole argument is a conspiracy theory. Occam's razor suggests that people moved from Twitter to Mastodon because of Musk. And indeed, that was the case for me personally. Yet you say no, it's... something else, Twitter "cult" leaders wanting to move their followers out of Twitter to avoid "challenges", and Musk was somehow just an excuse or something.

> Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument.

This is a misunderstanding of Mastodon. It's distributed. A server is just a server. I personally switched servers because of technical difficulties on my old server. You can follow and communicate with anyone on the fediverse. You're not restricted in any way to activity on one server.

imo the "echo chamber" scenario would be if you only followed people from your local server, and also set your posts to only show there. If you set your posts to public and gather a couple hundred mutuals...I find the Mastodon 2023 experience turns out to be pleasantly similar to early '10s Twitter.

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