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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> no mention of Mastodon in this announcement

Mastodon blew its moment. It could have eaten Twitter’s lunch. But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

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Everyone likes to blame the server interface, but honestly that's not so bad and I think most people get over it.

Mastodon's real problem in my opinion is that its primary audience today doesn't actually want anyone new to join - it's VERY toxic for newcomers who don't fit a specific mold. It's a shame, cause we really do need something new.

I'm hoping some of the new decentralized ones take off.

Edit: I think the comment about this being survivor bias is fair, but I still believe the community itself is a bigger hurdle for Mastodon than the signup flow

> it's VERY toxic for newcomers who don't fit a specific mold.

I have not experienced that ... at all. Surely this is highly instance dependent.

Have you considered you fit the mold?

I have considered that I don't fit most molds, but I am very observant.

I could believe that it's possible to stumble upon an instance that fits who you are and offers a great onboarding experience - but it's far from the norm.

The reason I'm confident saying that is that it's actually by design for the platform. The community is very hostile towards any kind of discovery tools or enhancements that help you explore the network without a direct introduction. Any attempt to provide that functionality is blasted with an intense amount of aggression and shut down.

That can be fine if they don't want to be Twitter. But I don't take it seriously as a Twitter replacement.

Which instance is nice?

I understand the hesitancy in some respects. Longtime Mastodon users fear a mass migration of the toxic elements of Twitter into what has been their private sphere. If Mastodon becomes Twitter 2.0 then we have solved nothing.

It's a well-founded concern, too. Every new wave has a cacophony of people demanding it change to work exactly like Twitter so they don't have to learn anything new or change, dooming them to experience exactly what they left if they got their way.

It reminds me of how Metro Atlanta has grown. People move out a bit to get away from Atlanta traffic. Then they miss all the stuff they had in Atlanta, and start clamoring for all they miss from where they moved from. It often starts with a Target or a movie theater. Ten years on, they're complaining about Atlanta traffic again, and they move. And the cycle repeats until half of North Georgia is consumed by a web of crumbling asphalt roads dangling off packed highways.

The difference here is Mastodon, as a community, said "No. Learn a new way or buzz off." Most people buzz off, and occasionally complain about how hostile the community was to them to anyone who'll listen. Some people stick around and appreciate the different way of doing things. Repeat.

I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter.

The challenge is that it's intentionally difficult to find your community on there unless you're invited in from an existing connection outside of Mastodon. I understand that's how some people want it - but blaming users for not understanding how to "learn a new way" in the first place IS hostile - whether you want to hear it or not.

Ultimately, doesn't matter. Mastodon will be what it will be, and folks like me will find something else that's a little more welcoming to people who aren't quite as my-tribe-only focused.

>> "I don't agree with this take - I joined mastodon with the best intentions and really wish I could have found my folks there. I did not want it to be like Twitter."

Then you're not who I'm referring to.

This is survivor bias. If you're a non-tech person signing up for a new service, the federation aspect is just wizard talk and it's not obvious what difference it makes. Most people do not want to go on side quests to find other people they know or figure out which digital village they live in, especially not as the first stage in the onboarding process.

Fair point, then I guess I'd adjust my comment to say "in ADDITION to the server issue....".

The reality is even once you're connected, it can be a rough place to explore for newcomers.

People manage to deal with this when they sign up for their email account. It's just that we don't (yet) have the equivalent of gmail (or hotmail, aol before that) as a default option.

Twitter has always been a cesspool. You're fighting not only other people but also the algorithm / popularity contest. I actually hate it and never want to go back, but for some it's engaging. People probably don't use Mastodon just cause nobody they care about is on it and the whole multi-instance thing is weird.

That hasn't been my experience. I joined a couple months ago and I have yet to see a single instance of toxicity in my feeds or replies. But I am guessing it greatly depends on the type of groups and content you interact with.

The great thing about Mastodon is that it doesn't push anything in my face that I didn't subscribe to.

I looked at joining Mastodon.

The first "recommended" server on the Mastodon's official website was something about anime, and the second seemed to be about some "Queer friendly furry community", whatever that means. Then there was one about tech and and the local Bay Area one.

At least, unlike GNU Ring (or whatever it's called nowadays) it didn't just crash on startup.

I'm pretty technical, but neither of those were the reasons I quickly abandoned Mastodon.

I don't care about federation, and I want algorithmic discovery. Specific I want to follow all sorts of people from around the world (on multiple mastodon servers) and have more people suggested to me based on that. Mastodon can't even reliably search across servers.

Most people do not get over it.

My experience was bad. A lot of servers my friends used didn't take new sign ups so I was forced to pick my own which went offline a few weeks later and I haven't tried using it since because there's no indicator of server quality that I know of and all the servers with a lot of active users are not taking signups. Recommendations from HN would be appreciated.

I use social.coop, and it seems to work well. They have some kind of participatory administration too that I don't know very well.

My recommendation is to find an instance with some kind of governance plan, and hopefully a stable stream of donations. Volunteer instances indeed could go at any time. And of course, if you can, donate to one or a few instances out of good citizenship.

I think it's also worth mentioning there are other services built around ActivityPub as well (and federation). I found friendica pretty good (as a Mastodon/facebook alternative), although I don't use it.

Instances I can recommend to HN fellows are probably https://floss.social/about, https://chaos.social/explore and https://mathstodon.xyz/about. But don't worry too much, you can move later without too much issue (though moving posts themselves is not possible).

This will always be a problem with federated vs unfederated services. It's hard to get a network effect when things are so spread out without a central place.

You don't need a central place, but you do need places that are large enough, mainstream enough, and trusted enough, for the masses. Email is like this now.

> you do need places that are large enough, mainstream enough, and trusted enough, for the masses

I think you don't necessarily even need that if you have a better way to support discovery and interaction with content from other places.

Email stands as a notable counter-example.

but that's not how you use email. you don't sign up for an email account, and then go searching for other users to follow and what not with in the same server.

with social platforms, you do just that. you want to see a centralized list of available users to choose to follow or subscribe or join cult or whatever.

i'm deliberately using centralized here as not needing to know that multiple servers exist with different users in each. maybe i'm showing my ignorance of mastodon, but it seems like mastodon.com or whatever central website could just publish a list that mastodon clients can refer to rather than making users discovery a hunt and fetch kind of process. like a torrent index site. if that already exists, then i'll TIL the workings of mastodon. if it doesn't exists, then it seems very short sited.

If people wanted email 2.0 they wouldn't have flocked to social media 1.0 and begun doing most of their correspondence through messaging instead of email.

I don't think they "blew it" but it could have been better. I think it would be better if they have a blurb about how it is very much like email; you pick a provider and sign up then after that you can message anyone else via your "address" and provider. Also, they could be a LOT more clear about which instances are accepting new signups.

I don't think there's anything they can really do about that. It's a federated platform, the user is going to have to pick a server. Aside from some landing page that shows you servers based on your interests, I don't know what else they could do.

I do agree that migrating between servers could be a more streamlined process though.

Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain. They could even have had a signup form on their .org website that would return “Your account has been created! Yours is on [xyz].com! But don’t worry, it will connect to other accounts from all others of the federation.”

> Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain.

soo... mastodon.social? the instance listed as first option, clearly marked as being run by the Mastodon company?

Weird TLDs don’t inspire trust. I would have never guessed that mastodon.social were the most serious place to start a Mastodon account.

luckily you didn't need to guess, because it's presented as the first entry, including the information that it is run by the company, when you go look at the .org page for where to sign up, just as you wanted.

But I'm sure you'll find another reason why doing exactly what you suggested isn't reasonable.

The internet blew its moment. But onboarding—specifically, choosing an ISP—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

lol you wish

You joke, but Mastodon could’ve learned from the history there, at least in the US. AOL in particular had a huge mainstream user base that didn’t really understand what was AOL and what was Internet. Witgout that gentle introduction, yes, many would’ve have been stuck trying to figure out which company to use to get online for longer.

AOL also charged you $15 a month for an email subdomain, whereas on Mastodon that kind of lock-in wouldn't exist. Creating an AOL-like company for Mastodon doesn't work unless your ultimate goal is to be blocked by every major federated community.

Sure. AOL was also a commercial service and joining Mastodon.social is free. A facade over the Internet would look different than a facade over a federated social network in many ways.

This is by design, Mastodon goal was never to replace Twitter, it's an alternative but with different goals. Mastodon isn't a centralized platform. This is good. The people that after a broad global audience shouldn't expect Mastodon to replace Twitter. Mastodon is its own thing.

> But onboarding—specifically, choosing a server—was too tedious for non-niche adoption.

I'm not entirely sure that's a bug. Specifically, I'm curious whether it squelches non-niche conversations like: Are vaccines a nefarious plot by Bill Gates to implant mind-control chips?

Also a "decentralized" social media network is something an engineer thinks is great, but no user does.

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