Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.

I think that’s another big issue with Mastodon - poor accountability.

I know some are going to view “accountability” as an oxymoron when it comes to Musk-owned Twitter. But, while Musk positions himself as a maverick who couldn’t care less about what the media thinks (and the “mainstream” media especially), it seems likely that their negative feedback played a significant role in the reversal of some of his dumber decisions. His whole “I don’t care what the media thinks” routine resembles the poop emoji with which he responds to their inquiries-such a juvenile response is a sign he really does care about what they say, even if only to a certain degree-if he completely didn’t care, he’d just ignore them entirely, or even have some intern respond promptly with inane non-committal unquotable PR blather

So yeah, the media provides some accountability for Twitter, however imperfect-even under Musk. By contrast, the media provides very little accountability for Mastodon-it is very fringe, the average person has never heard of it, why would they pay much attention to it? And its decentralised nature makes accountability by the media potentially even harder, since there’s no Musk to ultimately hold account, just an opaque collective of obscure individuals who wield power behind closed doors

Another dimension of accountability is regulatory-for better or worse, social media is an increasing focus of regulatory attention worldwide, and you can guarantee Twitter is near the top of the list. Musk may try to dodge them, but he can only dodge so much, and in many cases (especially those regulatory requests which don’t appear to be associated with his political opponents) he may just comply from the start. By contrast, most regulators are going to ignore Mastodon, because it is too small to merit their attention, and its decentralised nature makes it much harder to regulate.

Of course “if you are unfairly banned on one instance you can always move to another”-but that’s at the minimum a major inconvenience, and what about the problem of cross-instance bans? I know they are claimed to be only against the far-right; but even if that’s true, what’s to stop “ban the far-right” from evolving into “ban the moderate right” and then eventually even “ban lefties who deviate too much from the party line”? Yes, that’s a slippery slope argument-but accountability mechanisms play a big role in stopping people slipping too far down life’s many slopes

If you trust the average Mastodon administrator is on roughly the same page as you, maybe you don’t have much to worry about; if you lack that confidence, is it still worth investing your time in it? With Twitter, even if you don’t trust Musk to do the right thing, at least you know there are real (however imperfect) mechanisms to hold him to account. The same mechanisms for Mastodon are arguably a lot weaker

That’s not true. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to my other comment in which I explain why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35579360

But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word.

Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.

If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.

Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.

Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)

Really depends on the industry you're talking about. Some have never been on Twitter to begin with.

(e.g. the network engineers bubble: the gray beards are on IRC and the youngsters are on TikTok.)

If #people don't want #other #people to #dogpile their #social #media #accounts, perhaps they should just #make their #accounts #private. #Mastodon has #private #account #support, right?

That's maybe the sentiment of the users, but the implementation details allow indexing of public content very easily.

Anyway, the purpose - at least in my eyes - is not to compete with twitter as a whole, but to offer alternatives to people that desire it. And to this end, I think Mastodon, and I hope the rest of the fediverse proved quite successful.