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Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?

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To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.

I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.

AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.

This seems like it guarantees political battles of some sort? Whether intra or inter-community.

Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.

I meant battles between different instance hosters and moderators.

The Mastodon argument against generic search is that it leads to pile-ons. If you want to opt-in a post to be searchable then you expose it via hashtags. To a Twitter user it feels a bit over-exuberant new social media manager, but once you understand the context it becomes more understandable.

Unfortunately not enough people use it. And realistically, in the middle of a formula 1 race or a ufc fight, there’s no time to be hashtagging each and every keyword if you are live sharing your thoughts or replying to others. A single key hashtag is fine like #AusGP. But when I want to search for Albon and Red Flags and opinions on that, I can’t expect people to do #Albon and #RedFlag. Full text search is sorely missed :,(

There's another aspect to Mastodon search that distinguishes it from Twitter. When you search you do so in your own history of prior interactions. It is like 'personal search' that way and becomes more valuable the longer you are active on the Fediverse.

The real reason is mostly just speed. Pleroma has a full text search and its frankly kinda ass in terms of speed. You need fairly beefy hardware to make full-text searches an option if you're dealing with that many "documents". Doubly so on Mastodon, which is already fairly bogged down by being a Rails application.

The infra can't really support it without heavily centralizing the model (something for which Mastodons questionable tech stack already doesn't do itself any favors).

There's also a bit of a privacy concern in that many instances just don't like it when big nameless entities start scraping the posts of their users, which also leads to a fairly hostile mentality towards the concept.

My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this

X is really important.

5 things you have to know: (thread)

All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.

> 5 things you have to know: (thread)

This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.

I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.

If your version gets pushed I might as well do copy & paste and get my impressions up too ...

I've found twitter/mastadon useful to follow updates from specific open source developers whose work I know and am interested in.

How do you find the time to go through it all?

A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread.

Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech,

I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.

> How do you find the time to go through it all?

I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok.

> A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread.

I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.

Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :)

I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff.

You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.

You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.

If you don't care about Twitter's service model, you don't care about Mastodon.

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