Mastodon Has Already Won | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Has Already Won

d-s.sh

42 pointsd-s88 comments

> And, by a lucky dice roll, it became the first real success of the open-source world

Guess I need to wait for the Linux kernel to become popular & succeed. (Amongst thousands of other great pieces of open source software).

Possible one of the worst takes I’ve seen on the internet for a while.

Oh, the internet, guess that hasn’t succeeded either?

Guess someone should tell the ruby devs they aren't a success.

Yeah the python and rust devs will be pretty crestfallen too. All that wasted effort for all of these failed projects!

Just look at this pathatic open-source failures: VLC, Chrome, Firefox, and Wikipedia.

Yikes, I'm sure they mean the open-source world of social media applications.

Where's "the internet"'s source code ? Is it on GitHub ?

I agree that Mastodon being the first success is a bad take but the internet is not an open-source project. There are RFC's, protocols, but that's not what open-source is.

Microsoft was pretty happy though that an open source TCP/IP stack existed on FreeBSD so they didn't have to go and actually write their own for Windows.

From the context laid in the article, the author meant the first open source project that succeeded without a push from a big private company.

Not saying anything about the factuality of that, just bringing the context into the thread as it’s being ignored. The author mentions Linux as an example in the blog, but says that they had a strong push from IBM.

Here’s the full quote: > We’ve seen some free products gain tremendous traction, but only after help from big businesses. For example, Linux got a lot of support from IBM; Android is Google-owned, and VSCode is from Microsoft.

Hey guys I heard there's this new open source 3d editor called Blender, is it any good? /s

If it was any good they'd be charging for it. /s but there are plenty of people that actually think it.

From context I think they mean the first really successful open source _social network_. Though I’d argue this isn’t quite true; blogs were used as a form of early social network, particularly with features like pingbacks, so Wordpress is also a candidate.

Never mind the finger protocol, or BBS's which were often open source, if not Free Software. But given the attitude, no doubt the author doesn't remember these things.

This article is complete nonsense. It's the typical thing of someone being excited about something and being in the bubble of it, thinking it is a much bigger deal than it is.

The majority of people don't care about Mastodon and never will, Mastodon hasn't won, it's not even relevant.

The anti-Musk folks are the only ones that are excited about Mastodon. There are a lot of them though, so it's something I guess.

I think Musk is a dumb man-child. Mastodon sucks too though.

We should let social die. Our aggregate attention is too valuable to waste on such trivial things.

> We should let social die.

You know HN is a social site, right?

"You know HN is a social site, right?"

You know we're talking about social networks, right?

Sure, but like... if you want people to not use social networks, why are you here? Why are you posting here?

hackernews is more of a news feed with a comment section than a social network

"hackernews is more of a news feed with a comment section than a social network"

The "more of... than" makes this sound less absolute.

HN is not a social network. It is (probably) a public forum used to aggregate news and foster conversation.

How do you define social networks, then? This site here has user accounts, posts/comments, upvotes, and a profile description feature. It's 100% a communication platform/network. What's missing in your eyes?

"What's missing in your eyes?"

The network component.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

No. Mastodon was growing, thriving, and giving people all kinds of exciting ideas long before Elon began this process.

The post says

> Musk is slowly destroying Twitter

Which is something you would only believe because journalists or people in your bubble repeat it over and over until it just must be true. Indeed, the early posts predicting the downfall of Twitter were associated with the large layoffs, ironically ignoring that Mastodon manages to run with just four developers.

> Which it is something you would only believe because journalists or your bubble repeats it over and over until it just must be true.

Or, you can listen to Elon basically every day. What's Twitter worth now according to him? Significantly less than half now surely. He claimed 20 billion out of the 44 billion as of exactly a month ago, and April hasn't exactly been kind to the economy.

They lost almost 75% of their top 1000 advertisers. It's become a right-wing cesspool, with open bigotry commonly on display. To the point that even many right leaning moderates I know refuse to use it anymore. Not to say it was perfect before, but nowhere near this bad.

> ironically ignoring that Mastodon manages to run with just four developers.

And you are ironically ignoring the fact that Mastodon isn't "run" by four developers. There is no such thing as a "global Mastodon outage", or a central Mastodon authority that says blatant bigotry is disallowed.

There are currently 828 contributors. And Mastodon isn't responsible for what's certainly billions in hardware and infrastructure investment as Twitter is.

If I want to start a Nazi-themed hate instance that only allows white-people dressed like clowns, I can. But it will be a very silent echo chamber of myself and other like-minded bigots because no one will federate with me.

Or I could believe it because I've been on Twitter since 2008 and I see him constantly making changes for the worse?

He's banned third-party clients, paywalled the API, made "verification" less than useless, destroyed the fact that Twitter is supposed to be a microblog, pushed algorithmic recommendation and made the algorithm pay-to-play.

And those are just the things I remember off the top of my head. If I saw a full list of dumb shit he's done ever since last autumn, I could probably find even more stuff that is completely destroying the service.

Well, I disagree on algorithmic recommendation. There is now a "following" tab, which shows you just the people you follow. No random liked tweets, no recommendations. That simply didn't exist before.

There seems also better support for freedom of speech now. Before Musk, accounts were often suspended for highly dubious reasons.

I can't comment much on the Twitter API now costing money, but was it even important?

Moreover, in the past the "verification" was not about verification. It was a way to split Twitterers into peasants and elite. Where the elite didn't just include celebrities and big organizations, but also random journalists for some reason. I'm also on Twitter for quite a while, and in the beginning nobody needed verification and nobody missed it. And now it doesn't seem necessary either. You can easily see whether a famous account is real by looking at the number of followers.

>No random liked tweets, no recommendations. That simply didn't exist before.

Have you actually ever used Twitter? That's literally the first thing that has existed in Twitter. It's the oldest part of the entire service. It has always existed.

And of course, third-party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot always gave you pure sequential timeline. Elon decided to ban all of them.

>There seems also better support for freedom of speech now. Before Musk, accounts were often suspended for highly dubious reasons.

Highly dubious reasons such as what?

Also, remember when Musk banned people for posting links to Mastodon? Where does this fall on the "free speech" spectrum?

>I can't comment much on the Twitter API now costing money, but was it even important?

Yes.

>Moreover, in the past the "verification" was not about verification. It was a way to split Twitterers into peasants and elite. Where the elite didn't just include celebrities and big organizations, but also random journalists for some reason.

In the past, verification was supposed to mean that if you had the name "Bill Clinton" and a picture of Bill Clinton, that it was actually Bill Clinton. And now it's about… Paying Elon Musk $10?

I don't know where the "split" part comes from. The checkmark didn't actually do anything. It was literally just "we checked that this publicly notable person is who they say they are". Elon is the one that is trying to split Twitter into the paying and the non-paying by making sure that the non-paying are made much less visible. Freedom of speech if you just fork over the $10?

And yeah, journalists were also verified because they tweet about a lot of news from their accounts, and you want to know that "@johndoe from New York Times" is actually John Doe working for the New York Times and not Sergei in St. Petersburg.

>You can easily see whether a famous account is real by looking at the number of followers.

And how does that work if a famous account is new?

> Have you actually ever used Twitter? That's literally the first thing that has existed in Twitter. It's the oldest part of the entire service. It has always existed.

In the beginning it existed, then they forced more and more other tweets into the timeline. So then it didn't exist anymore -- until Musk took over. Third-party apps may have never had other tweets in the timeline, but they weren't widely used I believe.

> Highly dubious reasons such as what?

For example reporting factual but politically incorrect crime statistics.

> Also, remember when Musk banned people for posting links to Mastodon? Where does this fall on the "free speech" spectrum?

He reversed course in just a few hours. The old Twitter management were fond of certain censorship for years. Not just in blocking accounts, but also by doing things like acting as a direct arm of the FBI and performing political censorship on the Twitter trends (this was in the "Twitter files" which were ignored by the media, because people on right were affected, while most journalists are on the left).

> I don't know where the "split" part comes from. The checkmark didn't actually do anything. It was literally just "we checked that this publicly notable person is who they say they are".

The meaning of the checkmark became "this person is notable". Not generally that this person is who it appears to be, because verification wasn't open to everyone. The meaning of the checkmark was determined by the thing it was correlated with, notability, not realness.

> Elon is the one that is trying to split Twitter into the paying and the non-paying by making sure that the non-paying are made much less visible. Freedom of speech if you just fork over the $10?

I think the visibility difference mainly comes up for the "for you" tab, not for "following". It seems some reasonable compromise. They have to earn some money somehow after Musk was forced to pay an inflated price for Twitter (after his initial offer the stock market including Tesla tanked, which made him poorer and Twitter worth less, but he had to pay the old now-inflated price, he wanted to back out, but the Twitter management didn't let him, even though they opposed the deal just weeks earlier).

> And yeah, journalists were also verified because they tweet about a lot of news from their accounts, and you want to know that "@johndoe from New York Times" is actually John Doe working for the New York Times and not Sergei in St. Petersburg.

In my experience journalists just post their opinions like everybody else, they don't post more news than others. They just enjoyed having the "notable" sticker, a very pleasant association.

> And how does that work if a famous account is new?

That almost never happens. They may endorse it from somewhere else. Im sure it's simply an imaginary problem. I've been on Twitter before there was any verification and it wasn't a problem then.

Agreed. I know of not a single person in my life who even knows what Mastodon is.

Your bubble is obviously the most important one!

There were points in my career where I knew something was happening and was into certain technologies or communities: Linux, wifi, Drupal, Subversion, Apple Cocoa programming, Twitter, OpenStreetMap, the list goes on. A tiny core of people knew the potential, but 99%+ of the world didn’t know nor care what it was. There were just as many, or more, that died out, but my point is that measuring how many people have heard of a thing is not a great metric.

> There were just as many, or more, that died out, but my point is that measuring how many people have heard of a thing is not a great metric.

For a social network, it's kinda important.

number of users is one thing.

how many actively use it is another probably more useful metric.

Indeed. It was neat for awhile when Twitter was censorship hell, but now that that issue has improved dramatically I haven't actually bothered using it in months.

In that 99% of projects get less than 100 users and like 3 stars on GitHub sure I guess that's a win. But if winning is becoming the new preferred destination for microblogging or social broadcasting it seems like it took a shot and sputtered out before the finish line.

Mastodon isn't a microblog though? As far as I know, the maximum message length is basically limitless.

The default is 500 chars iirc, but yeah. Entirely configurable (and many modify it in practice), and most servers will pull in much larger ones than they allow to be published, so you can get a novel in your feed if you follow people who do that.

Mastodon is meant to be for microblogging (a la Twitter), but there is other software that accesses the same federated network (called the “Fediverse”) that focuses on other things, like long blogs (a la Medium), pictures (a la Instagram), etc…

(There are forks of Mastodon that increase the message length but on vanilla Mastodon it’s hardcoded to 500. But the fediverse itself doesn’t have a limitation like that, it’s a Mastodon thing)

I think your expectations might just be skewed. To be the largest decentralized communications platform is quite substantial. You're expecting it to dethrone centralized platforms but that's a gigantic additional hurdle, one nobody has been able to reach.

Interesting contrast to have both

“Mastodon is doomed?”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35713894

And

“mastodon has already won”

On the front page

I already grabbed a screenshot of that for the hilarity.

Then again, people usually post submissions on the same topic in response to a highly ranked submission. It’s not random.

data?

I've been on HN for more than a decade, and it's definitely a thing. I've even done it myself.

I've been on HN for more than a decade, and it's definitely a not thing. I've never even done it myself.

It's a personal observation.

OPs admit to it all the time in the comments.

It won because now we know people are at least talking about it.

we know nerds are talking about it at least

Its got people's attention. Both techies and heavy users of social media are aware of it, and maybe experiment with it. That is in essence the major win. Its no longer obscure.

In the reactions you can see all the typical traits of a new thing that comes to shake up a stagnant status quo. From naive excitement to cynical disbelief.

When somethig is doomed and wins at the same time you could say its a time of high drama.

Not bad for single person's work...

"Mastodon is doomed" is a good article, stupid title.

This article is garbage.

Agreed, the critical article does raise some good points that these more decentralized/fedarated/self-hosted/self-custody protocols need to incorporate in their designs at some point of they really want to scale to challenge the current status quo of social media.

First real success of open source? Where have you been, friend??

I'm more interested in the "Mastodon is a creation of a single Russian dude" bit. He was born there, but everything I've seen suggests he doesn't feel much connection to it having moved at 11. Even his Wikipedia page calls him German and puts his page in various German categories.

> He was born there

That's enough to qualify someone as such. He is also a German citizen, he is free to claim both/either as he chooses but it's also not wrong for someone to call someone born in a country as being from that country. The wikipedia also cites the only reason they use "German" in his bio is because he responded on Reddit saying he was a naturalized German citizen. Nothing about a demand to exclusively wanting to be referenced as German.

Which by the way, his answer about being a German citizen was because people were attacking him for being born in Russia and claiming Mastodon was Russian spy tools and nonsense like that.

It would only be interesting if the blog writer was asked by Eugen Rochko to replace it with the nationality he prefers to claim, and refuses to do that.

It's still interesting the blog author chose to go that way when it's the less obvious of two possible ways. Your response gives the impression you think I said it's bad or wrong. I did not.

My point is that it's not the less obvious way! It's been the norm for ages now to refer to people by their place of birth - NOT their chosen nationality.

It's only been a very recent move in social history to question this and instead ask why aren't we placing more importance on their environmental upbringing.

Okay. But essentially every news article ever calls him German except this one case here that seems innocent and the much larger portion of people trying to scaremonger. We're not speaking in the abstract here or talking about historical practice. There's a reality where one way is, in practice, the obvious way most people go for this person we're talking about, and the other is not so obvious.

So, yes, it is interesting that the blog author went this way and isn't doing it with the usual purpose. I don't know why this bothers you so much, but this thread has gotten tiresome.

Yes, and on Wikipedia it says he's born in Russia. So, someone who normally might label someone by their birth, would then claim he is Russian. See how that's an easier path than looking up "every news article"?

I am not bothered, and this thread is not tiresome. I am discussing why you feel the need to find this interesting, you brought it up. Blaming me for your stubbornness exhausting you will always render fruitless.

Is it the obvious way to say that Elon Musk is a South African?

He's labelled that quite often, yes.

I think nobody doubts that he is a US American. He was just born in South Africa.

Plot twist: Rochko is a Ukrainian last name.

It's funny how much importance we attach to someone's country of birth but not their state or canton or other administrative unit. If you were born in Texas but live in California, are you a Texan? Born in Boston but live in Los Angeles, are you a Bostonian or a Los Angeleno? Does it matter how old you were when you moved?

As an example, Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa. How many people think of him as South African? He has American, Canadian and South African citizenships. Is he Canadian?

Yes, it's one a lot of societies are questioning recently, identity and how much we attribute to parts that might not make any sense but stem from tradition or false beliefs. A lot of it isn't purely geographical either, things like views on race can have a huge impact on how we label/self-label.

Another part of the identity equation people are questioning are things like pride, where we claim people as [group] because it makes us feel better (even if the individual does not claim that identity, whether it be the school they attended or where they were born, etc).

It's a lot of good discussion, but I feel due to political circumstances recently a lot of people have become very antagonistic towards Russian labels even if the individual themselves distances from the Russian administration, in the same way you can still be American if you hate the Biden administration.

Imho what's more relevant is the current status. Nobody can choose where they are born.

It's considered malicious to call a trans person by their birth name, but if someone decides to leave their place of birth and publicly claim a different nationality that doesn't mean anything?

> Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit from Germany that develops the Mastodon software.

https://joinmastodon.org/de/about

Can't say that outside of HN i've come across a link to anything about Mastodon so not sure it's won much.

Really? It was all over the mainstream media 6 months ago after Twitter got bought:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-r... https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/tech/mastodon-twitter-explain... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/24/1139079748/leave-twitter-soci... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/08/mastodon-...

Anyone talking about it now in the mainstream media?

Oh, sweet summer child, thinking some tech nugget reported 6 months ago is still relevant.

No mention of Bluesky? From what I've heard, people are heading there precisely because it's not the "linux of social networks".

10 million total users is impressive compared to 450 million monthly active users, how?

3rd paragraph from the bottom.

The quality is probably very high for those 10MM compared to the 450MM. Still, Twitter is ahead by an order of magnitude for sure.

fwiw I left Twitter a few weeks ago with Elon's 'defund NPR' tweet which I only saw the image of since I had blocked him months ago. I kind of mildly miss Twitter but not enough to go back - used to be multiple times a day on there.

If NPR really objects to being labelled government funded, it seems they can't object to being government defunded.

'publicly funded' would be more appropriate but then I'd also like to see 'commercially funded' for all the private media outlets. The majority of NPR funding is not from the government so 'public' is more correct in that sense.

Voice of America you could call 'government funded'.

Let's settle on "state funded" saying "publicly funded" for media of foreign states would sound as if they were domestically funded.

> Mastodon is a creation of a single Russian dude.

Gargron lives in Germany, I assume he is German?

According to Wikipedia[1], he was born in Russia and moved to Germany at the age of 11. I'll let others decide if it makes him German or Russian :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Rochko

This sounds a lot like the annual "[insert the upcoming year] is the year of Linux on the desktop!" that circulated in the early 2000's.

Nobody cared outside of Linux crowd, and it never happened.

> If you want to message a friend, the friend is most likely on Messenger/WhatsApp.

So your friend might be on either, or both. But everyone has an email address.

The thing is that Mastodon/Fediverse is not competing, it does not have to won. It exists and shows there are options different from the walled gardens. It just works different. Some people prefer local markets and little shops other prefer malls. That's it. Winning is a metric that IMHO is not applicable in this case, much more when it's usually tied to profits or numbers for investors.

Except it seems very likely that the VC backed BlueSky social will probably become the replacement for Twitter with many finding Mastaodon intimidating.

I'm legit seeing a lot more people open up bluesky accounts than Mastadon when Musk took over Twitter.

This article has a lot of curious / BS one off lines and seems pretty empty overall.

Every day I see a twitter quitter tweeting back again. Looking at their mastodon, no likes and no interaction with their account.

What a testament to decentralized messaging.

Needs a better name tho..

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