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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

To a degree, yes. But a lot of the people I used to follow don't even know what Mastodon is, let alone have the inclination to register.

I used movetodon.org, so I follow everyone that did move. It's just that a lot of them didn't.

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There are definitely comedians and authors and artists on Mastodon, but perhaps not name brands from NBC who make it a brand home.

Expecting a one to one drop in network swap seems like a consistent barrier, no shade intended.

I don't agree with it but I guess I get it. My feed has a little tech but mostly science, authors, artists, and ground level activists. But almost no one I already knew, and of them one is a roommate and one is an amazing but very local author I already supported on Patreon. I'm actually meeting new people and actually getting to know a lot about them.

It's much more interesting to see individual real humans doing things to make the world better than to just read them commenting on it.

I'm kind of done following big names personally. The added value is overblown relative to how awesome strangers actually often are, plus strangers don't have a communications team filtering out anything too interesting.

That's part of the magic of Mastodon, for sure. Following real people, instead of social media characters. And a lot less hatraed and gossip, at least for now.

If you miss seeing big names, though, and let's not pretend there's no appeal in that, Mastodon is lacking.

I use Mastodon for social networking. Not for consuming news or media. Things where it being a two way street is nice.

I actually just have manual bookmarks to Twitter pages of the like half dozen people I think are at all worth reading. And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.

I assume that will break with API changes, at which point I just won't read those people anymore unless they cross post on Mastodon. But it's worked well so far.

Obviously eliminates any possibility of trying to win the comments section, but I don't really see that as a true negative.

> And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.

Thank you for this! I know of and use some of these already, just from luck of discovery, and having a compilation of several more is so freeing!

Maybe the distinction between social network and media consumption needs to be heightened and that will ultimately be a great thing.

But there was a period where I could do it all on Twitter and it was convenient. Perhaps it was never meant to be, as the incentives are kind of twisted.

I was looking for something like movetodon.org to find the accounts I follow on Twitter, but it currently is down due to Twitter's inane API changes.

Anyone know of another service?

I think that window has closed.

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