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Comment by midasz | Hacker News Reader

I'm just a big fan of ActivityPub. It seems like the next logical step. Perhaps there'll be bigger ActivityPub providers in the future but in theory, just like SMTP, I can talk from my thingy to your thingy. It's up to us to abstract the protocol away and make it easier for users.

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What I find interesting is that we are in the middle of A tremendous social experiment where two of the biggest closed platforms on the web recently took major steps to push away and alienate their users, leaving federated platforms as an enticing alternative. It's been very interesting to see who did and did not migrate, and what the growing pains have been as, for the first time that I know of, actual normies tried out some weird open source hacker shit en masse.

> It's been very interesting to see who did and did not migrate

The people who migrate are basically the people in the intersection of technically inclined, "we need social media," and "big tech is bad."

I think having a protocol that can be abstracted away to meet user needs is a great idea. But as it currently exists, Mastodon will always be niche. Too many weird tradeoffs that can only be forgiven by passionate advocates who understand their technical roots. Perhaps there is further development to the protocol or abstraction that can change this, but as it stands, Mastodon is only for passionate social media users who are technically inclined and resentful against big tech.

This is unfortunately always going to be true of any technology. If there's someone willing to cut corners for convenience, they will win the majority of the audience with even a small amount of competence. And by cut corners, I mean betray and abuse and exploit their users. Quality (in security, in privacy, in functionality) creates friction, even if it's minor, and animals generally take the path of least resistance.

And then immediately returned to Twitter for the most part

Heavily dependent on the circles one’s part of in my experience. Everybody I followed when I moved to mastodon several months ago (mostly devs, apple users, and a few designers) are still there, actively post, and have no plans to return.

I've had a similar experience, except in my case a bunch of the bigger posters found they no longer automatically got a ton of attention on Mastodon and without that dopamine feedback loop they just gave up microblogging entirely.

Most artists I follow also just dropped Twitter entirely and are on Instagram exclusively now (much to my dismay, the Instagram UI is nails on chalkboard to me.)

It's interesting how differently the experience has turned out for different crowds.

I've seen numerous anecdotes from more technically-inclined types saying that their Mastodon posts not only get greater engagement than their Twitter posts did, but that the average quality of engagement is much higher and closer to an actual conversation.

I imagine it depends on how much you played the advert game. While twitter is massive, it is very easy to get buried if you don't play by their rules. Techy posters are the antithesis of that algorithm: focused on text more than pictures, trying to deliver links to non-mainstream sites or personal blogs, rebelling against authority, probably sparse in their use of hashes.

So I can see a more intimate setting benefitting them more than a more traditional content creator who is already used to all those hoops.

This has been my exact experience!

Same, but I'm in the same circles :)

Twitter is harder to move off of because so many companies use it to report news. celebrities, media, even governments now deliver news on Twitter. Those entities were never going to care about small squabbles.

Reddit, not so much. Not that I don't think a lot won't simply go back, but a lot more people will probably leave, maybe even enough to create a network effect to begin the sparks for a new, proper competitor.

That's part of what makes the experiment so interesting!

"en masse" is definitely an exaggeration. This was mostly wishful thinking plus lots of astroturfing from journalists trying to stick it up to Elon Musk. It never amounted to much in reality.

It was pretty big increase in interest and public visibility for something that most people don't normally know or care about. I make no claims about how many people actually started using these platforms or are still using them after a couple of months.

What percentage counts as "en masse"?

and just like SMTP, will be slightly extended by large companies until the small guy can't keep up any more (or are there still people running smaller email servers that can talk with Google Mail?), then taken over, then (eventually?) extinguished

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I think it would be super interesting if there became a GMail of Matrix--one super-dominant provider--but it was still possible to have Fastmail and Protonmail etc of Matrix. So you could actually still host your own little community that could still interact with the giant gorilla even if it was challenging to do so. Imagine that whichever federated protocol were extended with spam-blocking features that complicated federation such that it was even harder to run a server than it is today. But it was still possible, especially for those with enough money.

So every once in a while a newcomer like TikTok could blow up and become a fad, but some old grandma could just keep plugging away on their hilariously old-school service and still follow their granddaughter's high school swim team hosted on the hip new shiny service all the kids are going for today.

> ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol

Ah it's one of those pipe dreams that runs like molasses and can't be explained to an average person before they die of boredom.

You don't need to understand the protocol any more than the average person understands email; you sign up somewhere and then you can email anyone.

Except instead of mail, it's microblogging, full-length blogging, image sharing, link-aggregation, etc. that is done with different services that can communicate with each other.

With improved onboarding it could become just a normal thing.

I feel like a basic understanding has served me well:

ActivityPub is a way to share social media.

Mastodon is like if Twitter gave you email addresses.

Mastodon is where I can talk with cool people and make new friends :)

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