Mastodon grows more in single weekend than the entire user base of BlueSky | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon grows more in single weekend than the entire user base of BlueSky

theverge.com

31 pointsevolve2k9 comments

To be honest, I still like Twitter more than Mastodon. I spend 5 minutes a day on Mastodon and double that on Twitter.

My problem with Mastodon is that I have a difficult time finding people to follow who are at the top of their fields in computer science, AI, math, etc.

I find that surprising. Look at https://mathstodon.xyz/about and some of the world's leading mathematicians (among those who are online) are there. In computer science expertise is more diverse and distributed so the users are spread across many servers.

With all the praise to Mastodon, I find it's still difficult and a expensive to host an instance.

I host two instances, an "original" mastodon for friends, and a gotosocial instance for myself.

The problem with original is once you want to get everything "right", starting from searches, you'll need to maintain an elastic search instance, with CJK language support you'll have to modify the the code a bit. I hate elastic search with moderate passion, and it's quite expensive to keep one up.

Then I had spun up an minio for s3 compatible storage, the complexity of running a mastodon is very close to a full time job at this point.

There's also something went beyond technical pov, e.g I'm worried about all of the image from the federated instances that were cached locally will raise some legal and compliance concerns. I will need to plan for moderation staffing for that if the instance grows, that's not very ideal.

For the personal parts, I don't have much complains to the gotosocial instance, with only exption bring that it doesn't have a good ui.

How is the scalability and compatibility of GoTOSocial?

A good resource for visualizing all this is FediDB: https://fedidb.org/

The app update greatly helps - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/mastodon-for-android-u...

The submission title has been editorialized. The real title is "A lot of people are checking out Mastodon. The number of active users rose by 294,000 over the weekend", which doesn't even mention Bluesky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Honestly bluesky has absolutely no reason to exist. Its still experimental, locked down and not ready at all.

Bluesky is limiting signups since it hasn't been released yet so it's not really a fair comparison.

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