Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Early impressions:

- The app is very clean. Black text on white background. Only the bare minimum functionality – post threads, follow accounts, see a single (algorithmically curated) feed. Not flashy, no ads. Of course chances of it staying this way are close to zero.

- There is no "trending" section, which is surprising. You'd think that was one aspect of Twitter they would have copied first. Or maybe they are waiting to introduce it over the coming days once there are more users.

- They managed to pre-seed a ton of content from celebrities and other top Instagram accounts, so even on day 0 with a brand new account you start with a full feed and the place seems "alive".

- App is handling the incoming load like a champ. Everything loads with no perceptible lag, even though I'm sure it is getting hammered from every angle right now. This is where the backing of Meta engineering shines (over Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon etc. which have all struggled to stay up lately).

- There isn't Fediverse support yet but your profile does show which server you belong to (right now threads.net by default), which is pretty neat.

I've been using Mastodon recently, and I've really enjoyed my experience. I guess some big instances may have difficulty with scale, but I've really enjoyed my experience on a smaller instance.

It's interesting to me how dismissive people are of Mastodon, when it's basically been perfect for me.

I enjoyed Jeff Atwood's post on the matter [1].

> People say "decentralization doesn't work as good as the centralized facebooks and twitters", but then I post here on highly decentralized Mastodon a silly little joke about the commando character in the old video game Command & Conquer from 1995 and get a response from someone who worked on the original game! .. uh, maybe it is working already?

Mastodon doesn't need perfect scalability and uptime to be better than Threads. Instead, it succeeds by aligning the platform's values with the user's, by not treating the user as a product to monetize.

[1] https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/110656567413673113

Isn't infosec.exchange shutting down, thus validating the concept that it doesn't work?

Where did you hear this? There's nothing in the announcements about a shutdown aside from the maintenance on the 6th.

Oops, I must be confusing it with a different instance.

I don't believe it's shutting down? The website appears to be stable, and its users are donating $2,285/month to support it [1]. It seems both technically and financially stable to me. Let me know if I'm missing something though.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/infosecexchange

As well as roughly another $5k/month on Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Infosec.exchange/

I'm really curious as to what the current operating costs are.

In addition to other responses, an instance shutting down has historically validated the concept of decentralization. Instance announces, people export, choose another instance, thank the old one for its service. I've seen this a couple of times now. Zero drama.

Does Mastodon need a PR person in each thread? I feel like I read a variation on this post every day on this site now. GP is literally just a comparison of Threads against existing, better known alternatives. Nothing deeper. What makes people so defensive about Mastodon?

It's because some people really like mastodon and there's a lot of, at best, odd arguments going around why it'll never work. Never mind that for a large amount of people it's already working.

Sure and I'd understand if the GP said something like "nobody is using Mastodon" but that's not what they said, they just drew a comparison between Threads and other social media.

The defensiveness is off-putting. Almost like a cult slogan. I'm glad folks are enjoying Mastodon, and there's obviously users on it! Threads claims plans to federate with Mastodon after all.

> Threads claims plans to federate with Mastodon after all.

Note that this is deeply worrying to a lot of Mastodon users. There's the fear that this is an embrace-extend-extinguish type move. Only time will tell.

> This is where the backing of Meta engineering shines (over Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon etc. which have all struggled to stay up lately).

Deep pockets also help.

> There is no "trending" section, which is surprising.

Seems like a cold start problem. I'd expect recommendations in general to improve soon.

I hope they'll give us a chronological, following-only feed like Instagram and Twitter already have.

My theory is that they are delaying launching it until everyone has more followers, to prevent the impression that it is a ghost town.

That makes sense. It certainly seems to have a lot more content than Bluesky already, but maybe it's just the algorithm.

Given that some of us have been on waiting lists for what seems like months, it isn't surprising that Bluesky is short on content.

Adam Mosseri posted on Threads that it’s coming.

https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...

Mastodon struggling to stay up where? Its decentralized.

A decentralized app still has servers. mastodon.social (which hosts the majority of the user base) was struggling with load and down as recently as 4 days ago (see https://status.mastodon.social).

mastodon.social does not represent the majority of users.

Any stability issues on mastodon.social are noteworthy, but it's important to recognize that it only represents 1,370,000/9,930,000 = 13% of total users, and 387,000/1,790,000 = 21% of Monthly active users.

If you don't use Mastodon, it might be easy to assume that the experience would be filled with blackouts or technical issues, but that's not true. If "picking a good server" sounds difficult, check out Mastodon's server page, and hopefully you should find one that fits your interest [3].

[1] https://fedidb.org/network/instance/mastodon.social

[2] https://fedidb.org/

[3] https://joinmastodon.org/servers

That’s a very sizable percentage of all of its users, so it’s a bit like saying that apple is technically not a majority, so it not being good at X is not a big deal.

Don’t get me wrong, I say that as someone who likes Mastodon and many of its ideas. My only gripe is a lack of focus on privacy - the fediverse makes everything overly public.

Thats the problem of one instance. Not with Mastodon as a whole...

no lag? it is lagging like crazy for me.

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