Comment by WaffleIronMaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WaffleIronMaker | Hacker News Reader

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WaffleIronMaker

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

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.

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.

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