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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

My entire tech bubble moved to mastodon and it's been great. No ads, no algorithms. Maybe the VC bubble is just stuck with it because of what it used to be?

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I'm curious about the composition of your tech bubble - is it programmers / technical folk mostly? cause yeah lots have moved.

The non-technical tech sphere hasn't really moved though, but maybe my circles are quite different to yours.

Infosec/cybersec. If you just want CVEs, automatic updates, and LinkedIn-style influencers, Twitter is still fine. If you want the stories, the how, the why, and reading humans live updates, you go to mastodon/Activitypub (bonus if you're a student: make your own activityPub reader!)

can you recommend an instance with this type of content?

Definitely a lot of electronics/EE stuff has also moved to mastodon (at least people that i was following). I follow a bigger group there than I have ever on twitter. Mastodon is still a bit quirky sometimes, but my mastodon feed is now definitely more interesting than my twitter feed.

How do I, as an investor, make money with mastodon?

You don't, which is why it doesn't suck

You don’t - oh well. I’m sure there is an endless number of other ways you can try to make money investing if that’s your main concern.

There could be a market for one central Mastodon host with better UX that makes it easier to onboard non-tech people, but I'm not sure why making money is a pre-req here. Mastodon was never meant to be a for-profit enterprise as far as I'm aware.

You... probably don't? I continue to believe that there may be some small value in a single-person-instance-as-a-service product for celebs etc (particularly if Threads goes ahead with its embrace of ActivityPub; lots of value for celebrities in having the audience but having some independence from Facebook), but it's very niche.

Not everything has to be about making money, you realise.

It seems like a hassle to re-negotiate federation each time for each celebrity. What about a general PR themed instance (strictly moderated so that everyone will peer with it).

> re-negotiate federation

That's not really how it works. Federation happens ~by default in general; restriction is reactive, not proactive.

Thats actually a really cool idea. The big PR agencies who rep for actors, authors, musicians etc, could run an instance and that's where the person's identity would be.

Find a real job

How do you, as an investor, make money with oxygen?

But you still breathe, right?

Does anyone make money from your Mastodon use? I understand how moving to your own place could be good, hell, if you're just talking to each other you could even consider retroshare, but I don't understand the business loss when a bunch of IT professionals move their conversations to a private server.

> but I don't understand the business loss when a bunch of IT professionals move their conversations to a private server.

Why pay (as much) to advertise to an empt(ier) room?

what instance did you join?

Who's paying for servers, moderation, etc?

A lot of the medium to large instances use crowdfunding subscription services like Patreon, Ko-Fi etc. to cover costs.

Wait, aren't we against paying to use a social media site?

Not in principle, we're just against paying to use Twitter.

(The dynamic is very different when it's voluntary and feels like supporting a community, though, and in practice it's going to be a few whales making donations)

No, I'm a big fan of paying for what I use, and I actually do give money to a small social media site that I use. However, I'm also strongly opposed to giving money to transphobes and Republicans, so Twitter is out.

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