Comment by ar-nelson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ar-nelson | Hacker News Reader

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Disagree. Mastodon isn't so much a Twitter alternative as a Tumblr alternative with Twitter-like UX. And its value proposition is much the same as Tumblr: curate a collection of interesting discussions and memes from across the network, and in the process find people who like the same kinds of things and build connections with them.

It's not about "number go up" in the same way Twitter or Instagram is because there's no algorithm to give it a feedback loop.

Both Twitter/Instagram and Tumblr/Mastodon are about getting community/attention from strangers by posting what you want and letting them come to you (as opposed to Reddit or forums where you join existing discussions). But the Twitter/Instagram model relies on an algorithm so it only benefits those who are already famous or who invest in gaming the system, whereas Tumblr/Mastodon make it easy for everyone to find their community of a few dozen mutuals without being buried by the algorithm.

It's all ether screaming mate. You scream into a black hole and hope someone (or something) responds. The only reason people continue to do it is because numbers go up. If numbers don't go up, people leave.

I'm not knocking it, I do it too. We are all desperate for connection and have a desire to be heard. We don't even care if it's real or not, we just don't want to feel alone. We are so desperate for connection, in fact, that we will create work that others profit from just so we don't feel alone.

It's why we are talking to each other right now. We could be doing anything else right now, but here we are. Desperate to be heard. Clicking refresh. Wanting to feel validated. Even if one of us is a bot, does it matter? The feeling is real.

I dunno. I've met most of my friends, including a lot of people in my local area, via the Fediverse, long before these recent waves of migration. Numbers are a lot less important than real connection.

Thanks for posting this -- as someone who was never on Tumblr, nor used Mastadon, this still felt like an interesting explanatory facet that helps me understand it better, both in terms of mindset and how people use it.

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