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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

> news is not a priority for them

Huh? That's a strange requirement. Somehow every social media platform eventually devolves into having news, meme pages and other faceless inhuman entities you seemingly can't escape.

I, for one, desperately want the opposite — a platform where organizations of any kind are not welcome. Only people and their personal accounts. The fediverse is kinda like that. Yes, BBC does have their own Mastodon server, but they don't have many followers and there are no algorithms to force-feed you out-of-network content.

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Mastodon is quite different. It really filters a lot of noise away (e.g. Xwitter always has ~20 pointless meme gif comments below every viral post) and it self-selects what I would consider interesting people. The algorithm-centred platforms tend to congregate around celebrities/influencers over time, while Mastodon is much more egalitarian and people-focused.

With some amount of curation, sure. I’ve recently started getting into mastodon and all I’ve seen across the dozens of sites are way more related to current political events than anything else.

I recommend installing the extension Streetpass for Mastodon to build up your followed accounts organically across time. A surprising number of interesting articles submitted to HN link back to the author's Mastodon account.

(Graze for Mastodon is another useful extension)

First off, thank you.

Secondly, it feels like in a federate network of any type that growing the network should be top priority, even over the user experience.

Put another way, it seems to me as a newbie that Mastodon's growth effort itself has been federated, which is probably not ideal for the growth necessary to really challenge the walled gardens.

I happen to think Mastodon is good enough as it is. To me it doesn't really need faster growth. It won me over and it won over the hundreds of people I'm following. I get a lot of value from it that I never got on Twitter, despite Mastodon's flaws.

The service itself is improving slowly and quite conservatively which is a really nice change of pace from the warp speed enshittification I have been used to for years now. On the other hand, there is also a wide range of high-quality third apps for it which Twitter now completely lacks (and basically every other walled garden platform, e.g. Reddit was the latest casualty) of you need a different experience.

> a platform where organizations of any kind are not welcome. Only people and their personal accounts

So, politicians and political meme accounts?

How would you even know if a personal account wasn't being managed by an organization?

You can't block politics on these sites in any case. People love drama, it adds 'stickiness' to the app.

> So, politicians and political meme accounts?

Without any form of recommendation system, you will have to find and follow these accounts yourself. Most people wouldn't do that without being constantly nudged by algorithms. So, anything you'll see in your feed would come from people you intentionally follow intentionally reposting things. For a piece of content created by someone way outside of your bubble to become viral in this kind of setup, it has to be really damn good.

News is not as monetizable as something short-form such as Reels

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