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Comment by ranqet | Hacker News Reader

When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.

As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.

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It depends who you follow and how.

The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon.

I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately.

Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

> When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.

That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?

In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever.

IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon.

My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.

Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience following mostly Swift developers. I’d also argue that the slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very “technical and confusing” for a lot of people.

>When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is.

Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).

> Twitter was always buggy at times

I call BS. Twitter was rock-solid for the approximately 8-year window bookmarked by retiring the failwhale and the disastrous Twitter Blue launch.

Twitter was the place people would go to complain about other platforms being down.I could rely on their availability dashboard, the UI was stable and there were no subsystem brownouts of the kind I'm seeing now (e.g. "Tweet not available" until you refresh several times)

Twitter had a very prolonged outage around 2020/2021 before the Musk acquisition, and many more localized outages.

I moderated the Twitter subreddit at that time, I'd be happy to dig up outage threads (like this one! https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/msfyvs/is_twitter_..., coverage: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/twitter-down-outage-12...)

My argument isn't that Twitter had 100% uptime: I consider outages to be on a different axes to general "bugginess" - which is why I stated that Twitter's status page mostly about service availability.

Twitter Spaces was buggy at times, but the core product had much better stability than it has now.

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