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Comment by wildpeaks | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hoped Mastodon to win (even backed their Patreon for a year), they kept underestimating the onboarding friction and now that the general audience was ready to switch, of course they went for the twitter clone that is easy to join and looks familiar.

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As an anecdote, an online comment responding to someone asking if their choice of server matters (e.g. if their Mastodon account would be visible to someone using another server) was roughly "no, as long as your servers federate with each other."

I would be able to parse that, but it seems rather out-of-touch for trying to attract the bulk of Twitter users. Meanwhile, Bluesky offers a de facto server with some (lesser?) amount of decentralization that's largely invisible to end users.

Yes, it's almost as if the general populace actually like centralization, even as many tech people on HN don't want to believe it.

“Liking it” is a stretch, I’m sure most normal people don’t have a real opinion on the subject; they just want to use whatever is frictionless and easy to understand

I should've said "prefer" rather than "like" then, as it's not a conscious understanding of centralization vs decentralization but that the centralized one is nicer and easier for people to use.

This is true. The trouble is, I don't see anything preventing it having all the same problems. I actually like Mastodon because it feels a bit more like the old internet. I'm thinking maybe onboarding friction is a feature not a bug.

For me Mastodon misses some common workflows I have. When I find someone interesting I like to easily see who they follow with bios and then I may follow some of those. In Twitter and Bluesky this is pretty easy, in Mastodon it's hard and has a lot of friction points.

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