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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

I see his point about the "fediverse" and the potential benefits of anyone hosting their own message board, that has interoperability with other message boards, aka Mastodon.

We've seen it though, Mastodon's model is garbage, and they lost from the start. No one wants horrible Reddit style mods ego tripping over their own echo chamber. There is no future for Mastodon.

To the point of the article, the real question is if we'll see more atmosphere hosts (aka using a PDS other than Bluesky's) and more applications built on the protcol. And I think the real test will be if anyone ever builds their own relay that gets popular.

Bluesky's model is still better (more open, unbiased, harder to censor) than Mastodon/Threads/X by default, and yes it has a long way to go, but we've known that from the start.

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Saying “mastodon has lost” is like saying gopher has lost, or personal web pages have lost, or rss has lost. You don’t need most people to be there to “win”; the best conversation isn’t the one with the most people.

Personal websites and RSS don’t have the toxic echo-chamber walled-garden culture of Mastodon.

If you are having problem with “echo chambers” in the list of people you decided to see posts from: My brother in Christ, you made the sandwich.

Well, but personal websites and rss have lost, sadly. I agree with you that being mainstream is not the defining characteristic of a working system. OTOH, every "community" has a lower bound when it comes to involvement. At some point, things just die out, like FidoNet or CB radio.

> the best conversation isn’t the one with the most people

I think this has to be the sentiment that saves discourse on the internet. We spend too much time focusing on the size of the network graph and not nearly enough time considering how to elevate the best conversations.

A lot of subs on reddit really did get destroyed by its free time moderators. And it is mostly the "powermods" that have some form of addiction to be the arbiter of truth, not the ones that just lead an enthusiast or topic centric subs. Those are still mostly fine.

There are similar cases for mastodon instances and it really did repel many users. But there are still open and interesting ones. Not ones where you see celebrities posting, but that isn't the focus of everyone. They will remain niche because exposure of communities is minimal on other places. Maybe that isn't a bad thing.

In contrast to media propaganda, that it is hate that drives users away, in my case it is the paternalistic and childish content moderation. If everything is safe, everything is boring.

I hope Bluesky is more tolerant here, but I fear its discovery just forms information silos as well. Time will tell. Until then it probably is an improvement that we get more distinct platforms.

Some use these sites for networking. For me it is purely entertainment.

> There is no future for Mastodon.

What? About half the people I care to follow post exclusively on Mastodon.

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