Hacker News Reader

Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

Deliberate choices to avoid being addictive is exactly why I use Mastodon. I do agree that private messages don't quite work - probably it's best to use a third-party messenger for that. There is also an annoying corollary to anti-virality and lack of recommendation algorithm that if you subscribe to an account that posts or reposts a lot (like an organization or just a very active user), then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing. There is no solution to this problem as far as I know, and I'm not sure it's widely discussed either.

Otherwise, if you want to stay informed, connected, but not addicted, Mastodon seems to work quite well.

View on HN

> then you feed gets dominated by that account, and you end up unsubscribing

Possible solution is to create a list with those accounts, remove them from the default feed and display them separately.

> Deliberate choices to avoid being addictive is exactly why I use Mastodon.

The posts I see on BlueSky make it not addictive for me. Everything there seems unnatural, unorganized and performative. It gets old after a few scrolls

Mastodon is much better than any alternatives, in my opinion, too. Open it, see there's no new posts, and close. Deterministic like an RSS feed. Exactly what I want.

I even don't care about "spamming" by serial posters anymore. I chose to follow them, and unfollow them if they bother me that much.

Totally agree on both points. I follow Cory Doctorow and every time he posts it's a 20-long thread that just spams my timeline.

BlueSky sorta has a solution to the problem: a feed called "Quiet posters", that only gives you the posts from the least active users in your timeline. It's not the perfect solution, but it works for me.

I have a feeling that Mastodon was designed to be a sort of anti-social network but advertised as a social network only for the marketing. I'm all for having some alternative model to lessen the apparently inherent addictiveness in social networking, but advertising as a social network feels dishonest to me.

What's anti-social about it? You can follow people, you can talk to other people, you can write things for others to read and discuss. It's not advertisement-oriented, and thus doesn't try to keep the engagement high. But those are anti-features of social networks, not what they promise.

Something about the design causes cliques to form, both within and between instances, expressed with mutual blocking and bans based on association.

It's actually extremely antisocial! It's why I left, all the instances were tribes with beefs against the other instances, and that told me something about the design encourages the behavior

calling it antisocial is pretty apt imho

Oh, that's a (n anti-) social game I've missed somehow, everything is civil in my bubble. Only have one blocked account in my profile that looks like a bot that followed me for no reason.

It is a social network. Social networks aren't defined by the use of addiction loops and dark patterns.

Claiming a social "network" without useful DMs is OK seems like masssive cope to me.

I dunno, I'm pretty old and am used to an Internet without walled gardens and super apps, using different tools for different tasks, so seems fine to me. But I agree it would be convenient.

Yeah, I am also rather old, so old that I started with FidoNet before I got Internet.

However, I have to admit that I grew used to the fact that it is easy to contact a node in my social graph, without having to go hunt for their email, or maintain my own contact database.

After all, the social network should be about people, at least to me. I don't care about corporate pages on social networks, they might as well only exist at normal websites outside of the walled garden.

I guess thats my point. In my book, social networks are about people. And not being able to easily contact people is pretty much useless.

I'm using Mastodon with DMs completely disabled and it's better than OK. Its only use on Twitter was to receive spam anyway.

Trusting a social network with your DMs is a massive delusion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com