Hacker News Reader

Comment by alde | Hacker News Reader

> Federated platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are "culturally" closed

What does the even mean if you can host your own

Nothing, fedi is extremely anarchic by design. If you don't like a server you can move to a different one, or start your own. The big Mastodon servers put in a great deal of effort to police what their users can see and interact with (see FediBlock), but it's impossible to shut certain people or groups out of the network entirely. It's a double-edged sword, but it's a net good for the kind of network it was intended to be, which is a hacker's network; it wasn't designed for normies.

Hosting your own doesn't really matter if it just means you're on a social network with one user.

Lots of people run single-user instances.

Getting them federated properly was pretty tough a while ago (since any spammer could just set one up, there had to be a bar to clear), did that get fixed?

I'm not sure if it ever was that hard but if you follow a bunch of people the network effects will kick in eventually, you can also add relays to pull in posts from other servers if you're impatient. A fresh instance can take some time before the known network starts filling in, especially if you don't know who to follow (or have anyone following you), but fedi is a series of tubes: it only pushes and pulls stuff from places it knows. I didn't have problems federating outgoing messages to my friends' instances when I started, but I wouldn't be surprised if some Mastodon servers use some stupid anti-spam measure that keeps low peer count servers away.

I follow some people who have moved to single-user instances after the instance they were on shut down/etc, and I haven't seen anyone mention any trouble getting federated.

Maybe they're referring to defederation? It's quite common on Mastodon as I understand it, due to disagreements on things like moderation between server operators.

What does it even mean, period? MAGA losers are free to establish a community on Bluesky, the only difference between that and Twitter is that Bluesky isn't built to optimize for ragebait and culture war fighting. But they can still socialize among themselves on Bluesky even if no one else wants anything to do with them.

the problem here is, that a large large group of people do want something "to do with them" (and "them" not just being "maga losers"), but that for NORMAL users that sign up and use bluesky, there are others who choose that they must not socialize with them.

normal people dont understand how they can join specific communities or instances or whatever it is on the specific platform, they want something like "twitter" and then thats where they are, they dont want "some weird twitter instance thats not the main one"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com