Live data from Hacker News

Exploring Mastodon

martinfowler.com

211–220 of 248 posts

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#211
I've had an account on 2 instances (was 3, but 1 vanished) for a couple years now and the biggest thing that I personally run into as a roadblock - ages. Fediverse users are way younger than me. I'm in my late 40s and grew up with usenet/etc, so the tech hurdle wasn't that steep but finding people that I connect with at all has just not happened. I follow a few folks here and there but that's really about it.

It's amazing how the little silos of content can be so isolating.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just have lost the ability to comprehend the concept of federation because everything in the current internet is walled gardens. There is nothing Mastodon can do to "fix this" without giving up on federation. But people understand how federation works. They see it happen everyday with e-mail. You just need to tell them it works like that and they'll get it.

People keep using email as the prime example of federation, but email is pretty terrible! I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails…

>I can't communicate with anyone whose address I don't already know. There's no real "discoverability." Many people have multiple email addresses, and I don't know whether I'm communicating with the correct one, or even whether more exist that I don't know about. If an email address stops working, it just... stops working. Emails bounce back (if I'm lucky!) with no easy or standard way to say why, or what address to use instead. I could go on.

These all sound like features to me. If I want you to contact me, I will give you my e-mail address. Otherwise, leave me alone.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#213
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barrier to entry is just one problem. The main one is reach. 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach. Posting messages is easy. I'm sure a thousand entrepreneurs have figured out how to collect 140-character messages, follow and reply. But they will collect dust unless they get seen by 100M people. That means having that many users on one platform, one platform for content creators to promote, and a single place for…

You might be assuming that people interested in being on the fediverse have the goal of excessive reach. I acknowledge that some coming over from twitter might be interested in such a goal....but those individuals might simply not fully understand the compelling value that the fediverse (and mastodon instances) often represent. Not everyone wants/needs to reach 100M people. - While, twitter (& other commercial social…

You're right but also you're discounting the value of the Twitter model. Twitter sells eyeballs, but they also give away reach to creators. Politicians may use the platform to amplify nonsense but a lot of them use the platform for good as well. Same with journalists which is the primary reason I'm there. It's easy to follow the kind of people I'm interested in hearing more from and they're all in one place. Looking at ads is the price paid for a free service with adequate moderation. For personal connections or interest groups, there's no shortage of existing platforms that do the job better than Mastodon.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#214
post #209
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barrier to entry is just one problem. The main one is reach. 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach. Posting messages is easy. I'm sure a thousand entrepreneurs have figured out how to collect 140-character messages, follow and reply. But they will collect dust unless they get seen by 100M people. That means having that many users on one platform, one platform for content creators to promote, and a single place for…

> 99% of the value of Twitter is its reach. For marketers, politicians and others that use Twitter as a megaphone for their personal brand. Everybody else just wants to see funny memes, cat pictures and occasionally have the small topic conversations that make Twitter occasionally worth it.

Reddit is better at that than Mastodon

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#215
post #90
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a 502 Bad Gateway from that.

well when you throw a ton of HN traffic at it it'll probably cook the underlying components.

How much traffic are we even talking about? The parent comment thread appears near the bottom of this page. Are that many people getting this far in the thread, and going on to click the link....all at the same time?

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#216
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is following someone on another server with Mastodon difficult? Or is that some sort of a meme now?

It's confusing if someone posts a Mastodon handle on eg Twitter. If it's a link to their profile, you can't follow them on that page . You have to go to your own instance and paste their handle into the search box and follow them that way.

That is a legit UX annoyance, yes.

Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs.

Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#217
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus. What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users. Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users…

i fear that Mastodon will suffer enormously from the Twitter exodus because it has already had to accommodate a million new users. a million new customers is great, a million new members of a community is a giant acculturation problem

Septembers happen.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#218
post #215
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well when you throw a ton of HN traffic at it it'll probably cook the underlying components.

How much traffic are we even talking about? The parent comment thread appears near the bottom of this page. Are that many people getting this far in the thread, and going on to click the link....all at the same time?

looks like it's not doing 500 status responses anymore

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#219
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i fear that Mastodon will suffer enormously from the Twitter exodus because it has already had to accommodate a million new users. a million new customers is great, a million new members of a community is a giant acculturation problem

Septembers happen.

Septembers demolish communities.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#220
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon has been around for six years, which is young but not infant-young, and what I'm getting at is pretty central to the entire concept. If it is still this poor of an experience six years in, one might wonder what is going to change in the next six.

No, it's not central. Discoverability of the entire universe is not a goal of any fediverse tool; the goal is to put back communities in the hands of users. Diackverability happens by talking to people, asking your way around, following interesting accounts from afar, being part of the discussion and organically grow your network. If you search for Twitter2, the fediverse is not it.

It's not a goal of any current fediverse tool. More advanced discoverability will come. It's not hard to e.g. ask instances to opt in to relays or crawl for profiles. It can happen the easy way (cooperation on a non-commercial solution) or someone will build some ad-supported hellhole to do it once they think the traffic would be worth it.
Post reply on HN