Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

mastodon.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 257 posts

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#11

Post by drstewart »

nerdponx wrote: post #7
vorpalhex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a feature, not a bug. Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Consider running your own for your friends.

Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get to control your own community and moderation. Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.

Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#12

Post by EarlKing »

323 wrote: post #5

It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?

I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody wants to hear that either.

If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of the Fediverse.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#13

Post by spaceribs »

ajross wrote: post #10

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done al…

It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had scaling up in the first few years of it's life.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#14

Post by BoorishBears »

vorpalhex wrote: post #6
323 wrote: post #5

It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?

That's a feature, not a bug. Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Consider running your own for your friends.

I mean you're certainly free to paint it as a feature, but Mastodon is getting pushed very heavily by many Mastodon users to Twitter users as a backup (see "movetodon.org", which starts with "Log in with twitter") so I the scaling issues deserve more than the "that's a feature!" I see thrown at every person who brings them up

> Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small.

Certainly doesn't vibe with the project owners pushing a set of "blessed" servers to every visitor: https://joinmastodon.org/servers

I think this is the biggest reason Mastodon will stay a fringe platform. No one who enjoys it will accept anything of its issues as valid criticism, and if you point out the fact that such a mentality will keep it from getting popular, the reply will be "good! I don't want it to get big!"

Meanwhile the project itself very clearly wants to get popular, and it's clearly being sponsored with the intent that it should become more and more relevant, much to the chagrin of those who were using it before it was cool.

It seems like eventually the cool kids who start to shut out the new kids to stave off an Eternal September, leaving the project in an awkward spot and a steady decline for everyone involved as the old guard shifts energy to building taller and taller fences around their respective echo chambers. (Now what was that about registrations again?)

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#15

Post by standardUser »

ajross wrote: post #10

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done al…

How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#16

Post by Kye »

ajross wrote: post #10

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done al…

People will still say the same thing at 80 million accounts that they say at 8. It's easy to be reflexively pessimistic. It's hard to try and see the potential, or even admit the last thousand predictions of doom all the way back to when Mastodon was one server were wrong.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#17

Post by abdullahkhalids »

cbozeman wrote: post #8

Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.

Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#18

Post by spaceribs »

standardUser wrote: post #15
ajross wrote: post #10

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done al…

How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.

Maybe I could pose this question another way, what does Twitter do that Mastodon can't?

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#19

Post by kirbyfan64sos »

323 wrote: post #5

It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?

It's because most of the servers are not nearly on the level of setup that a normal large-scale social network would probably need...which in turn is also because a lot of them have been run by hobbyists and the like, which in turn is also because no one ever needed to scale it this high before.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#20

Post by rsynnott »

cbozeman wrote: post #8

Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.

I mean, it depends what you mean by 'replace'. Mastodon is already filling many of the functions that twitter filled for millions of people. Will it be a like-for-like replacement for Twitter? Of course not; I don't think anyone's saying that. But as Twitter crumbles, it's a place for many Twitter users to go which will work for many purposes.

> the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others.

You're talking about, maybe, on the order of 50,000 people there. To a large extent... who cares? Extremely high follower count people are important to Twitter's _business model_ (or were, when it had one), but arguably not all that important to the _average user_.

Post reply on HN