Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.social

51–60 of 257 posts

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

#51
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.

They're just emoji, not actual verification (right now).

You can see what custom emoji are available on an instance by visiting https://emojos.in/

Here are hachyderm.io's custom emoji, for example: https://emojos.in/hachyderm.io

You can add these shortcodes (eg. :verified:) to your Mastodon display name or your profile. If you don't see them immediately convert, try F5-ing the page and they should render.

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

#52
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.

Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of years past.

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

#53
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atte…

I don't use Twitter so maybe this is just wrong, but isn't part of the appeal of Twitter that regular users can interact with celebrities?

... Eh, I mean that is probably the appeal to _some_ users (though note that you can do that on Mastodon too, of course). But not all, or, I think, most. Twitter is many things to many people (the one I was always surprised by is that some people have Twitter accounts which they use for making consumer complaints and nothing else)...

I think maybe what you're getting at is the people who are celebrities solely _because_ they are big on Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/whatever. I would agree that the Mastodon model doesn't work particularly well for those. I don't see it as an issue for _normal_ celebrities, tho.

But that just seems like _such_ a niche. The majority of people, I'm reasonably sure, do not use Twitter primarily to follow internet celebrities.

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

#54
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.

The entirety of twitter is too large to just lift and shift to mastodon - absolutely correct. There are also slightly different social norms and styles of discovery.

However, communities and professions have already moved and will continue to move.

Things like Black Twitter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter and https://blacktwitter.io/about ) or Energy Twitter ( https://twitter.com/hashtag/energytwitter and https://mastodon.energy/explore ) are examples of communities that previously existed solely on twitter starting a migration.

This isn't about platforms but rather communities - and these things are "sticky". It's hard to get a community to move off a platform, but once it does move, it makes it hard to keep the remaining people as the pull to the new platform becomes stronger and stronger.

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

#55
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?

Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable.

Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was growing. Slow and constantly breaking.

Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes, Admins had to scale up, but they did it.

I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.

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

#56
The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate.

Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub.

History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.

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

#57
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are already badges that people have. For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0]. [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews

> For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge

You realize that this is a parody account that posts pictures of foxes, not the American cable news channel... right?

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

#58
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling, add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole network is congested, either.

This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the roo…

> That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image.

But that's fixable in several ways - local media cache for an instance, the boost including the preview rather than each client fetching it for themselves, etc.

The problem* with ActivityPub is that it's been designed and developed in a bit of user vacuum and it definitely has issues but they can all be worked on. Much like Twitter going from Rails to Scala, etc., to fix their issues.

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Allow users to signup in 3 seconds without "choosing a server".

People seem to sign up to email just fine.

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

#60
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atte…

I don't use Twitter so maybe this is just wrong, but isn't part of the appeal of Twitter that regular users can interact with celebrities?

That was the promise, but realistically huge accounts were so swamped that your actual chances of having such an interaction turn out to be slim to none. The game was dominated by people who would reply to a celeb's every post, people shilling for crypto, etc.
Post reply on HN