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

Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

aus.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 136 posts

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#21

Post by rapnie »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #13
rapnie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely enough there's in those few millions there's enough people to have interesting conversations with. ~12 million is larger than population of quite a few countries, where people still manage to have social lives somehow. With just a relatively small amount of followers you'll have engaging conversations on Mastodon/Fediverse. While on Twitter/Birdsite the engagement, unless you are an influencer, is surprisin…

Where did you get the 12 million number from?

You are right. I was off by few million, according to below stats counter. Note that any count is an estimation due to the decentralized nature of the network and instances not counted. I've seen other higher numbers too.

https://mastodont.cat/@fediverse/110191027067688818

servers: 21,583 (-17, max: 21,600) users: 8,990,211 (-69,061, max: 9,059,272) MAU: 1,469,800 (-8,596, max: 2,444,236)

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#22

Post by eqvinox »

Etesam wrote: post #5
LesZedCB wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh my god a product isn't growing, it must be garbage

user growth is almost imperative for social media products. No one wants to be on a dead social media.

Mastodon is social media, but it is not a product. While indeed no one wants to be on dead social media, Mastodon is perfectly fine at a "stable condition". If your friends are on it, why would you leave?

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#23

Post by illiarian »

rapnie wrote: post #19
suddenclarity wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want the right people such as experts and industry leaders. Those are on Twitter. If you want to hang with average Joes then you have a random Discord service, forums or anonymous people on Reddit. It's not the features that makes microblogs great.

> It's not the features that makes microblogs great. Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not kno…

> It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter

Do you though? If you're unlucky with your instance of choice, there will be as much "organic interaction" as in an abandoned mining town.

Coupled with aversion to search this makes Mastodon "organic" only on large instances and/or only if you specifically know which people on which instances to follow.

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#25

Post by rapnie »

oytis wrote: post #12
Barrin92 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a product with angry VCs breathing down your neck, yes. For a protocol/ecosystem run without profit motive? Not really. IRC has existed for how many decades now? And of course those stats are misleadingly timed given that it's up about 3x compared to a year ago.

From the user's point of view really. Why would I spend time on a social network where few of the people I know or interested in are present?

> Why would I spend time on a social network where few of the people I know or interested in are present?

Heard this argument more often. I find this a strange perspective. Say that you are living in a country with the same amount of population as the Fediverse has. Would you say generally speaking it is hard to get to know people you are interested in? Of course for niche interest areas mass networks help find a larger group. But among millions there's quite a few people to have nice engagements with already.

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#26

Post by eqvinox »

suddenclarity wrote: post #11
rapnie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what your purpose is. If you want to be a broadcaster, have a message to sell, then there's a larger audience. If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. Who talks to millions of people in a lively back and forth?

You want the right people such as experts and industry leaders. Those are on Twitter. If you want to hang with average Joes then you have a random Discord service, forums or anonymous people on Reddit. It's not the features that makes microblogs great.

> You want the right people such as experts and industry leaders. Those are on Twitter.

Really depends on the industry you're talking about. Some have never been on Twitter to begin with.

(e.g. the network engineers bubble: the gray beards are on IRC and the youngsters are on TikTok.)

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#27

Post by ChildOfChaos »

I mean it's almost average satire, but really nobody cares about Mastodon in the mainstream and never will.

It's a worse version of twitter, like all of the tools such people use, woke people just started using it to virtue signal against Elon Musk.

It's just this weird fringe platform, used by a load of outsiders, hackers and developers, but in terms

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#28

Post by johnchristopher »

Hamuko wrote: post #20
Barrin92 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for the same reason you're talking to me here on HN right now. Because a personal community of a 1000 people you vibe with is better than an entropy machine of 100 million. Can you even call something a social network if it makes the people on it anti-social?

Is Hacker News a "personal community"? As far as I know, there's hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896991

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897453

> Dang comment about the 1% rule from 7 months ago:

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983

> > The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound.

> > Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total:

> > So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#29

Post by rapnie »

illiarian wrote: post #23
rapnie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not the features that makes microblogs great. Agreed. It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter is my anecdotal observation. On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. There are quite a few experts, academics, scientists and journalists migrating to the Fediverse. Increasingly some of the industry leaders too. I do not kno…

> It is organic interaction, which you get at the Fediverse. Much more so than on Twitter Do you though? If you're unlucky with your instance of choice, there will be as much "organic interaction" as in an abandoned mining town. Coupled with aversion to search this makes Mastodon "organic" only on large instances and/or only if you specifically know which people on which instances to follow.

No, you have to build your own network first. That's the main difference to Twitter, where the algorithm throws people at you (including the toxic ones to maximize engagement). It is more representative to real life that way. If you move to a new city you will have to give some effort to build a relationship network. By doing so it is likely also to be a more intimate and qualitative one, providing more value from the time you spend there.

Re: Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

#30

Post by leobg »

“Mastodon” as a product name, to me, doesn’t sound inviting at all. Evokes associations with masturbate, Mammoth and the general sense of something big, dark and clunky.

If you have used the product and like it, I’m sure you won’t care about the name, or even come to like and cherish it. But for an outsider who just hears about this thing I would argue that it’s not very approachable.

Post reply on HN