6 ms·

Twitter has one killer feature: lots of users. Everything else is just detail.

rapnie 4y ago
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?
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  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.
  - rapnie 4y ago
    > 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 know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      > 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.
      - rapnie 4y ago
        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.
        illiarian 4y ago
        You need to build your network on Twitter, too. And it's much easier because you can more easily search for topics and people. I have no idea what algorithm throws at me because I only use "for you"
      - gcthomas 4y ago
        It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.
    - suddenclarity 4y ago
      > On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. On the contrary, algorithms are to a large extent irrelevant. You see what the people you follow tweet and retweet. No algorithms involved. What made Twitter special is rather that you can interact with anyone. You can live in the middle of nowhere and still share knowledge and network with the best in your field. Making a copy of the platform but removing the people, also removes the whole point of Twitter.
  - eqvinox 4y ago
    > 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.)
  - viraptor 4y ago
    It depends on the industry. The ones I'm following mainly are: infosec - almost every single follow I had is on mastodon, and gamedev - different people but there's still a big crowd. Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)
  - dasil003 4y ago
    I disagree that "the right people" are on Twitter. I will grant that Twitter has historically been the high water mark for having the largest number of those people in one place, and also that a disproportionate number of people who need broad public reach as an intrinsic part of their career will also be their (eg. celebrities and journalists). But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word. Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
    - rektide 4y ago
      You can either go hunt down very specific narrow spaces where perhaps some special people have gathered. Or you can go to the site where everyone who wants to be in public having interesting engaging discussions with smart people already are. There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
      - dasil003 4y ago
        Everyone sharp was not on Twitter, there was always a majority that were not. Like I said, in terms of a single platform it was a high water mark, but it is incredible confirmation bias to claim that everyone sharp went to Twitter.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    You don't have good conversations with those people on Twitter though. 99% tweets directed by unpopular account to popular are going into a black hole. It's not a "good conversation" where you write something with 1% chance of getting something back. If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.
- rxhernandez 4y ago
  Reddit AMAs
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. I still need quite a few of them to have interesting follows. I'm following 180 accounts on Twitter but only 20 on Mastodon. And basically all of those on Mastodon are tech people. Not that I really want to follow people on Mastodon anyways. I'm hoping that Bluesky is gonna become the go-to Twitter replacement once it opens up.
- basisword 4y ago
  I would suggest most people don’t care about broadcasting or having a conversation. They want to get “important” information from people they’re familiar with (news services, celebrities, etc).
  - gcthomas 4y ago
    If that's their take, needing a news feed, then they wouldn't benefit from a social media service. One way comms isn't very social.
Hamuko 4y ago
Twitter actually has a bunch of killer features when compared to Mastodon, to a degree where "toots can have a content warning" seems trivial. One massive one being "able to search tweets".
- gcthomas 4y ago
  If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    I'm of the #opinion that this isn't a #great #way to #implement #search #inside a #product. #Hopefully #whenever a #service goes #down, #people will #remember to #add the #required #hashtags for #other #people to be able to #find them using #search. #Personally I've seen #very #few #posts on my #Mastodon #feed use #hashtags, so #searching is nigh on #impossible, and I don't #think that's #because they're #avoiding #dogpiling. If #people don't want #other #people to #dogpile their #social #media #accounts, perhaps they should just #make their #accounts #private. #Mastodon has #private #account #support, right?
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Keyword spamming has been uncool since the 90s, when search engines were naive. Making every word in your post a keyword defeats the purpose - in Mastodon's case, it also makes it look ugly, I consider that a win
- jghn 4y ago
  Search, or the lack thereof, is my least favorite thing about the fediverse. The federated nature means it's not feasible to search across all instances the way I can search across all of Twitter.
  - 4y ago
mrtksn 4y ago
This is definitely the moat against having another Twitter but a lot of things have a lots of users. There's something else about it, a culture which tells what people should expect from it maybe. There must be something else because anyone with lot's of users is supposed to be able to inflate and take over everything but this is not happening.
skissane 4y ago
Twitter is easier for new users to join. If you aren’t on Twitter and want to be (or have left and want to give it another try), the flow to create a new account is really easy - go to twitter.com, and then the sign-up flow is pretty standard, something almost everyone nowadays is familiar with. Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance - there are so many to choose from. If you are joining Mastodon because a lot of people you know/follow already have, it makes the choice easier-just join whichever one they are on-but then what happens if it is closed to new registrations? Whereas, if you just heard about this Mastodon thing and want to check it out, a lot of people (especially your average non-technical person) presented with “choose an instance” are going to respond “er, this thing looks too complicated, I can’t be bothered”
- rvz 4y ago
  > Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance... This is one of the essential problems that frustrates normal users from moving to another social network. We are yet to talk about the mediocre 'search' function, co-ordinated instance-level bans, rouge moderators, instances shutting down / falling over, etc. Techies love discussing about how complex something is, where as the majority of users do not care especially normal users moving from Twitter to Mastodon which from the looks of it, was no 'mass migration'. As many instances have closed registrations, if the largest instances re-opened them it further defeats the purpose of federation and encourages instance centralization. We haven't even mentioned the strong network effect of Twitter being the major reason why little to no-one other than the 'screaming techies of the Twitter apocalypse' got angry, packed their bags and moved to Mastodon. The event was as if it was a leaf falling out of a tree.
  - gcthomas 4y ago
    Want to join Email? First you have to choose a server ... No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
CM30 4y ago
Yeah, this is it. Otherwise you'd think the non federated Twitter alternatives that popped up recently (Cohost, Post, Hive, Substack Notes, etc) would be lighting the world on fire and taking lots of Twitter's disgruntled users. But they're not, because the majority of Twitter's users haven't moved over. And without the majority moving over, said majority has no reason to. Federation is basically irrelevant to the success or failure of a platform, since the technical details of how its implemented don't matter to 99% of the userbase. If their friends and idols use Mastodon, they'll learn how to use it. If they don't, they won't.
pxoe 4y ago
twitter has a bunch of 'conversation quality' features that they've amassed over time and which now make up their 'expertise' on this kind of social media format. and yes, that includes stuff like quote tweets, which mastodon for whatever reason stubbornly opposes and refuses to implement. like, wouldn't it be better, that if someone decides to talk about something, for there to be a definite link to the original? instead of just, having them vaguely talk about 'something someone said' without an actual exact reference? but nope, mastodon just kinda...doesn't think that through. not even on the 'what would disabling/not having this feature result in' level. and then they pretend like 'that's the solution', but it's just not.

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?

suddenclarity 4y ago
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.
- rapnie 4y ago
  > 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 know if that is good for the dynamics. It is quite refreshing to have a social network where people don't try to become influencers.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > 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.
    - rapnie 4y ago
      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.
      - illiarian 4y ago
        You need to build your network on Twitter, too. And it's much easier because you can more easily search for topics and people. I have no idea what algorithm throws at me because I only use "for you"
    - gcthomas 4y ago
      It's trivially easy to move your profile and followers list to another instance, if you want to. But you aren't restricted to following users from your instance anyway. Follow one person you see boosted into your feed, look at who they follow and follow them. Rince and repeat.
  - suddenclarity 4y ago
    > On Twitter you have to hone your messages in hope the algorithms make you 'go viral'. On the contrary, algorithms are to a large extent irrelevant. You see what the people you follow tweet and retweet. No algorithms involved. What made Twitter special is rather that you can interact with anyone. You can live in the middle of nowhere and still share knowledge and network with the best in your field. Making a copy of the platform but removing the people, also removes the whole point of Twitter.
- eqvinox 4y ago
  > 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.)
- viraptor 4y ago
  It depends on the industry. The ones I'm following mainly are: infosec - almost every single follow I had is on mastodon, and gamedev - different people but there's still a big crowd. Then there's "weird tech", which was already on mastodon. (Tube time, foone, etc.)
- dasil003 4y ago
  I disagree that "the right people" are on Twitter. I will grant that Twitter has historically been the high water mark for having the largest number of those people in one place, and also that a disproportionate number of people who need broad public reach as an intrinsic part of their career will also be their (eg. celebrities and journalists). But at the same time, being an expert, leader and overall interesting person is not synonymous with public reach, and there is a huge subset of interesting people that have never touched Twitter. There's also been a slow and steady descent in the level of discourse on Twitter to the point that it's widely regarded as a cesspool now, with many formerly active interesting people having abandoned it, and many others holding their nose to drop their broadcasts but not engaging in any discourse due to the amount of polarization and armies of angry partisan nobodies ready to dogpile on the slightest misplaced word. Ultimately, the most interesting parts of Twitter as being a marketplace for ideas, public square, and open platform with diverse use cases that everyone was so excited about in 2008-2012 was eventually subverted by the financial incentives that VC investment demands. The result is a significant divergence between what constitutes an interesting idea and what will make you successful on Twitter. Therefore I thoroughly reject the idea of treating Twitter as any kind of baseline bar for contemporary human notability. I'd rank a large scale following there somewhere above reality TV star, and somewhere below traditionally published author.
  - rektide 4y ago
    You can either go hunt down very specific narrow spaces where perhaps some special people have gathered. Or you can go to the site where everyone who wants to be in public having interesting engaging discussions with smart people already are. There's no comparison. This isn't about audiences nor number of users. It's about the ability for people to form connections. Twitter has been way better of a place to do that, to find & discover new connections to make, in a place everyone sharp already was at.
    - dasil003 4y ago
      Everyone sharp was not on Twitter, there was always a majority that were not. Like I said, in terms of a single platform it was a high water mark, but it is incredible confirmation bias to claim that everyone sharp went to Twitter.
- throwaway290 4y ago
  You don't have good conversations with those people on Twitter though. 99% tweets directed by unpopular account to popular are going into a black hole. It's not a "good conversation" where you write something with 1% chance of getting something back. If I am interested to know what experts and industry leaders think, I can monitor their media (where by the way HN is wayyy better than Twitter, and I'm sure there is a better community for every industry), but for good conversations I'd probably head to a smaller group which can exist anywhere, Matrix, Discord, FB group, Whatsapp communities, Discourse, etc. If I have an industry leader who is also a friend, those places is probably where they are having the good conversations.
rxhernandez 4y ago
Reddit AMAs
Hamuko 4y ago
>If you want to have good conversations, you don't need many people. I still need quite a few of them to have interesting follows. I'm following 180 accounts on Twitter but only 20 on Mastodon. And basically all of those on Mastodon are tech people. Not that I really want to follow people on Mastodon anyways. I'm hoping that Bluesky is gonna become the go-to Twitter replacement once it opens up.
basisword 4y ago
I would suggest most people don’t care about broadcasting or having a conversation. They want to get “important” information from people they’re familiar with (news services, celebrities, etc).
- gcthomas 4y ago
  If that's their take, needing a news feed, then they wouldn't benefit from a social media service. One way comms isn't very social.

Hamuko 4y ago

Twitter actually has a bunch of killer features when compared to Mastodon, to a degree where "toots can have a content warning" seems trivial. One massive one being "able to search tweets".

gcthomas 4y ago
If a poster wants their posts searchable then they hash tag key words. Those who don't want randos searching for vulnerable people they can dogpile onto can have that relative anonymity by avoiding contentious hash tags. It's a feature, although some exTwitterati disagree.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  I'm of the #opinion that this isn't a #great #way to #implement #search #inside a #product. #Hopefully #whenever a #service goes #down, #people will #remember to #add the #required #hashtags for #other #people to be able to #find them using #search. #Personally I've seen #very #few #posts on my #Mastodon #feed use #hashtags, so #searching is nigh on #impossible, and I don't #think that's #because they're #avoiding #dogpiling. If #people don't want #other #people to #dogpile their #social #media #accounts, perhaps they should just #make their #accounts #private. #Mastodon has #private #account #support, right?
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Keyword spamming has been uncool since the 90s, when search engines were naive. Making every word in your post a keyword defeats the purpose - in Mastodon's case, it also makes it look ugly, I consider that a win
jghn 4y ago
Search, or the lack thereof, is my least favorite thing about the fediverse. The federated nature means it's not feasible to search across all instances the way I can search across all of Twitter.
- 4y ago

mrtksn 4y ago

This is definitely the moat against having another Twitter but a lot of things have a lots of users. There's something else about it, a culture which tells what people should expect from it maybe. There must be something else because anyone with lot's of users is supposed to be able to inflate and take over everything but this is not happening.

skissane 4y ago

Twitter is easier for new users to join. If you aren’t on Twitter and want to be (or have left and want to give it another try), the flow to create a new account is really easy - go to twitter.com, and then the sign-up flow is pretty standard, something almost everyone nowadays is familiar with. Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance - there are so many to choose from. If you are joining Mastodon because a lot of people you know/follow already have, it makes the choice easier-just join whichever one they are on-but then what happens if it is closed to new registrations? Whereas, if you just heard about this Mastodon thing and want to check it out, a lot of people (especially your average non-technical person) presented with “choose an instance” are going to respond “er, this thing looks too complicated, I can’t be bothered”

rvz 4y ago
> Want to join Mastodon? First you have to choose an instance... This is one of the essential problems that frustrates normal users from moving to another social network. We are yet to talk about the mediocre 'search' function, co-ordinated instance-level bans, rouge moderators, instances shutting down / falling over, etc. Techies love discussing about how complex something is, where as the majority of users do not care especially normal users moving from Twitter to Mastodon which from the looks of it, was no 'mass migration'. As many instances have closed registrations, if the largest instances re-opened them it further defeats the purpose of federation and encourages instance centralization. We haven't even mentioned the strong network effect of Twitter being the major reason why little to no-one other than the 'screaming techies of the Twitter apocalypse' got angry, packed their bags and moved to Mastodon. The event was as if it was a leaf falling out of a tree.
- gcthomas 4y ago
  Want to join Email? First you have to choose a server ... No wonder email failed to thrive as an open protocol, distributed communication system. It's just too darned hard and unfamiliar to figure out how to join.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago

CM30 4y ago

Yeah, this is it. Otherwise you'd think the non federated Twitter alternatives that popped up recently (Cohost, Post, Hive, Substack Notes, etc) would be lighting the world on fire and taking lots of Twitter's disgruntled users. But they're not, because the majority of Twitter's users haven't moved over. And without the majority moving over, said majority has no reason to. Federation is basically irrelevant to the success or failure of a platform, since the technical details of how its implemented don't matter to 99% of the userbase. If their friends and idols use Mastodon, they'll learn how to use it. If they don't, they won't.

pxoe 4y ago

twitter has a bunch of 'conversation quality' features that they've amassed over time and which now make up their 'expertise' on this kind of social media format. and yes, that includes stuff like quote tweets, which mastodon for whatever reason stubbornly opposes and refuses to implement. like, wouldn't it be better, that if someone decides to talk about something, for there to be a definite link to the original? instead of just, having them vaguely talk about 'something someone said' without an actual exact reference? but nope, mastodon just kinda...doesn't think that through. not even on the 'what would disabling/not having this feature result in' level. and then they pretend like 'that's the solution', but it's just not.