16 ms·

Monthly Fediverse posts cross 1 billion for the first time

250 points by mg 4y ago

hnarayanan 4y ago
And anecdotally, I find the amount of discourse just the right fit for my needs I’m on a server with similar enough people and between the list of people I’m following and the “local” timeline for my server, I have a healthy stream of nerdiness and silliness.
quaintdev 4y ago
I have more activity on my pixelfed account in last 3 months than what I have on Instagram after half a decade of presence.
- prox 4y ago
  Do you have any tips to get started?
  - quaintdev 4y ago
    Nothing special. I signed up for pixelfed.social which is default instance and started posting occasionally.
- bmarquez 4y ago
  Took a look at pixelfed and it seems fascinating. I have no interest in leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but I'm desperately looking for an Instagram alternative. I wonder if pixelfed is going to have storage issues someday with the videos uploaded. I guess its dependent on the server but pixelfed.social is the only one with a large userbase.
AndyMcConachie 4y ago
We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse so this likely happened earlier. We will always under count because some servers don't report statistics and we may not even be counting all the servers. I say this as someone who has spent time trying to measure these things and has written a fair bit of software attempting to measure things like this.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  > ...We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse... In many ways, I hope that blindness continues...While i know my opinion there hurts valid research studies (and any stats work like yourself might conduct - sorry about that!), I think the pseudo-privacy that the network affords is worth the likelihood that any data set is only a fraction of the true numbers. My intent is not to be flippant....i just really value this nebulous aspect of the network...Like someone who values their small town feel (warts and all), and dislikes Big City folks who charge into said fictional small town trying to change things that may not need changing. (Not saying you or other researchers do so...just using a cheesy analogy)
rapnie 4y ago
To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the other day [0] that the Fediverse is not in a contest to existing megascale platforms: > The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385
- celdon25 4y ago
  I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?
  - beej71 4y ago
    Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
  - IanCal 4y ago
    My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.
mkl 4y ago
ActivityPub came out in 2018, Mastodon in 2016. Twitter got to 1 billion a month in 2010, at about 3 years old: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets So the Fediverse took ~2 times as long, but in the face of much tougher competition and network effects. Better than I would have guessed!
- mg 4y ago
  Another factor is that protocols propagate much slower than individual pieces of software Email, the thing with the "@" symbol, was invented in 1971. Most people did not use it until 30 years later. ActivityPub, the thing with the two "@" symbols, is now 5 years old. If we assume it will propagate twice as fast as email, it will take another 10 years until it hits the mainstream.
  - viernullvier 4y ago
    This also implies that a future generation social protocol with three "@" symbols will only take 7.5 years to become mainstream.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Calling it now: long-lived assistant personas that hold context for years at a time. "@engineering@orgdomain@openai.com where can I find the Frobber service documentation?"
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  On the other hand, Twitter basically predated smartphones and tablets. I recall a time when you had to use WAP to read and SMS to send tweets. To avoid absurd fees, most people would only use internet on their stationary computer. Compare it with today when there are supposedly 7 billion smartphones while most colleagues seem to use them 24/7.
- riffic 4y ago
  it's fair to note that the Fediverse is much older than the AP protocol. It originally came up through a duo of protocols, OStatus and the Diaspora protocol. Before Mastodon we had Status.net, Identi.ca, and GNU Social. The Fedi will be celebrating its 15th year soon: https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/ https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/
xvilka 4y ago
So far, the biggest problem is the UX. Following someone from another server is not one click away. Until it's resolved, it will not gain mainstream acceptance.
- rapnie 4y ago
  In the Mastodon web UI for interesting people that pop into your timeline (via boosts/retweets) it is 2 clicks, go-to-profile + follow. Some clients have it as one click directly from the timeline. That is hardly a high UX barrier. OTOH when I am in Twitter UI I am always surprised how cluttered it is by Twitter recommending me all kinds of people I should be interested in somehow. Any UX takes a bit of time to get familiarized to, and then you no long notice its warts so much.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I disagree, this is a problem that needs solving. Clicking the link on my phone brought up Mastodon's web interface (which is fine) but there's no way for me to easily follow this account. My phone doesn't prompt me to open the link in an app because those prompts are domain based and the follow button showed me a whole bunch of text and instructions to copy/paste something somewhere else. It's perfectly understandable to me, but it's also not exactly great UI design.
    - mal-2 4y ago
      There have been proposals to use a custom URL scheme to accomplish this (you don't need the link to point to the person's home domain at all), but they were shot down by Mastodon lead Eugen due to browser support and UX concerns. I think that is a mistake and it needs to be looked at more seriously. Perhaps another fedi software project will adopt a useful standard and then Mastodon can follow after the kinks are worked out. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679#issuecomment-1301180085 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679#issuecomme... https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2291 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2291
- mg 4y ago
lynx23 4y ago
I can't help it, the name always triggers me. The first association I have with this name is "a social network built especially to be controllable by the feds."
- rahmeero 4y ago
  I consider myself somewhat plugged into social media (Twitter, Insta, Tiktok, etc). But I admit I didn't know what Fediverse was and though it was some kind of government project, maybe for contractors to share documents relating to grants. Still don't understand the connection between "Fed" and "Mastodon". I think a Mastodon-based social network should be called "Tuskverse" or "Pachyverse" or "Stompverse"
  - pferde 4y ago
    The connection is that Mastodon is just one of the "applications" built on top of ActivityPub protocol. Others are Pixelfed, Pleroma, Peertube, Writefreely, and several more. Being based on the same protocol, they are all to some extent interoperable - e.g. you can follow Pixelfed users from your Mastodon account. "Fediverse" is the umbrella term for all of these applications working together. It is a portmanteau for "federated" and "universe". The "federal police" association is unfortunate, but it is something USA only - rest of the world doesn't really see this.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      >but it is something USA only The US holds no monopoly on the concept of a federation. Germany (Föderale Bundesrepublik) is one too, so is India or Russia. It's the first time I hear someone take offense with the name. I think it's nice honestly, captures the essence of the network well.
      - malermeister 4y ago
        It doesn't hold a monopoly on the concept of a federation, but it does (as far as I know) hold a monopoly on the association of "fed" = (federal) police in people's minds.
oldfashioned1 4y ago
[flagged]
techaqua 4y ago
most of post on twitter is botted anyway.
edwcross 4y ago
Is there some tutorial about Fediverse for organizations, in a way that is really simple for non-experts? I mainly use Twitter for town-level information (as a glorified RSS), and the local administration barely masters Twitter, let alone more complex tools. But if there is a simple way to copy their messages towards the Fediverse, that could help bootstrap it.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  There are various tools that will mirror tweets to Mastodon. Many of them worked the other way around (replicating Mastodon posts on Twitter) but with the ridiculous pricing Twitter asks for API access I doubt they'll still work in a few months. There's also a tool that will directly mirror RSS into Mastodon, so if that's the source of your tweets then you're in luck. There's also a decent, chance your posts are already readable on Mastodon through https://bird.makeup/ https://bird.makeup/. I wouldn't use that as an official source, but it's probably good to know about. It should also be noted that some servers block dedicated Twitter forwarding services like these because of the massive moderation task blindly forwarding the Twitter cesspool can cause. I can't tell you what tool or program suits your needs most. There are systems ranging from fully custom ActivityPub servers to simple set-and-forget IFTT automations (https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter) that can solve the problem of "post the same stuff on two platforms". Sadly, the most easy to use tools that I know of are useless without access to the Twitter API and I doubt you'll be willing to spend the ridiculous amounts of money Twitter demands for that for a few replicated tweets. As far as simple guides, everyone has their own idea of what "simple" means. In its most basic form, you type or paste text into an input field and hit the send button, just like on Twitter. You give people your username to follow (@user@server.com),they type that into their dashboard and they hit the follow button. If you want to reply to people, you click the reply button and type a reply. Retweeting and liking works the same way as on Twitter, with similar icons. Usernames are a bit longer because they include a domain name, but honestly who even cares about usernames on social media. If you've ever emailed someone outside your organisation, using Mastodon shouldn't be harder than using Twitter. The hard part is synchronising the two, because the only people who have put effort into that so far either used the Twitter API or are comfortable with running shell scripts.
lapcat 4y ago
As a Mastodon user myself, I don't find these low-content, context-free, analysis-free Mastodon stat post submissions to HN to be useful. It's just an excuse for people to argue. I'm not even sure why people need to argue about this. If you want to use Mastodon, then do it, and if you don't want to use Mastodon, then don't. Is anyone forcing you? It's a personal choice. And no, Mastodon will never replace Twitter for hundreds of millions of people; it was never designed to do so. Mastodon vs. Twitter is a false dichotomy. It's more like Twitter vs. itself, Twitter vs. not-Twitter. From my own perspective, Mastodon is simply a place I happened to go after I already decided to stop using Twitter. I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter, and this argument has been rehashed ad infinitum on HN from various angles.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time. That's fine. So, don't use Twitter or Mastodon, and don't argue Twitter vs. Mastodon?
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      Why am I not allowed to argue about those things?
      - lapcat 4y ago
        What do you want to argue about exactly? You didn't even explain why you hate Musk or Mastodon.
        4y ago
gtunic 4y ago
Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out, it's not going to get anywhere near as much usage as Twitter. If you don't follow a very narrow political viewpoint then you'll almost certainly get banned from whatever server you signed up for. They all enforce this on each other as well, with a shared block list of servers on which the operators allow users to say things outside of this narrow political viewpoint. This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. Instead it's more like an authoritarian state where you have to be super careful about what you say, under threat of exile.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  > This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. I disagree with your overall take for a few reasons. Some of the best forums on the Internet in the days of yore were heavily moderated. Some of the best subreddits are the most heavily moderated (AskHistorians is the example people provide routinely). Not every place should be about an open free speech debate about everything. Having topic-focused spaces is perfectly reasonable and you as the user are owed nothing if you join one and start posting off-topic content. Users are not owed a spot in any given community.
  - bjt2n3904 4y ago
    I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance by a mob. The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day, the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins. The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes, regardless of what the "rules" say.
    - 4y ago
akudha 4y ago
What is the point of these vain/vanity numbers? This is like saying "I read 50 books last year" - ok, so? One great book is better than a million shitty books. Enjoying/understanding/implementing the learnings from one book is better than reading a thousand books for reading sake. How many of these posts are non-spam, useful etc? Shouldn't we measuring usefulness of info, friendships formed, partnerships created, things learned etc? Though I don't know how to measure any of these, or if it is even possible. 9 times out of 10, this "data driven" stuff is just useless and annoying
- lantry 4y ago
  I think it's a somewhat useful proxy. You can't measure "friendships formed", so you find something you can measure that hopefully correlates with "friendships formed". As you point out, it's not without it's flaws, but I think most people would say that some data is better than none.
rsynnott 4y ago
Huh, wonder what happened in January. It returned almost to pre-Musk growth rates for a month, then resumed extremely rapid growth. Also somewhat surprised there wasn't more of a spike in April 2022; IIRC that's when Musk made his offer and it's certainly when I started un-mothballing my old mastodon account.
shadowgovt 4y ago
It's interesting to see how much of a boost the Fediverse received simply from the inept handling of Twitter. Social networks operate on an attention economy.

250 points by mg 4y ago

And anecdotally, I find the amount of discourse just the right fit for my needs I’m on a server with similar enough people and between the list of people I’m following and the “local” timeline for my server, I have a healthy stream of nerdiness and silliness.

quaintdev 4y ago

I have more activity on my pixelfed account in last 3 months than what I have on Instagram after half a decade of presence.

prox 4y ago
Do you have any tips to get started?
- quaintdev 4y ago
  Nothing special. I signed up for pixelfed.social which is default instance and started posting occasionally.
bmarquez 4y ago
Took a look at pixelfed and it seems fascinating. I have no interest in leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but I'm desperately looking for an Instagram alternative. I wonder if pixelfed is going to have storage issues someday with the videos uploaded. I guess its dependent on the server but pixelfed.social is the only one with a large userbase.

AndyMcConachie 4y ago

We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse so this likely happened earlier. We will always under count because some servers don't report statistics and we may not even be counting all the servers. I say this as someone who has spent time trying to measure these things and has written a fair bit of software attempting to measure things like this.

mxuribe 4y ago
> ...We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse... In many ways, I hope that blindness continues...While i know my opinion there hurts valid research studies (and any stats work like yourself might conduct - sorry about that!), I think the pseudo-privacy that the network affords is worth the likelihood that any data set is only a fraction of the true numbers. My intent is not to be flippant....i just really value this nebulous aspect of the network...Like someone who values their small town feel (warts and all), and dislikes Big City folks who charge into said fictional small town trying to change things that may not need changing. (Not saying you or other researchers do so...just using a cheesy analogy)

rapnie 4y ago

To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the other day [0] that the Fediverse is not in a contest to existing megascale platforms: > The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385

celdon25 4y ago
I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?
- beej71 4y ago
  Don't follow #cats or #politics or #lunch. :) I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff. You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
- IanCal 4y ago
  My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this X is really important. 5 things you have to know: (thread) All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.

mkl 4y ago

ActivityPub came out in 2018, Mastodon in 2016. Twitter got to 1 billion a month in 2010, at about 3 years old: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/measuring-tweets So the Fediverse took ~2 times as long, but in the face of much tougher competition and network effects. Better than I would have guessed!

mg 4y ago
Another factor is that protocols propagate much slower than individual pieces of software Email, the thing with the "@" symbol, was invented in 1971. Most people did not use it until 30 years later. ActivityPub, the thing with the two "@" symbols, is now 5 years old. If we assume it will propagate twice as fast as email, it will take another 10 years until it hits the mainstream.
- viernullvier 4y ago
  This also implies that a future generation social protocol with three "@" symbols will only take 7.5 years to become mainstream.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Calling it now: long-lived assistant personas that hold context for years at a time. "@engineering@orgdomain@openai.com where can I find the Frobber service documentation?"
suddenclarity 4y ago
On the other hand, Twitter basically predated smartphones and tablets. I recall a time when you had to use WAP to read and SMS to send tweets. To avoid absurd fees, most people would only use internet on their stationary computer. Compare it with today when there are supposedly 7 billion smartphones while most colleagues seem to use them 24/7.
riffic 4y ago
it's fair to note that the Fediverse is much older than the AP protocol. It originally came up through a duo of protocols, OStatus and the Diaspora protocol. Before Mastodon we had Status.net, Identi.ca, and GNU Social. The Fedi will be celebrating its 15th year soon: https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/ https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/

xvilka 4y ago

So far, the biggest problem is the UX. Following someone from another server is not one click away. Until it's resolved, it will not gain mainstream acceptance.

rapnie 4y ago
In the Mastodon web UI for interesting people that pop into your timeline (via boosts/retweets) it is 2 clicks, go-to-profile + follow. Some clients have it as one click directly from the timeline. That is hardly a high UX barrier. OTOH when I am in Twitter UI I am always surprised how cluttered it is by Twitter recommending me all kinds of people I should be interested in somehow. Any UX takes a bit of time to get familiarized to, and then you no long notice its warts so much.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I disagree, this is a problem that needs solving. Clicking the link on my phone brought up Mastodon's web interface (which is fine) but there's no way for me to easily follow this account. My phone doesn't prompt me to open the link in an app because those prompts are domain based and the follow button showed me a whole bunch of text and instructions to copy/paste something somewhere else. It's perfectly understandable to me, but it's also not exactly great UI design.
  - mal-2 4y ago
    There have been proposals to use a custom URL scheme to accomplish this (you don't need the link to point to the person's home domain at all), but they were shot down by Mastodon lead Eugen due to browser support and UX concerns. I think that is a mistake and it needs to be looked at more seriously. Perhaps another fedi software project will adopt a useful standard and then Mastodon can follow after the kinks are worked out. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679#issuecomment-1301180085 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679#issuecomme... https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2291 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2291
mg 4y ago

lynx23 4y ago

I can't help it, the name always triggers me. The first association I have with this name is "a social network built especially to be controllable by the feds."

rahmeero 4y ago
I consider myself somewhat plugged into social media (Twitter, Insta, Tiktok, etc). But I admit I didn't know what Fediverse was and though it was some kind of government project, maybe for contractors to share documents relating to grants. Still don't understand the connection between "Fed" and "Mastodon". I think a Mastodon-based social network should be called "Tuskverse" or "Pachyverse" or "Stompverse"
- pferde 4y ago
  The connection is that Mastodon is just one of the "applications" built on top of ActivityPub protocol. Others are Pixelfed, Pleroma, Peertube, Writefreely, and several more. Being based on the same protocol, they are all to some extent interoperable - e.g. you can follow Pixelfed users from your Mastodon account. "Fediverse" is the umbrella term for all of these applications working together. It is a portmanteau for "federated" and "universe". The "federal police" association is unfortunate, but it is something USA only - rest of the world doesn't really see this.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >but it is something USA only The US holds no monopoly on the concept of a federation. Germany (Föderale Bundesrepublik) is one too, so is India or Russia. It's the first time I hear someone take offense with the name. I think it's nice honestly, captures the essence of the network well.
    - malermeister 4y ago
      It doesn't hold a monopoly on the concept of a federation, but it does (as far as I know) hold a monopoly on the association of "fed" = (federal) police in people's minds.

oldfashioned1 4y ago

[flagged]

techaqua 4y ago

most of post on twitter is botted anyway.

edwcross 4y ago

Is there some tutorial about Fediverse for organizations, in a way that is really simple for non-experts? I mainly use Twitter for town-level information (as a glorified RSS), and the local administration barely masters Twitter, let alone more complex tools. But if there is a simple way to copy their messages towards the Fediverse, that could help bootstrap it.

jeroenhd 4y ago
There are various tools that will mirror tweets to Mastodon. Many of them worked the other way around (replicating Mastodon posts on Twitter) but with the ridiculous pricing Twitter asks for API access I doubt they'll still work in a few months. There's also a tool that will directly mirror RSS into Mastodon, so if that's the source of your tweets then you're in luck. There's also a decent, chance your posts are already readable on Mastodon through https://bird.makeup/ https://bird.makeup/. I wouldn't use that as an official source, but it's probably good to know about. It should also be noted that some servers block dedicated Twitter forwarding services like these because of the massive moderation task blindly forwarding the Twitter cesspool can cause. I can't tell you what tool or program suits your needs most. There are systems ranging from fully custom ActivityPub servers to simple set-and-forget IFTT automations (https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter) that can solve the problem of "post the same stuff on two platforms". Sadly, the most easy to use tools that I know of are useless without access to the Twitter API and I doubt you'll be willing to spend the ridiculous amounts of money Twitter demands for that for a few replicated tweets. As far as simple guides, everyone has their own idea of what "simple" means. In its most basic form, you type or paste text into an input field and hit the send button, just like on Twitter. You give people your username to follow (@user@server.com),they type that into their dashboard and they hit the follow button. If you want to reply to people, you click the reply button and type a reply. Retweeting and liking works the same way as on Twitter, with similar icons. Usernames are a bit longer because they include a domain name, but honestly who even cares about usernames on social media. If you've ever emailed someone outside your organisation, using Mastodon shouldn't be harder than using Twitter. The hard part is synchronising the two, because the only people who have put effort into that so far either used the Twitter API or are comfortable with running shell scripts.

lapcat 4y ago

As a Mastodon user myself, I don't find these low-content, context-free, analysis-free Mastodon stat post submissions to HN to be useful. It's just an excuse for people to argue. I'm not even sure why people need to argue about this. If you want to use Mastodon, then do it, and if you don't want to use Mastodon, then don't. Is anyone forcing you? It's a personal choice. And no, Mastodon will never replace Twitter for hundreds of millions of people; it was never designed to do so. Mastodon vs. Twitter is a false dichotomy. It's more like Twitter vs. itself, Twitter vs. not-Twitter. From my own perspective, Mastodon is simply a place I happened to go after I already decided to stop using Twitter. I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter, and this argument has been rehashed ad infinitum on HN from various angles.

Hamuko 4y ago
>I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time. That's fine. So, don't use Twitter or Mastodon, and don't argue Twitter vs. Mastodon?
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    Why am I not allowed to argue about those things?
    - lapcat 4y ago
      What do you want to argue about exactly? You didn't even explain why you hate Musk or Mastodon.
      - 4y ago

gtunic 4y ago

Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out, it's not going to get anywhere near as much usage as Twitter. If you don't follow a very narrow political viewpoint then you'll almost certainly get banned from whatever server you signed up for. They all enforce this on each other as well, with a shared block list of servers on which the operators allow users to say things outside of this narrow political viewpoint. This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. Instead it's more like an authoritarian state where you have to be super careful about what you say, under threat of exile.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BeefWellington 4y ago
> This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. I disagree with your overall take for a few reasons. Some of the best forums on the Internet in the days of yore were heavily moderated. Some of the best subreddits are the most heavily moderated (AskHistorians is the example people provide routinely). Not every place should be about an open free speech debate about everything. Having topic-focused spaces is perfectly reasonable and you as the user are owed nothing if you join one and start posting off-topic content. Users are not owed a spot in any given community.
- bjt2n3904 4y ago
  I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance by a mob. The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day, the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins. The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes, regardless of what the "rules" say.
  - 4y ago

akudha 4y ago

What is the point of these vain/vanity numbers? This is like saying "I read 50 books last year" - ok, so? One great book is better than a million shitty books. Enjoying/understanding/implementing the learnings from one book is better than reading a thousand books for reading sake. How many of these posts are non-spam, useful etc? Shouldn't we measuring usefulness of info, friendships formed, partnerships created, things learned etc? Though I don't know how to measure any of these, or if it is even possible. 9 times out of 10, this "data driven" stuff is just useless and annoying

lantry 4y ago
I think it's a somewhat useful proxy. You can't measure "friendships formed", so you find something you can measure that hopefully correlates with "friendships formed". As you point out, it's not without it's flaws, but I think most people would say that some data is better than none.

rsynnott 4y ago

Huh, wonder what happened in January. It returned almost to pre-Musk growth rates for a month, then resumed extremely rapid growth. Also somewhat surprised there wasn't more of a spike in April 2022; IIRC that's when Musk made his offer and it's certainly when I started un-mothballing my old mastodon account.

shadowgovt 4y ago

It's interesting to see how much of a boost the Fediverse received simply from the inept handling of Twitter. Social networks operate on an attention economy.