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The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on

The failure of Mastodon to break into the mainstream especially in the wake of Twitter/X's debacles is a good example on how decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practice. It turns out that a) people will just join the largest instance/community possible for network effects b) internet discourse is bifuricated enough that preemtively banning instances just in case makes discourse even more bifuricated and c) maintaining and moderating said instances is expensive and time-consuming. Even though Bluesky did break through to the mainstream with ATProto, it's unclear how ATProto is either a functional or competitive benefit, or if its users even know about it.

deleted 1y ago
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snarf21 1y ago
I agree completely. This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. As long as posts are gamified with likes and notifications, decentralization will never win. Even HN isn't immune and it has carved out a pretty specific niche of text based and no ads social network focused largely on tech. I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers.
- krapp 1y ago
  >This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. Yes it is. It literally is. If we want to do that we can just do that. The internet is not a zero-sum game. We don't have to play to "win." >I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers. The only reason HN is popular is its connections to Silicon Valley and startup culture. It didn't really carve out a niche so much as succesfully create and market an image. Without that it isn't anything remarkable, and there are already tons of technically-focused communities on the fediverse.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  > This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. That's exactly what Mastodon is. The whole reason mastodon exists is because a whole lot of people wanted exactly this experience. Mastodon won't win because they aren't playing. Which again, is the whole point. It's extremely deliberate and intentional. People use mastodon because the "game" is abhorrent and objectively extremely bad for people individually and society as a whole. So mastodon eschews the gamification and like farming and fake notifications. One of the most common jokes throughout the whole network is "wow, this post blew up and is doing Real Numbers" and the post has like ten boosts and twenty likes. It's extremely rare to see more than a couple hundred notes on any one post. It's on purpose. Mastodon users like and actively want it to be this way.
gitaarik 1y ago
Now that you mention it, I vagely remember something about Bluesky being built on some distributed protocol. So yeah, I guess it's correct that doesn't mean much to it's popularity. Which is sad of course. But yeah, most people don't know about technology, and security and privacy, so yeah, why would they care..
K0nserv 1y ago
This is, at least in part, a UX problem. Even as someone with a lot of technical experience I found Mastodon quite disorienting at first. Bluesky has solved this much better which is why they've won out over Mastodon.
- zoul 1y ago
  It’s arguably much easier to solve the UX issues when you are designing a centralized service, which is what Bluesky is.
  - K0nserv 1y ago
    I agree the UX challenge is much more challenging for decentralised services. I don't know enough about Bluesky to really comment on whether it is centralised or not. Regardless, I think there's another thing that helped Bluesky: VC capital. In particular, to hire people to work on UX. It's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I find it strange that designer don't contribute more to projects like Mastodon, which definitely need it. Even from the selfish angle of building a portfolio, helping solve Mastodon's UX challenges is much more impressive and realistic, than doing the millionth redesign of Gmail that will never get implemented.
    - estimator7292 1y ago
      It's a "distributed protocol" but there's really only a single server using it.
  - ronsor 1y ago
    It is easier, but it's still possible to solve the UX issues with a decentralized service, in my opinion. What I think is the main issue is that these decentralized services are made by programmers with little regard or intuition for UX, and there is also a lack of funding to work on UX problems.
  - jauntywundrkind 1y ago
    People are running every element of the Bluesky / AtProtocol stack independently. Bluesky could disappear and it would continue to function as is (albeit with lots of Bluesky data lost). PDS's to hold users data, relays/firehoses to aggregate & forward traffic, AppViews to create composite views of likes, replies, etc, resolvers to lookup DIDs, clients to access the network. Each of these has independent implementations. BlueSky is already decentralized & already has viable credible exit. It's not decentralized, and indeed the scalability & accessibility of having firehose consumers has the greatest scale out decentralization characteristics we've seen anywhere short of BitTorrent.
ktosobcy 1y ago
Mastodon would be OK but the UI/UX is just terrible... interacting with someon on different instance is utterly cumbersome and I do/could miss a lot of posting in global view if someone didn't already followed someone from other instance...
- orblivion 1y ago
  Terrible compared to what? Mastodon is just fine for me. I'm an oblivious nerd here I guess. But I sometimes use Twitter too, can't say I find the UX refreshing by comparison.
  - derefr 1y ago
    > Terrible compared to what? Email?
  - ktosobcy 1y ago
    For example bluesky. I tried masto a bunch of times, still have the account but each time I try to use it, it's so cumbersome. I tried alternative UIs but they are no that better...
Hizonner 1y ago
Those sound like reasons why federation doesn't work. Some of us don't think federation is decentralized enough anyway.
oytis 1y ago
Mastodon might not have broken into the mainstream, but it's surprisingly viable. I am totally OK with its current state to be honest - feels like the cozy internet of 2000s.
- RebeccaTheDev 1y ago
  My Mastodon feed has a very "early to mid 2000s LiveJournal friends page" feel to it, and I honestly adore this.
Glyptodon 1y ago
I think there's an element of how decentralized services work that's not sufficiently refined yet. In a lot of ways it's a better way to have a good user experience with decentralized data that we're sort of looking for, and in some ways, it doesn't really fit how the web works.
- 6510 1y ago
  yes, lots of stuff needs to be figured out. Like, you don't need decentralized auth servers. bittorrent has webseeds. I dump large files and archives on my sever, give people the magnet or link it from an article, they download it fromthere. If for any reason I no longer want to host the file I just remove it. Usually I just want the space back, in theory there could be bandwidth issues or an excess of interested participants. You can put fairly interesting websites in torrents too! That no uninvited participant can find them is a feature not a bug. Email does html too! PDF is also great for publishing. You can send people videos and even executables if you are close enough.
nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
I asked people who use platforms like X and Substack (Notes) why they don't use Mastodon and they said they can't discover new people and new content.
- oytis 1y ago
  Discoverability was an anti-goal for Mastodon initially. People from queer community felt it enables bullying. Mastodon has added search functionality since then, but it's still pretty basic. IMO it's not necessarily bad though. It prevents the network from becoming centered around content and keeps it social. You discover new accounts as they get reposted by people you are already connected to
  - nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the history on this.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    I feel like this is a clear case for "security through obscurity doesn't work" saying, and for the same reasons as the original meaning. "Normal" people won't find such community because it is pain in the ass to do, while bullies will get there just fine because they are motivated. It is like reverse moderation, filtering out less radical and less pro-active newcomers.
- jacooper 1y ago
  Mastodon is completely detached from the world, it's irrelevant.
  - krapp 1y ago
    This attitude is weird to see on Hacker News of all places, a forum that considers itself a quarantine zone from the rest of the world and the modern web, and which is also irrelevant to almost everyone, including much of tech.
growingkittens 1y ago
All of these decentralized social media concepts were/are too technically complicated for too long during the Twitter debacle. Even now, the top results for "how to use Mastodon" have jargon incompatible with mainstream usage.
ocschwar 1y ago
Discord servers are half of a good counterexample, since people try to avoid the extreme end of network effects and want their chat partners pre-screened. But... it's all on Discord, not IRC or jabber or anything.
smileson2 1y ago
That’s a key feature
jazzyjackson 1y ago
d) The kind of people who put a little thought into how Twitter could be done differently may come to the conclusion that they don't actually need a Twitter in their lives
estimator7292 1y ago
The entire point and purpose of mastodon is to not be mainstream social media. Almost everyone there signed up because mainstream social media is so awful. The small and diffuse nature is one of the main benefits. Because it's distributed, there's an extremely niche community server for any subject you might be interested in. Mastodon captures perfectly what twitter was at the beginning. Just people talking to each other and having fun. Not performative like fishing or whatever. No ads, algorithms, endless feeds, AI slop, or spying and tracking. It turns out that a lot of people think mainstream social media is objectively abhorrent and want to connect with other humans in a more natural and user-driven way. Frankly, "mainstream" is a dirty, disgusting concept here. A very large fraction of users would put a significant amout of effort to prevent that from happening. If one server did become "mainstream", as mastodon dot social did, the network treats it as a damage and routes around. Many servers just cut them off because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from the big public servers. Mastodon won't go mainstream because they don't want to and the system fundamentally cannot operate that way. A few individual servers may go mainstream, but we'd eventually consider it a hard fork. The network would fracture (as it has many times) and the network of small servers will go back to the obscurity we enjoy and cherish. Case in point: Facebook tried to force their way into the fediverse network through threads or whatever it was called. There was a pretty hard split in the network as nodes that value privacy and safety cut themselves off from a literal hostile invader. Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook. I haven't heard anything about Facebook trying activitypub again, so I guess the quarantine was effective.
- int_19h 1y ago
  > Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook A big problem is that this is happening with other servers as well. I've seen nodes that block all other nodes that run Pleroma because it's "for Nazis". And some of them also block nodes that don't share most of the blocklist.
estimator7292 1y ago
I'll post this every time mastodon comes up: to compare mastodon to Twitter, Facebook, bsky, etc. is fallacious in the extreme. Saying that mastodon is "losing" to bluesky is a complete non-sequitur. Mastodon hasn't lost to these other services because they aren't competing. Nobody on mastodon actually wants to replace Twitter. Mastodon exists explicitly as a rejection of mainstream social media. Calling this "losing" is like saying that a bunch of kids playing basketball in the street are "losing" to pro hockey teams. Not the same game, not the same scale, the only similarity is that they're both playing a sport. Mastodon doesn't want to compete. That's totally counter to the entire philosophy. Mastodon isn't even remotely playing the same game as twitter and Facebook. It just so happens that mastodon has a text box with limited characters. That's it, that's the only similarity. Of course a chess club of 10 year olds in Japan isn't going to "win" and displace the entire American baseball league. You'd be laughed down for even suggesting that. And yet, people think that mastodon is "losing". Mastodon is exactly where it wants to be. The small scale and diffusion are features, not bugs. Besides that, it's functionally impossible for "mastodon" to go mainstream. To suggest that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what mastodon is, how it works, and how the people involved run it. At absolute most, you could get a few big servers to go 'mainstream'. When a server gets too big or too popular, the network treats it as damage and routes around. A lot of admins do this purely on principle: huge servers are antithetical to the philosophy and actively bad for the network. The rest block them because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from such servers. If mastodon went mainstream, the network would fracture (again) and the majority of nodes would re-form the network in the obscurity they enjoy and value. This is all extremely intentional and deliberate. Mastodon is an explicit rejection of all the things you think it's "losing" at. Mastodon doesn't want to "win", they largely want to be left alone to continue enjoying a small internet with limited connections. Mastodon has won its own game. It's firmly established itself in a niche, and is not going to move from that niche to chase fads, engagement, metrics, profit. Mastodon wants to be exactly what it is because mainstream social media is a very bad thing
- bxsioshc 1y ago
  You sold me on mastodon. Is there a node for scientists? How do I find it?
bxsioshc 1y ago
> decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practic This claim is so vague it's meaningless. I could just as well argue that torrents are the purest example of decentralisation, and work amazing.
BirAdam 1y ago
If decentralized is great on paper and not in real life, then the paper is wrong and thus not great. Additionally, if decentralized doesn’t work, please explain the survival of email.

deleted 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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snarf21 1y ago

I agree completely. This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. As long as posts are gamified with likes and notifications, decentralization will never win. Even HN isn't immune and it has carved out a pretty specific niche of text based and no ads social network focused largely on tech. I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers.

krapp 1y ago
>This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. Yes it is. It literally is. If we want to do that we can just do that. The internet is not a zero-sum game. We don't have to play to "win." >I don't think another decen-HN is likely to take off or break into other self organizing segments even though this is easy to attempt with some Mastodon servers. The only reason HN is popular is its connections to Silicon Valley and startup culture. It didn't really carve out a niche so much as succesfully create and market an image. Without that it isn't anything remarkable, and there are already tons of technically-focused communities on the fediverse.
estimator7292 1y ago
> This isn't the world of BBSes where everyone had a corner or two that they hung out on. That's exactly what Mastodon is. The whole reason mastodon exists is because a whole lot of people wanted exactly this experience. Mastodon won't win because they aren't playing. Which again, is the whole point. It's extremely deliberate and intentional. People use mastodon because the "game" is abhorrent and objectively extremely bad for people individually and society as a whole. So mastodon eschews the gamification and like farming and fake notifications. One of the most common jokes throughout the whole network is "wow, this post blew up and is doing Real Numbers" and the post has like ten boosts and twenty likes. It's extremely rare to see more than a couple hundred notes on any one post. It's on purpose. Mastodon users like and actively want it to be this way.

gitaarik 1y ago

Now that you mention it, I vagely remember something about Bluesky being built on some distributed protocol. So yeah, I guess it's correct that doesn't mean much to it's popularity. Which is sad of course. But yeah, most people don't know about technology, and security and privacy, so yeah, why would they care..

K0nserv 1y ago

This is, at least in part, a UX problem. Even as someone with a lot of technical experience I found Mastodon quite disorienting at first. Bluesky has solved this much better which is why they've won out over Mastodon.

zoul 1y ago
It’s arguably much easier to solve the UX issues when you are designing a centralized service, which is what Bluesky is.
- K0nserv 1y ago
  I agree the UX challenge is much more challenging for decentralised services. I don't know enough about Bluesky to really comment on whether it is centralised or not. Regardless, I think there's another thing that helped Bluesky: VC capital. In particular, to hire people to work on UX. It's a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I find it strange that designer don't contribute more to projects like Mastodon, which definitely need it. Even from the selfish angle of building a portfolio, helping solve Mastodon's UX challenges is much more impressive and realistic, than doing the millionth redesign of Gmail that will never get implemented.
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    It's a "distributed protocol" but there's really only a single server using it.
- ronsor 1y ago
  It is easier, but it's still possible to solve the UX issues with a decentralized service, in my opinion. What I think is the main issue is that these decentralized services are made by programmers with little regard or intuition for UX, and there is also a lack of funding to work on UX problems.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  People are running every element of the Bluesky / AtProtocol stack independently. Bluesky could disappear and it would continue to function as is (albeit with lots of Bluesky data lost). PDS's to hold users data, relays/firehoses to aggregate & forward traffic, AppViews to create composite views of likes, replies, etc, resolvers to lookup DIDs, clients to access the network. Each of these has independent implementations. BlueSky is already decentralized & already has viable credible exit. It's not decentralized, and indeed the scalability & accessibility of having firehose consumers has the greatest scale out decentralization characteristics we've seen anywhere short of BitTorrent.

ktosobcy 1y ago

Mastodon would be OK but the UI/UX is just terrible... interacting with someon on different instance is utterly cumbersome and I do/could miss a lot of posting in global view if someone didn't already followed someone from other instance...

orblivion 1y ago
Terrible compared to what? Mastodon is just fine for me. I'm an oblivious nerd here I guess. But I sometimes use Twitter too, can't say I find the UX refreshing by comparison.
- derefr 1y ago
  > Terrible compared to what? Email?
- ktosobcy 1y ago
  For example bluesky. I tried masto a bunch of times, still have the account but each time I try to use it, it's so cumbersome. I tried alternative UIs but they are no that better...

Hizonner 1y ago

Those sound like reasons why federation doesn't work. Some of us don't think federation is decentralized enough anyway.

oytis 1y ago

Mastodon might not have broken into the mainstream, but it's surprisingly viable. I am totally OK with its current state to be honest - feels like the cozy internet of 2000s.

RebeccaTheDev 1y ago
My Mastodon feed has a very "early to mid 2000s LiveJournal friends page" feel to it, and I honestly adore this.

Glyptodon 1y ago

I think there's an element of how decentralized services work that's not sufficiently refined yet. In a lot of ways it's a better way to have a good user experience with decentralized data that we're sort of looking for, and in some ways, it doesn't really fit how the web works.

6510 1y ago
yes, lots of stuff needs to be figured out. Like, you don't need decentralized auth servers. bittorrent has webseeds. I dump large files and archives on my sever, give people the magnet or link it from an article, they download it fromthere. If for any reason I no longer want to host the file I just remove it. Usually I just want the space back, in theory there could be bandwidth issues or an excess of interested participants. You can put fairly interesting websites in torrents too! That no uninvited participant can find them is a feature not a bug. Email does html too! PDF is also great for publishing. You can send people videos and even executables if you are close enough.

nakamoto_damacy 1y ago

I asked people who use platforms like X and Substack (Notes) why they don't use Mastodon and they said they can't discover new people and new content.

oytis 1y ago
Discoverability was an anti-goal for Mastodon initially. People from queer community felt it enables bullying. Mastodon has added search functionality since then, but it's still pretty basic. IMO it's not necessarily bad though. It prevents the network from becoming centered around content and keeps it social. You discover new accounts as they get reposted by people you are already connected to
- nakamoto_damacy 1y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for the history on this.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  I feel like this is a clear case for "security through obscurity doesn't work" saying, and for the same reasons as the original meaning. "Normal" people won't find such community because it is pain in the ass to do, while bullies will get there just fine because they are motivated. It is like reverse moderation, filtering out less radical and less pro-active newcomers.
jacooper 1y ago
Mastodon is completely detached from the world, it's irrelevant.
- krapp 1y ago
  This attitude is weird to see on Hacker News of all places, a forum that considers itself a quarantine zone from the rest of the world and the modern web, and which is also irrelevant to almost everyone, including much of tech.

growingkittens 1y ago

All of these decentralized social media concepts were/are too technically complicated for too long during the Twitter debacle. Even now, the top results for "how to use Mastodon" have jargon incompatible with mainstream usage.

ocschwar 1y ago

Discord servers are half of a good counterexample, since people try to avoid the extreme end of network effects and want their chat partners pre-screened. But... it's all on Discord, not IRC or jabber or anything.

smileson2 1y ago

That’s a key feature

jazzyjackson 1y ago

d) The kind of people who put a little thought into how Twitter could be done differently may come to the conclusion that they don't actually need a Twitter in their lives

estimator7292 1y ago

The entire point and purpose of mastodon is to not be mainstream social media. Almost everyone there signed up because mainstream social media is so awful. The small and diffuse nature is one of the main benefits. Because it's distributed, there's an extremely niche community server for any subject you might be interested in. Mastodon captures perfectly what twitter was at the beginning. Just people talking to each other and having fun. Not performative like fishing or whatever. No ads, algorithms, endless feeds, AI slop, or spying and tracking. It turns out that a lot of people think mainstream social media is objectively abhorrent and want to connect with other humans in a more natural and user-driven way. Frankly, "mainstream" is a dirty, disgusting concept here. A very large fraction of users would put a significant amout of effort to prevent that from happening. If one server did become "mainstream", as mastodon dot social did, the network treats it as a damage and routes around. Many servers just cut them off because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from the big public servers. Mastodon won't go mainstream because they don't want to and the system fundamentally cannot operate that way. A few individual servers may go mainstream, but we'd eventually consider it a hard fork. The network would fracture (as it has many times) and the network of small servers will go back to the obscurity we enjoy and cherish. Case in point: Facebook tried to force their way into the fediverse network through threads or whatever it was called. There was a pretty hard split in the network as nodes that value privacy and safety cut themselves off from a literal hostile invader. Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook. I haven't heard anything about Facebook trying activitypub again, so I guess the quarantine was effective.

int_19h 1y ago
> Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook A big problem is that this is happening with other servers as well. I've seen nodes that block all other nodes that run Pleroma because it's "for Nazis". And some of them also block nodes that don't share most of the blocklist.

estimator7292 1y ago

I'll post this every time mastodon comes up: to compare mastodon to Twitter, Facebook, bsky, etc. is fallacious in the extreme. Saying that mastodon is "losing" to bluesky is a complete non-sequitur. Mastodon hasn't lost to these other services because they aren't competing. Nobody on mastodon actually wants to replace Twitter. Mastodon exists explicitly as a rejection of mainstream social media. Calling this "losing" is like saying that a bunch of kids playing basketball in the street are "losing" to pro hockey teams. Not the same game, not the same scale, the only similarity is that they're both playing a sport. Mastodon doesn't want to compete. That's totally counter to the entire philosophy. Mastodon isn't even remotely playing the same game as twitter and Facebook. It just so happens that mastodon has a text box with limited characters. That's it, that's the only similarity. Of course a chess club of 10 year olds in Japan isn't going to "win" and displace the entire American baseball league. You'd be laughed down for even suggesting that. And yet, people think that mastodon is "losing". Mastodon is exactly where it wants to be. The small scale and diffusion are features, not bugs. Besides that, it's functionally impossible for "mastodon" to go mainstream. To suggest that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what mastodon is, how it works, and how the people involved run it. At absolute most, you could get a few big servers to go 'mainstream'. When a server gets too big or too popular, the network treats it as damage and routes around. A lot of admins do this purely on principle: huge servers are antithetical to the philosophy and actively bad for the network. The rest block them because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from such servers. If mastodon went mainstream, the network would fracture (again) and the majority of nodes would re-form the network in the obscurity they enjoy and value. This is all extremely intentional and deliberate. Mastodon is an explicit rejection of all the things you think it's "losing" at. Mastodon doesn't want to "win", they largely want to be left alone to continue enjoying a small internet with limited connections. Mastodon has won its own game. It's firmly established itself in a niche, and is not going to move from that niche to chase fads, engagement, metrics, profit. Mastodon wants to be exactly what it is because mainstream social media is a very bad thing

bxsioshc 1y ago
You sold me on mastodon. Is there a node for scientists? How do I find it?

bxsioshc 1y ago

> decentralized web is a good idea on paper but won't work in practic This claim is so vague it's meaningless. I could just as well argue that torrents are the purest example of decentralisation, and work amazing.

BirAdam 1y ago

If decentralized is great on paper and not in real life, then the paper is wrong and thus not great. Additionally, if decentralized doesn’t work, please explain the survival of email.