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Comment by X86BSD | Hacker News Reader

I've just started using mastodon.social as a replacement for FB and like it just fine. Give it a look.

I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there.

I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.

We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.

I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement.

I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.

I think Mastodon as a native or Electron app that uses bit torrent protocol should do it. Not sure what's the problem with that or I am too optimistic.

That would be optimal, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. The fundamental requirement is that, if the owner of an instance behaves poorly, users should be able to move elsewhere without being cutting off from the larger network.

The name Mastodon is bad. Doesn't say anything about what the site does. Compare Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat....

Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.

I can't look at the word "toot" without being reminded of a terrible, terrible Alvin and the Chipmunks song where it's an euphemism for farts.

> I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed).

Google hasn't had a great track record with these things in general. The problem with a lot of Facebook alternatives is that they make a somewhat better Facebook and then hope everyone will switch over. Of course that's going to fail. Sites that succeed have reasons for people to use them even if there aren't mass migrations.

We know that people have a need for social sites other than Facebook. Slack's been successful, so has Discourse. Heck, meetup.com is still going even though by a naive understanding of things Facebook should have subsumed it (it has a much smaller base, and you need to pay something like $140 a year if you want to start a group). A Facebook alternative will eventually catch on, but it's not going to be a site that starts out by trying to mimic Facebook with a few extra bells and whistles attached.

Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.

You can always copy twitter but you can't get the traction. You think TV companies will advertise your network 24/7? If you think Twitter should be utility either govs have to force some standards to every social network or nationalize it.

The people in the offices are too dumb to even grasp what servers are, let alone distributed services or why would standards be beneficial for the society. Maybe next generation knows better if we by then are not under the iron rule of few SV companies.

Why? Twitter is in no way essential.

It's not, but it's clearly highly useful and is the incumbent in the short public messaging market.

Highly useful and is the incumbent should be criteria for something to become public utility like water?

>Twitter should be a public utility like water. It shouldn't rely on surveillance capitalism to make money. There's another social network called Ello and it's essentially a registered charity. Twitter should be like that.

A charity? Sure, if you can make it work. But a public utility? That would link it to governments, which I think is the last thing we should be pushing. I think there is already enough concern over how Twitter interacts with governments, especially those looking to censor speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter

It's more like Twitter than FB, and it works, but it has some problems. You can't stop someone from impersonating you unless you run your own instance (fine for tech people, useless for the average user), and while the feature is good there's no way to get list of trending hashtags, so finding people/topics is a pain.

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