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Comment by samcat116 | Hacker News Reader

With the death of certain Twitter APIs coming up soon, I wonder if many Twitter client developers will start to make Mastodon apps. I would love to see "Tootbot" by the Tweetbot developers.

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What Mastodon badly needs is a client that can crosspost to both Twitter and a Mastodon instance to lower the barrier to slowly switching.

There already is one on mobile: https://github.com/TwidereProject/

You can use Mastodon cross-poster[0] like Cory Doctorow[1] does.

[0] https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/

[1] https://mamot.fr/@doctorow/100397875390621221

This never works, it just means people don't actually switch at all because in the end they only engage with one place properly. This was one of the things that went wrong with app.net.

A ton of people _hate_ crossposting accounts.

correct me if I'm wrong but i don't think there is one single place developers can create APIs for. if anything, developers will be picking and choosing which "instance" they want to write for if willing. this is like having thousands of "twitter" clones all acting as their own environment. kind of like how we have thousands of wordpress sites out there.

That doesn't seem right. The API for an instance is going to be the Mastodon API, which will be the same for all instances. Each instance isn't going to be creating their own API - really, all Mastodon is is an API spec.

yes what i was saying is, i doubt you will be able to hit one mastodon API and get the tweets across all the federated instances. you will only retrieve the data of that single instance you are hitting. if that instance only has 1 user, then that will be all you are getting.

but please correct me if im wrong. i havent really dived too much into it.

Browsing the global timeline of the main and pixiv instances could probably let you see most of the network.

essentially the api will return all toots from whatever timeline you're asking it for, e.g. if your instance is federated with 5 servers, you'll get your timeline from people tooting from these servers, I think the "public" timeline (can't remember the exact name) is all the toots from all federated instances you federate with. So it would be the same data as the browser has.

I think the biggest problem for the app developers is an interface that lists a lot of instances that you can search for which you identify most with (I think some use a centralised list someone has created somewhere). But that's a bad UX to jump into as a new user.

Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon? I remember App.net got all buzzy several years ago. Whatever happened to that? Facebook got big because college students wanted to get laid and that’s where their friends were. Twitter got big because it captured the Zeitgiest and had a FOMO aspect. I am not sure what Mastadoon has going for it to convince normal people to care.

How is a Twitter client developer going to actually make any money on this? How is anyone going to make money on this?

I do, though I haven't adopted it yet. At some point, a new protocol will get social media right, and free itself from walled gardens.

I don't know if it will be Mastodon, but I'll keep looking with interest until it happens. Mastodon seems to get a bunch of things right, and it may evolve into a more-open (and messier) Face-gram-ter-+ that gets enough traction to thrive.

People derive a lot of value from email. A protocol like this should be viewed as something like email.

> Besides a few neckbeard types, does any significant number of people actually care about Mastadoon?

The problem with this kind of argument is that it also explains why nobody uses that neckbeard internet thing and everyone still uses telephones and TV.

And, in a way, that is true. But the internet still exists.

Yes, to flesh that out, the Internet has morphed into "telephones and TV" :( For all too many, at least.

mastodon is used by pixiv here in Japan, which is essentially what deviantart used to be -- a sprawling, incredibly active community of artists (amateur, semi-professional, and professional alike).

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