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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

> why do you give a shit?

Given your tone, I'm going to guess you're not asking the GP a question in earnest. You should try to think about why they might "give a shit".

Twitter's userbase is its primary feature. Not its shitty UI, not its awful character limit, and none of the stuff mastodon's various UIs are copying. Its userbase.

If you want the fediverse to succeed, you need to understand that. And you need to stop being so accusatory of people who don't use the internet the same way you do, FFS.

(And for the record, I want the fediverse to succeed, but I also use Twitter because userbase)

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I don't want the fediverse to "succeed", frankly its the only space for us LGBTQ+ to not be harassed, reply guyed, and screen-capped online that isn't a corporate hellhole.

Edit: "Success" in our current world seems to be defined as the transition Reddit has gone through, where the userbase has exploded, its eaten Facebook's lunch to a fair degree, but the quality of discourse and interaction has dropped like a rock.

I've stopped using Reddit, and such a change would kill my use of the fediverse.

> screen-capped

People are upset that others are taking screenshots of their public posts?

That’s the eternal September. Almost all online communities ultimately either die out or become overflowed by the masses.

I don't understand why that's not okay, though. I get people get attached to communities they're a part of, but just like people, they change and/or die.

If you think about it, it's absurd to expect them not to: Even if the community keeps its member list exactly intact forever, and the members remain at their exact same activity level forever, those very members will change over time. Hell, you will change over time and get to appreciate different qualities of that community.

Same reason my guild's forum feels completely different today than it did 5, 10 years ago.

The problem isn't change per se, but change for the negative brought on by mainstream exposure leading to an influx of new members who don't learn the ettiquette of the community before joining in.

An analogy would be if HN was suddenly overrun with rude, non-technical people attacking other posters and causing drama, and outnumbering the thoughtful and constructive comments and links we come to the place for.

The "eternal september" is particularly sad if you go back and read the archived posts of early usenet - I would kill to get discussion of that quality on the net today.

You can ban people, from instances that you disagree with, from replying/following people on your instance if you like. You can also completely isolate your instance or only federate with a whitelisted cluster of instances.

The person I'm replying to clearly does.

Nethertheless, if the usefulness of something depends on it failing, something's wrong.

The person your replying to explicitly states that you should follow random people off main (the federated timeline) and have a sense of wanderlust rather than following a handful of #thoughtfluencers.

Please see earlier reply: stop being so accusatory of people who don't use the internet (or live their life) the same way you do.

Mock them all you want, in private. Don't bully people because they take selfies, buy tourist gadgets, or follow people you're too good for.

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