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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter and not Facebook.

Which is sad IMO as Twitter - again IMNSHO - is one of the most overhyped and useless ideas there is.

I still have an account on mastodon thought and I'm far more active there than on twitter, mostly because new is interesting and to support a good cause.

I also sometimes follow development and hope that it might get more features from both Google+ or Facebook. Groups would be an obvious improvement in my book.

That way maybe it could become more than a twitter clone, which matters to me because in my opinion Twitter is close to useless except as a better way to receive spam and propaganda (it is even easier to ignore than the spam folder in my mail.)

I want to try Mastodon because it's open, federated, ethical etc, all the qualities I seek out in the software I run (not to mention new and interesting, like you say).

But at the end of the day it's still a Twitter clone, so offers absolutely no value to me.

> But at the end of the day it's still a Twitter clone, so offers absolutely no value to me.

Agree in the long run.

In the short run playing with interesting tech has its own value at least as long as it only replaces more useless stuff (I guess tv is the thing I "sacrifice" to have time for tech.)

Twitter is also very limited regarding groups, yes, this is right. Still very successful, but no groups. Makes it unusable for many use cases.

> Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter and not Facebook.

And that is the one reason I haven't already started a Mastodon instance and tried to talk all my family and friends into using it instead of Facebook.

Some people like everything to be public; fine. But some people, like me, want to be able to control who sees stuff; as far as I can tell, the only platform which allows that at the moment is Facebook.

Why not make "groups" an option, so that it can serve both kinds of people?

...because Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, and not Facebook?

Last I checked, Twitter doesn't have groups.

I think this is a very limited (and limiting!) view of the world, that it should be one or the other, and that features cannot be borrowed from both.

Limiting scope is a very important part of delivering software.

That like saying making a phone that can take pictures is insane, because it is a phone and those are just meant to make calls.

Or, it's like saying that a browser that has a built-in email client is insane.

Usually, focusing on doing one thing only is how you make good products.

Right, that is a better formulation of that argument: "Not currently in scope of this project" is better than: "This is a clone of X".

The old Opera had an excellent integration with its M2 email client. There's also Seamonkey.

Most email programs use a built-in rendering engine anyway, and sometimes browsers can actually use the email code (e.g. MHTML is basically MIME+HTML, HTML sanitization[0], Opera used M2 for RSS support). So a browser having a built-in email client might be undesirable, but it is not "insane".

[0]https://frederik-braun.com/firefox-ui-xss-leading-to-rce.htm...

Browsing the web and reading / sending email are fundamentally different tasks. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally the same thing. The key difference is that Facebook allows you to limit posts to specific people.

Mastodon not implementing a "limited visibility" option would be more like a web browser refusing to implement Private Browsing mode.

I love this example. Off topic but like yourself I too remember when camera phones were first released and most people (including myself) did shrug it off as an insane novelty which would never catch on. It didn't help that the resolution on those things were barely better than the original Nintendo Gameboy camera.

It's funny how something that seemed so insane at the time is now the de facto standard way of taking pictures.

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