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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

For only $6/month, you can buy a managed instance of Mastodon[0] with 20gb of media storage. For an additional $1/year, you can buy a custom domain to use with it.

Obviously everyone isn't going to switch because of this, but if you're a microblogging nerd who wants the most out of their platform, Mastodon is looking increasingly appealing.

[0] http://masto.host/

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You can type your posts for free on the Notes app on your phone and it will have the same effect.

The value of Twitter is in the network and eyeballs, not the tech behind it.

And also that it's moderated. Just like how we've got dang and company on HN, you've got to have good paid moderators.

There's nothing to moderate if you're the only one on your instance.

Yes there is. You have to spend the time blocking lots of servers full of crazy people who just spout offensive stuff at you because the entire server is full of people who dogpile on anything they see.

This is a harsh and bad comparison, it will certainly not have the "same effect" because a small audience, even one you can count on one hand, is larger than zero.

You can go to a crowded place and send the notes via airdrop to everybody who crosses you.

Sharing individual iOS notes with others will probably result in greater reach than convincing them to join your Mastodon instance and keep track of your posts.

Self-hosted Mastodon might be a good product by itself, but people need to stop pushing it as a Twitter substitute because that's not what it is.

> Sharing individual iOS notes with others will probably result in greater reach than convincing them to join your Mastodon instance and keep track of your posts.

The same could be said about Twitter, just with more bots and advertisements.

Not really. The Twitter account I have has something like X thousand followers, which is certainly more than I'd be able to share around with iOS notes.

For an additional $1/year, you can buy a custom domain to use with it.

Do you mean $1/month? Most .com, .org, and .net domains I've seen cost ~$12/year.

Oops, yeah. Forgot to do my math right :p

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