Hacker News Reader

> I can’t think of a single thing normal people use.

The Internet is federated. You can become the customer of any number of ISPs, and each can take you to any website with an IP address, in a distributed fashion, by just asking routers along the way.

ISPs all over the world are collaborating for a global network of networks.

>Normal people just don’t care about federation. They seem to actively dislike it, and I don’t blame them.

Normal people don't like any kind of freedom of choice really: they want everyone to own the exact same iPhone they have, they actively discourage everyone they know from getting anything other than an iPhone (even going so far as to refuse to communicate with them because their messages show up with a different-color dot), and then they have the audacity to whine and complain when Apple exercises its monopoly power and makes iPhones absurdly expensive and forces software updates on them which make their older iPhones slower. But they absolutely refuse to even consider trying anything besides an iPhone, no matter how much they feel screwed over by Apple.

It's not just Apple and iPhones; I see this mentality all the time with many other things.

We'll probably see the same thing with Twitter. Many people will whine and complain about the price increases, about Musk's new rules or who or what he allows on the platform, etc., but a large group of them will simply never leave Twitter no matter what, unless it finally goes the way of MySpace.

>Between federation (yes, I know the benefits), resource issues, and simple UX issues I can’t imagine it taking off. >The UX and apps can be fixed, but by then its one chance may have passed and it may be too late.

I haven't looked at Mastodon so I'm just taking your word for it, but federation would only be useful if it were mostly transparent and not a hassle as others have described here, and the other issues will probably prevent anyone from switching, just like desktop Linux basically missed its chances to get really big over the years because of too many small issues that drove people back to Windows/Mac. First-mover advantage is a huge thing and it's really hard to unseat an incumbent.

> I just have a hard time seeing Mastodon succeed.

Very different numbers and contexts, but nobody could also predict Libera.chat would completely take over Freenode. All it needs is pissing off users, and it seems Twitter could be on the right track to do that, at least for a generous part of them.

People being annoyed enough to leave twitter is not synonymous with them also joining Mastodon.

Right. Also Freenode and Libra.chat are 1:1 equivalents. They’re both IRC right? Same features, same clients, same experience.

That’s not the case with Twitter and Mastodon.

There are many different Fediverse apps you can try; you don't have to stick with the official Mastodon one.

But I personally just use the web interface of my instance myself, the rare times I view it on mobile.