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Comment by piuvas | Hacker News Reader

You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen.

Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would centralize the whole protocol. It's favorable for everyone using the service that you join invite-only niche servers or self host.

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I'd be interested to see what might happen if quality daily/weekly news publications, science journals, academic institutions, professional bodies (representing educators, medics, dentists, climate scientists, mathematicians etc) were to set up and run Mastodon instances. Seems like a possible way to encourage a return to the old-school newsgroup discussion communities; to bring focus and avoid the chaff clogging up the centralised megaplatforms.

As for one example, a fairly well known body has set up an official Mastodon server half a year ago:

https://social.network.europa.eu

"EU Voice is the official ActivityPub microblogging platform of the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (EUIs). Together with EU Video, it is part of an alternative social media pilot program proposed, and provided by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). The pilot program contributes to the European Union’s strategy for data and digital sovereignty that aims to foster Europe’s independence in the digital world.

EU Voice provides EUIs with privacy-friendly microblogging accounts that they typically use for the purposes of press and public relations activities."

A list of the official accounts present there: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore

A stream of recent activity from all the accounts on the instance: https://social.network.europa.eu/public

my guess is this will absolutely happen over time.

whatever forms will be similar to libera being the logical irc network for open source projects channels. if you’re a science org, you’ll just naturally join $science_instance.

it’s still early in the process but i’m stoked to watch it all unfold. it really feels like we’re watching in real time what people mean when they explain how the internet was prior to everything being centralized behind walled gardens and google.

So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?

Because it’s a microblogging platform.

Does a platform of mostly invite only communities count as microblogging?

Is Facebook a microblogging platform too?

I would describe Facebook's core post/newsfeed feature as a microblogging platform.

Servers bring invite only is like when Hey was invite only. It doesn’t mean you can only talk to other Hey users it just means being hosted by them is exclusive. The only thing you miss out on is the feed of what people on your server are posting -- maybe that's not a problem or maybe that's the raison d'être.

You can use a service; not all of them are invite only, or you can setup your own blog software. Federation is pretty close to RSS. Yes it's trying to be microblogging.

It's not very different. The hardest thing to grasp is the decentralization.

According to another user it's not even decentralized, but centralized into competing blocs.

How so? Every instance is not independent, they all communicate with each other. In practice, it's like everyone (Misskey, Pleroma, Mastodon) is on the same platform, except that some users have an address after their handle.

There's apparently a few very popular instances that are not federated at all with any of the other popular instances.

It's not "advertised" as a replacement for Twitter; the word "Twitter" does not appear on the Mastodon homepage. It's talked about because at the moment there aren't many similar alternatives.

Mastodon looks like Twitter, functions like Twitter, apes Twitter's features such as using @username, and even calls its posts "Toots." You really can't honestly argue that Mastodon isn't trying to be Twitter.

Look, I get it - it's not Twitter therefore it's a failure. And some people are ok with that, I really don't get why the need to campaign against Fediverse, it isn't killing anybody's dog.

I never said Mastodon was a failure because its not Twitter. I'm somewhat skeptical but I think the jury is still out on Mastodon. There is a lot of potential there. Part of me thinks the Fediverse is a great idea but it causes more problems than the value you get from it.

using pieces that work well and that users enjoy doesn’t preclude you from also doing other things differently.

just because hacker news has usernames, comments, and voting, that doesn’t mean it’s “trying to be reddit”

there are countless little things one can change that make it an entirely different experience even if some features are similar.

just like hackernews to reddit, the experience i’ve had on mastodon has been a noticeable improvement over twitter. yes, there are comments and voting in hackernews, but the experience is noticeably different—and better—than reddit.

This isn't "shares some features", this is directly copies the look and functionality of Twitter. It may have some differences, but so much is the same you can't argue that isn't what they were going for.

it’s not “advertised” as a twitter _clone_, it’s just being talked about as an alternative.

whether or not it fits what people are looking for, it’s being compared to twitter because it’s been pretty clear for a few years, even prior to the elon mess, twitter users really want to move somewhere else, they just haven’t settled yet on where.

this is all reminiscent of discussions around facebook a few years ago, it was clear at the time it was on its way out, people just hadn’t settled on where to go at the time. most just shifted their time to twitter or insta and the kids all just went to tiktok.

twitter will be the same way. if i had to guess it will be similar to facebooks boomerish crowd, twitter will have its user base who refuses to move on—they’ll be shaking their fists at the “cancel culture virtue signal woke woke” sky and the rest of the internet will just continue on somewhere else.

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