Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Ned's spot on.

Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive¹).

> The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join…

If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io. There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there, and it's run by Kris Nóva². Her most recent articles on Medium talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor.

> …if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all?

Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts"³, goes into detail on how this works in practice.

¹ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-j... ² SME in Linux kernel security, distributed systems and infrastructure management, and open-source software engineering. https://medium.com/@kris-nova ³ https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-...

Thanks, @CharlesW. I'm familiar with Kris and follow her on Twitter, and see a lot of people have opted to join her Mastodon server, which is great, but her explanation of what happened when she tried to migrate her account from one server to another, where she even controlled both, points to the weakness in the fundamental Mastodon design that makes it a non-starter for me.

Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers, following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself.

I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!

> Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself.

I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Twitter is not a protocol, is a corporation with a profit-motive, and sees itself as the town square of the internet with its design geared toward this function.

Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.

Are there other protocols that fix some of ActivityPub's design flaws? Yes, like nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol. But ActivityPub, being an open protocol, can also be massaged into a better one by its community.

Personally, I've found my corner of Mastodon to be a much kinder place than Twitter perhaps because it does not profess to be the town square of the internet nor pursues that status.

Ultimately, I think what we're seeing here is the transparent lie sold to us by Meta and Twitter and Instagram: that social media superapps that try to tie the world together are not forces of good to unite but ultimately weapons that serve to divide it. We are not equipped as a species for the cacophonous screams of billions, only the Bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-Yin, She Who Hears the Cries of the of World, can do this, and she arguably doesn't exist.

So yes, you are at the mercy of whatever server mods you happen to drift to on Mastodon but you are not powerless, like on Twitter.

> Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.

A protocol has no inherent value. Its value comes from its application. And, Mastodon, as one of ActivityPub's applications, is nothing better than Twitter fractured into many smaller islands of Twitter: instead of upsetting Elon and getting the boot, if you upset the Mastodon server operator you happen to choose, you run the same exact risk of being deported off that particular island. If you're going to subject yourself to the whims of a dictator, you might as well stay on Twitter and reap the benefits of the larger network.

You've ignored all of my salient points. Of course Mastodon offers significant advantages for all of the reasons I just described. Of course a protocol has inherent value. Its value is inhered by giving users the option to walk away whenever they want or implement their own server.

You've completely ignored the arrest of user behavior and audience that happens when a single proprietary application is allowed to own the social sphere of the public.

The whims of a dictator become a lot less impactful when users can just walk away. The consequences are massively different when the entire captive audience is on one platform and feels they must remain because there is no other option with critical mass. With federation, critical mass is spread out over the protocol, yes a value inhered in the protocol itself.

There is another threat which is more a problem in my opinion.

Imagine a future where everyone has moved to mastadon, and 1 mastadon server has done a good job of improving the flow and UX to bring in the users. Years later, when everyone is comfortable, this becomes the 'default' because its easy and their policies appeal to main stream users.

The big server sells user metadata and shows ads, and has money to invest in AI moderation and legal compliance with data privacy & anti-abuse laws. Maybe they lobby to increase regulation in a way that they can more easily comply with than the little guys.

Eventually the others wither away into only niche use. Their unwillingness to sell user data gives them thin margins for lawyers and compliance dealings. The big player enacts anti-spam / anti-abuse policies that happen to ban the small servers a lot while trusting themselves a lot. Eventually you are in a situation where you CAN have an account on any mastadon server, in theory, but for your posts to not be flagged as spam, it is more reliable to use the 1 big server everyone uses.

We have seen this starting to happen with email (gmail/msft/apple) for example.

What is the point of all the work to move to a federated system, if there is no force to counter a few players becoming dominant and killing the rest, converting the system back into a few big corporate players?

Open protocols and standards can be used as a trap to lure us in. I'm old enough to remember when facebook used to publish RSS feeds, which was a primitive federating mechanism. Once they got big enough, they stopped.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com