Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

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Mastadon is not a big tent community like Twitter. It's not a tech company seeking to attract every user on the planet.

It's a toolkit for building communities. People will join because the communities they want to participate in are there (which eliminates the supposed dilemma of "which instance should I join?" - this is only a problem for people fleeing Twitter and looking for safe harbor, not for people discovering it organically). They'll stay because it's a good toolkit and they want to join more communities.

Or those things won't turn out to be true and it will fade away, nothing is guaranteed, but if you judge it based on whether it is Twitter, you're missing the value proposition.

In my view, having everyone in the same tent is one of the mistakes Twitter made; it doesn't need to be replicated. It created opportunities for messages intended for a certain community at a certain time to be taken out of that context and misinterpreted to fuel flamewars. It made it possible for there to be this spectacle of the "main character" who was ridiculed for day and then tossed aside.

This.

Facebook's founding premise wasn't easy onboarding. It was getting laid at Harvard.

And then getting laid by someone who knew someone at Harvard, or another selective-admissions university.

The initial founding cohort was one that engendered strong aspiration of others to join that group, though of course, in others joining the group, the specific appeal waned. A loss in per node value however was offset largely by the network value of the group as a whole.

(I've argued that this dynamic of balancing network value with network costs is key to how social networks grow, are limited, and ultimately decline. In particular, each new member adds a variable value (not all nodes are created equal) but a fairly uniform cost, in the form of additional friction, information overload, and the like. A large-scale network attacks those costs ruthlessly through hygiene functions, including content moderation and the like.)

I also remember when Snapchat purposely obfuscated features in the UI and was designed to not cater to the “Facebook boomer” audience.

Bad onboarding and complexity was a growth feature.

I think networks like Twitter have created a demand for mass-scale socializing though. If that's your reason for joining Twitter, then Mastodon isn't the experience you're looking for. As others have mentioned, Mastodon is oriented around creating communities. But there are many tools for creating communities, everything from Discord guilds to mailing lists. What the journalist who bounced off Mastodon was probably looking for was access to the mass socializing on Twitter, not the focused community experience of Mastodon.

That's fair, and there's room in this world for both. I guess I'm not being sufficiently empathetic & understanding what when people say, "Mastadon won't replace Twitter," they're often mourning Twitter (which is dead to many people even if it isn't dead) more than they're criticizing Mastadon.

Caveat: I'm not a good Twitter user as I only really started using the platform a few months before Musk's acquisition. Most of the folks I follow on Twitter haven't left, but I've used Mastodon/Pleroma in the past and have experience with it.

What I think of when I hear about people wanting a Twitter alternative, is to join a global social network and just start messaging people. At its best, I can find a VR content creator I really like and a transit advocate I think is cool and ask them questions or send them content off-the-cuff. In a more community-oriented Mastodon world, VR content creators would be on a VR specific instance and transit folks on an urban planning instance. Nothing is stopping me from making an account on another instance and following/messaging them, but there's all sorts of friction that taints the experience. Is the VR content creator on instance A the same person I want to talk to, or are they on instance B? What if I join an instance C that's been blocked by instance A, but allowed by instance B? Do I trust the admin of instance C to not read my posts? Is membership on instance C even open right now?

Again, to those looking for community-oriented socializing, these are all features and not bugs. Why would I care about talking to VR content creators if I'm in a transit community? If the community doesn't want me (invites are disallowed), why would I even enter? But Twitter does present (among other things) the idea of having a "globally addressed social network", which Mastodon is not. Moreover there are many vibrant tools out there for community social networks, ActivityPub is one of many.

It absolutely is meant as a criticism of Mastodon. Any social product that does not have user experience as the top priority is not gonna make it. It's really that simple. Simply providing a platform for communities, as you say, is not sufficient by itself. We already have plenty of platforms for that, like Reddit and Discord (and, perhaps formerly, Twitter).

More than one way to prioritize a user experience. Or rather, there's more than one experience worth providing.

It has both. I am in a writing community but I generally use the service in much the same way I used Twitter six months ago. I think what gets lost is that it is a generalist community that replaces stuff like search with options to narrow in, whether through hashtags or by choosing a dedicated community with a strong local timeline.

This is effectively a restatement of my premise, though I think you're also missing the larger scale of non-social (epistemic, marketing, advocacy) roles.

When Twitter was small, it didn't offer mass-scale socialising. What it did offer is far more comparable to Mastodon now.

When Twitter did develop sufficient critical mass, at least within a specific context, it became compelling in ways that compensated for any onboarding difficulties. That occurred in niches initially: tech early-adopters, the Arab Spring (a/k/a the Twitter Revolution, seen then as a Good Thing), and in particular, journalists, who live and die on hot takes and quick access.

(I'm watching the accommodation of the latter to Mastodon / the Fediverse with interest and amusement. Some factors that created strong appeal on Twitter are (still) lacking on Mastodon.)

Facebook founding premise wasn't what made it big - 100% easy onboarding to good features (chronological friends & family posts, and flash games) is what lead their biggest growth years.

Danah Boyd has made a compelling alternative case (from 2007):

When Facebook opened to everyone last September, it became relatively easy for any high school student to join (and then they simply had to get permission to join their high school network). This meant that many more high school teens did join, much to the chagrin and horror of college students who had already begun writing about their lack of interest in having HS students on "their" site. Still, even with the rise of high school students, Facebook was framed as being about college. This was what was in the press. This was what college students said. Facebook is what the college kids did. Not surprisingly, college-bound high schoolers desperately wanted in.

In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated "good" kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren't nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed "safe" thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of course, I've seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won't go there.)

As this past school year progressed, the division around usage became clearer. In trying to look at it, I realized that it was primarily about class.

<http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html>

> a toolkit for building communities

Feature by feature, how does this compete with Discord? Because if it isn’t competing with Twitter, then what you describe is competing with Discord. (And there remains a niche for Twitter, which benefits from network effects and economies of scale.)

Discord is a complementary product. There are several servers that have both a Mastodon and a Discord. Mastodon's features fill in gaps in information organization that Discord hasn't addressed, with one of the biggest being that by federating, it allows a community to go un-siloed and broadcast its output to others.

Discord, on the other hand, is a superior method of onboarding among many demographics, if only because it has more inertia in that role and reduces their community onboarding to "add a new Discord". If they join a Discord and a community member says "we also have a Mastodon", that is their probable onboarding to Mastodon - not the server browser.

Discord also acts as a backup for the technology, a secondary point of contact.

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