Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

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There are more charitable interpretations than virtue signaling.

Mastodon has the unfortunate adolescent problem of being not Twitter but not yet fully matured into its full potential. Teenagers and Mastodon alike rebel agaist their parents in order to discover who they are. Before they sort this out they try a bunch of contrary behavior and eventually they discover what makes them them.

Is Mastodon Mastodon because it doesn't have full text search, because it doesn't have an algorithm feed, because it is decentralized, because it doesn't have quote replies, because it has a different user base with different relations?

All of these, and not all of these. Mastodon will, eventually figure out which ones make it itself and which ones don't. Maybe in that process it reinvents itself countless times or maybe it coalesces around a strange attractor in social-feature-space. We dont know the results without running the experiment and figuring out what full text search means to Mastodon is running the experiment.

It's been around for years and has never improved. Source: I was there before the Twitter users arrived. Mastodon is a failed experiment, at least if you're looking for a digital open society and intelligent conversations. The Twitter users that left because they're outraged about Musk not censoring enough are only going to make things worse if anything. Many might fit right in though, Mastodon is all about echo chambers which is a surprising feat for a decentralized network.

Having read through a few of the comments this guy faced, this feels like a decent take. I suspect most folks float around for a bit and land back on twitter - which is also a shame.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Twitter although I use it in light of a lack of good alternatives and because some interesting people are still on there. Social media matters, this is where opinions are made these days, where people get their news but also where they get indoctrinated and misinformed.

Different folks have very different expectations and wishes if you ask them about the ideal social media site. Imo it's paramount to bring back trust. This could be done not through dubious "fact-checkers" or by banning anyone certain people dislike, but simply by having the option for accounts to have all their submissions posted to a blockchain so that they can't be deleted nor altered. This could be used by media, politicians and anyone else who wants to signal reliability. Users could then go back in time and decide for themselves if the account is honest and worth engaging with, there would be cryptographic proof if they keep lying or misrepresenting things and this in turn could easily be linked to.

Ideally, not only that but users should be in control of their data. This is kind of true with Mastodon but the majority of users don't run their own server and won't ever, because that's just unrealistic. It's better to outsource this with financial incentives to ensure decentralization and user control.

How did you arrive at that measure of success for Mastodon?

I have my own measure of success and Mastodon meets it well enough, but I wouldn't say treating it as an objective measure adds any value, and why should it? I really only care about n=1.

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