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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

I don't really get it, but I'm also someone that hasn't used or missed mass social media in years.

Anyone can say they are "truly open", but also I feel like the massive amount of people needed to make a social media site work... don't care about that.

I don't really get Mastodon either fwiw, sounds like people want it to be twitter but it just isn't and never will be that. I think I'm just burnt out on social media in general.

I wish you good luck and prosperity! Hopefully others are more optimistic and helpful lol

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FWIW I don’t want mastodon to “be twitter” but I absolutely want mastodon to adopt many of the very nice features that Twitter, the original and biggest microblogging site, has long since figured out and popularized.

Like I realized the other day that when certain news events hit, I have to go to twitter to find the info I need, because search engines don’t have the raw info of networks like twitter. But I strongly dislike that I have to go to twitter and cannot do this on mastodon. I would rather be searching on mastodon.

And on twitter I use quote tweets to provide updates to my own projects in new threads which reference old threads. This works great for readability and yet I can’t do it on mastodon without just sharing the link, which doesn’t render properly on many clients and has other issues.

I just want mastodon to have nice features that Twitter happens to have pioneered. I also want DMs to make sense and feel like DMs on mastodon. I’m afraid of confusing people when I DM them on mastodon so I always say “this is a DM by the way, that’s not always clear”.

Yeah, I think many people in the Fediverse don't understand what makes specific networks like Twitter great. Twitter is instant, unfiltered news. You get new information much faster than through other media. If the people running Mastodon instances are so vocal against global search, they are missing out on one of the most important Twitter features.

Likewise, (early) Facebooks killer feature was that you could "stalk" people (I mean that in a non-creepy way, hope that ironic usage translates to English ;-)). You could look up and get into contact with people that you know from real life. Friends, Classmates, Friends of friends. It was a social telephone book. And I think it was a great aid especially if you were not extremely socially inclinded and extroverted, because it helped you interact more with people in your life. At some point, FB changed radically. Afterwards it was more about adding random acquaintances and getting stupid articles in your feed. The social USP went completely missing.

Same for a myriad of other smaller sites that have closed. Every site had their unique appeal, but nowadays many sites define themselves as what the are not.

I lump participating in Hacker News comments as social media.

I do too, but I definitely don't consider it mass social media. It's not engineered to extract my time, it just does it naturally by being a good source of information :)

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