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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I really tried to use the fediverse, but its not good enough.

Search is hot garbage, can't find anything useful, or what people are actually talking about, not that Twitters search is great by any measure.

Missing content when visiting external content, cuz why would anyone ever want to see or search old content.

Also most clients I have seen show replies in a really stupid way, you have to actively click to see what the person is replying to, its not visible in the timeline.

Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land.

In general I have been spending more time on hacker news and youtube than Twitter and fediverse, they aren't like pre-elon twitter.

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Is search really that big of a deal?

> Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land.

"Outside of the super-active communities using Mastodon everyday, it is a ghostland."

> Is search really that big of a deal?

Yes. From finding things to searching archives etc.

Tim Bray has a good post on the topic: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-... (you can skip to the very last section if you don't want to read it all)

These communities are active if not more active on Twitter. One of the things that made Twitter good is that every niche uses it.

>Is search really that big of a deal?

I used Twitter search constantly.

Yes, search is the main way to find the conversations people are having on a topic.

Search is a principal use case. It's not a small extra feature.

Hashtags are the main way to find topics on Mastodon.

Which doesn't work because cross-instance search is hot garbage.

Search is only hot garbage if you expect the fediverse to be a global public square, which it isn't. The search drills down into your personal interaction history, and that's great.

There are no non-js clients (that I am aware of) yet. Twitter is still way more accessible and privacy friendly, due to nitter.

Brutaldon[1] works fine without JS (although it doesn't currently work with Akkoma or ~GotoSocial~ instances.)

Edit: Just checked with a new checkout and it's working with my GTS instance. Now to figure out how to make it work with Akkoma...

[1] https://gitlab.com/brutaldon/brutaldon

Thanks!

How can I read with it for example

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11005195786562981...

Log into an instance you have an account on through brutaldon, then paste the URL in the search box. It's not a no-login-url-passthrough like Nitter.

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