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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Having switched to my own Mastodon host (https://social.mailpace.com/@paul), there are two huge differences:

1. I (almost) only see content and topics from people I follow. Which means everything is specific to the interests of the people I choose to follow, and that list needs to be curated well

2. There are no ads, anywhere. Nothing. It’s so strange to experience this and so refreshing

It’s definitely a little quieter than Twitter, which is also quite nice. You can read your feed once or twice a day and be caught up.

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I don't see how that is any different than Twitter to be honest. I only see posts from people I follow and I see no ads even without Twitter Blue.

On Ads, perhaps you have an adblocker on your desktop, but on mobile you’ll end up forced to use an app, and given twitter’s api is now pretty much closed off, there will be ads in those clients/apps.

Elon needs to make money, and you will eventually see ads or give him money if you use his platform

I was about to specify I use Ublock, however I don't get any ads on mobile either. Scrolling down maybe 10 pages worth and not a single ad.

Before Elon, Twitter needed to make money too; it had long distanced itself from its pre-2010ish self in mission and leadership, though that statement suggests at least some independence over the drift of the population during that time.

Don’t the people hosting these instances need to make money as well?

Some of them self-fund, some of them solicit donations, and at least one I know of has a sponsorship.

But they don't generally seek to make a profit, just cover costs.

True that, thanks to uBlock Origin though. Browsing the web without it nowadays is crazy.

> I (almost) only see content and topics from people I follow

I have the same thing on Twitter.

> 1. I (almost) only see content and topics from people I follow. Which means everything is specific to the interests of the people I choose to follow, and that list needs to be curated well

Why "almost" though? Does Mastodon shows tweets from people you don't follow? Or is that a preference setting for this?

People retweet/boost posts, and if you add relays to your instance you’ll see “trends” and other topics in the federated timeline

My client (tut) has option of disabling boosts, I like my timeline like that.

It's like Twitter used to be. The feed is time sorted. You can filter by hash tag. There is no AI driven second guessing of what you may or may not like to see.

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