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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

As a Mastodon user myself, I don't find these low-content, context-free, analysis-free Mastodon stat post submissions to HN to be useful. It's just an excuse for people to argue.

I'm not even sure why people need to argue about this. If you want to use Mastodon, then do it, and if you don't want to use Mastodon, then don't. Is anyone forcing you? It's a personal choice. And no, Mastodon will never replace Twitter for hundreds of millions of people; it was never designed to do so. Mastodon vs. Twitter is a false dichotomy. It's more like Twitter vs. itself, Twitter vs. not-Twitter. From my own perspective, Mastodon is simply a place I happened to go after I already decided to stop using Twitter.

I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter, and this argument has been rehashed ad infinitum on HN from various angles.

View on HN

It's weird - there was a lot of support on HN for Mastodon before Elon Musk took over Twitter, albeit in the midst of a lot of criticism, mostly about UX. Now that the narrative of people fleeing Twitter because of Elon seems to dominate discussion, it seems like everyone wants to double down on hating it or dismissing it. Even with evidence that Mastodon's UX problems aren't insurmountable, everyone still wants to call code on Mastodon and declare it dead.

You'd think more people would be happy that the FAANG hegemony is being broken, at least a little, but I guess not.

There is a very simple answer to this. The people that were leaving Twitter went to Mastodon and found it unsuitable. It's not that people who were cheerleading Mastodon turned coat or went away, they just got outnumbered.

Or these people actually tried it and saw it isnt alternative because or boneheaded decisions.

I know plenty of people who moved and wound up perfectly satisfied with it.

Maybe people here are just projecting.

>I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter

I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time.

> I'm perfectly capable of hating Elon Musk and Mastodon at the same time.

That's fine. So, don't use Twitter or Mastodon, and don't argue Twitter vs. Mastodon?

Why am I not allowed to argue about those things?

What do you want to argue about exactly? You didn't even explain why you hate Musk or Mastodon.

It wasn't about why I hate Musk or Mastodon. Your claim was that if you argue against Mastodon, you're actually just a Musk lover, or if you argue for Mastodon, you just do it because you hate Musk. I can dislike Musk and think that he's making Twitter worse, and still think that Mastodon is a shitty social network. Those things are not related. But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not "argue Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.

> Your claim was that if you argue against Mastodon, you're actually just a Musk lover, or if you argue for Mastodon, you just do it because you hate Musk.

No, my claim was specifically about "arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon".

> Those things are not related.

Exactly! That's my point. They are entirely separate issues that are too often conflated.

> But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not "argue Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.

If you dislike both, then it doesn't make any sense to argue Twitter vs. Mastodon. It's a false dichotomy.

>They are entirely separate issues that are too often conflated.

You're the one that is conflating them.

>If you dislike both, then it doesn't make any sense to argue Twitter vs. Mastodon. It's a false dichotomy.

How?

>It's just an excuse for people to argue

Q.E.D.

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