Mastodon links are now more common than Twitter/X on HN | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon links are now more common than Twitter/X on HN

mastodon.communick.com

35 pointserlend_sh20 comments

Twitter essentially broke itself as a useful tool for me having used it primarily through Tweetbot for years.

Previously if I was having some issue, I could search for the @username of a company or service and find users sending messages that username from Tweetbot. Now if I search that on their web or X app I can't find any way to show what people are saying "to" that username. Instead I get that username's content or perhaps a reply from them to someone that seems to be stale.

So I spend almost no time there anymore, and as-such, no links from there are surfaced to other platforms.

Twitter is fine. Make an account and look at 1 or 2 ads so you can message the companies you want. You work in tech right? How do you keep the lights on? From people paying to use your software.

Look at 1 or 2 ads so the company can stay afloat with lights on and enjoy messaging your companies.

You can do all that stuff like look at previous tweets to companies from the twitter search bar. Though I admit it is harder to do on mobile because of screen real estate

To echo a comment on the post, the numbers on this would be really interesting to see. The comments are all on bigquery if anyone wants to write a blog post to confirm the trend.

https://hoffa.medium.com/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-da...

Given that Twitter links are now virtually useless if you're not logged in, this is perhaps unsurprising. Baffling decision.

Twitter doesn't have a ton of people pimping twitter out to anyone who will listen. Those links tend to occur because people actually use twitter.

Doesn't really pass the smell test. I checked on hckrnews.com/, scroll to load posts that reached the front page from now to August 1, ctrl+f "twitter", ctrl+f "mastodon", 14 vs 2 matches.

I don't know if there's other domains besides mastodon that I may have missed in this quick test.

> ctrl+f "mastodon"

Would this necessarily match all links to Mastodon instances?

I updated my comment to acknowledge that. I don't use mastodon or know of all the domains. But at first glance, the assertion doesn't seem to hold. Nor did the poster provide any evidence to support their claim. As far as I can tell, twitter is still alive and well for now.

It’s objectively not well. Or at least it is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it once was, which is fatal to a social network.

The simple act of requiring one to login to view any content has muted it everywhere I once saw Twitter content.

No, certainly not. Many of the most important instances (and in particular many of those most likely to be linked here) don’t use the word ‘mastodon’ in their domains, and of course there are lots of personal ones.

Lots of news about Twitter is not a link to Twitter. Most mastodon domains don't have mastodon in the name.

I don't see the difference between this and just some joe-random's blog post then.

If mastodon posts come from random domains - isn't that like saying "Random Blog Post Links are more common than Twitter/X"?

Mastodon probably won't ever reach critical mass like centralized Social apps do, as much as we technies might want it.

A major difference is that mastodon instances federate together, blogs don't. A rapid resurgence in self-operated blogs would also be exciting and newsworthy.

> won't ever reach critical mass like centralized Social apps

Is that even a goal? I use it because there's interesting people I can interact with there. Market share is not the only measure of success.

The reason this particular article was submitted was to dig at Twitter/X/Musk, no?

> Is that even a goal?

The people pushing for Mastodon seem to have been co-opted by the anti-Twitter/Musk crowd. To them, it does appear to be a goal.

I wouldn't assume that intent and that hasn't been my experience on the platform. There was a visible uptick of Twitter discontent voiced on all platforms (including HN) at several points this year. It's easy to follow accounts that arent fixated on the old.

You could I think at one time actually have argued it for blogs; there’s a reason people used to call it the blogosphere, and social-network-esque mechanics (eg linkbacks, which likely inspired quote tweets) were commonly used at one time.

“More people use email than fax”

“No, that’s wrong, there are more fax messages sent than emails sent from email.com”

Like, the whole _point_ of the thing is that it is not just one site. That is why it was made in the first place.

This isn't a good test. You'd need to run a regex against the entire urls, not just domains.

(domain pattern)/@(user pattern)/(\d+)

But I bet that will accidentally match other things like maybe lemmy or threads or even tiktok?

Mastodon links not being distinctive is annoying because on mobile your viewer of choice can't catch urls, the url needs to load in the browser and then you might be suggested to re-open in your app of choice.

In case it's news to you: Firefox on Android can automatically open links in-app, or you can long-press and "Open in App", and select your preferred viewer from there.

not everyone wants mastodon, so alternative links would be good. forking HN activity over to another board is unseemly, but if its really low quality non informative stuff thats fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com