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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

People don’t think the company is a public service - they think that about the function. The real delusion is mastodon being a reasonable replacement.

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> The real delusion is mastodon being a reasonable replacement

Personally, I've found Mastadon to be a fantastic replacement. What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement? It definitely fits better with the public and open service that people wanted Twitter to be.

> What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement

Nobody uses it. Talking to yourself was not a mainstream use-case for Twitter users.

By that logic, nobody should have started using Twitter in the first place, because when it started, no one used it either. It's circular reasoning.

Most social networks try to provide the energy necessary to get a critical mass of users aboard, but Mastodon is the opposite. Mastodon throws up a torrent of Nerd Bullshit® to make sure that only the chosen few will tolerate it.

The network effect you describe is not a property of the platform itself

> Nobody uses it.

Who is nobody? Almost all of the people I used to follow and discuss the topics I cared about on Twitter are now all on Mastadon. I find that I'm having similar discussions at this point with almost all the same people I used to.

Different technical communities are joining Mastodon one at a time (math, rust, and enthusiast product communities). Time will tell if this can lead to a critical mass. I wouldn't hold my breath but I also wouldn't discount the possibility to the point of not thinking about it.

Most of my people have moved to either Slack or Signal, depending on how much written content there was. Slack for people with a lot to say, and Signal for social chats. The majority of my Twitter follows have left the platform. I still use it though.

Mastodon is great for talking to an engaged audience. My feed is full of interesting stuff. Less good for narcissistic babbling to thousands of “followers.”

I currently follow 447 people on Mastodon, and 258 follow me. I think on Twitter, after 15 years of having an account, I followed about 1000 people, many inactive by the time I tired of Naughty Old Mr Car’s antics, and was followed by about 1000 (presumably ditto). _In my niche_, it’s a perfectly adequate replacement, and is better than old-Twitter in some ways (it is so much better than the post-Musk mess it’s not even funny), but it would not be for everyone. I post about as much, maybe a little more (it’s easier to have a conversation, for a variety of mechanical reasons.)

I do miss quote-tweets as a mechanic; while they could certainly be abused, there were legitimate use cases. Mastodon plans to add them, but AIUI getting the appropriate changes made to ActivityPub to allow for consent-based quote-posting is a whole thing.

Mastodon is a reasonable replacement for some subset of Twitter’s userbase. It works for me, say, because the sort of people I followed on Twitter largely ended up on Mastodon. It would work less well if, say, you were into influencers (dunno where if anywhere those are going), celebs (Threads), crypto-people/metaverse-people/AI-people/other-tech-hype-people (still committed to Twitter, I think), or journalists (there are some experimenting with Mastodon, but Bluesky is generally their Twitter-in-Exile).

I’m not sure that there will ultimately be _one_ Twitter replacement; with the exception of Digg->Reddit, it’s actually rather unusual for that to happen when a social media site dies. Livejournalers-in-exile mostly didn’t go to Dreamwidth, say; they scattered to a bunch of rather dissimilar social networks.

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