Comment by HuwFulcher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HuwFulcher | Hacker News Reader

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I find that Mastodon has become the mirror-verse version of Twitter/X. I've tried spending time on there but unless if you subscribe to certain political/ideological values then you wont find much to hang around for.

On the flip side I find the discourse on X a lot more varied. There are definitely big problems with the types of conversations that happen on X but I have to go out of my way to find them. On Mastodon it's not that hard, mainly down to it being a smaller pool of content.

ActivityPub/Mastodon is flawed at its core with its concept of federation. They paint a pretty utopian picture of decentralised communities but there really isn't much difference between them. They are mostly part of the same political zeitgeist and if you don't toe the line you get banned. Once you're banned that's it, you've lost your profile, sure you can recreate elsewhere but have to start from scratch.

For the problems alternatives have like Nostr at least they are truly censorship resistant.

> unless if you subscribe to certain political/ideological values then you wont find much to hang around for

I’ve had success with following people with pre 2015 bio’s. No flags, no politics, no pronouns. Just tell me what hobbies etc. you’re into.

That's an interesting coincidence because I've had success with blocking people who go out of their way to say they're stuck in 2015 when everyone just assumed you were a dude, embrace the politics they were raised with to the point they consider themselves apolitical, and can't stand us queers in their hobbies even though we've been there all along.

I don't know... I have game developers, authors, scientists, musicians and all sorts of interesting people on my feed, and I see a wide variance in discussion, despite the likely political commonalities. I suppose if you can only find value in online community through political debate and heterodoxy, most well-curated communities will seem hostile to you, since most people aren't looking for shock and chaos.

I'm not looking for value through political debate and heterodoxy. In fact I'm trying to look for the opposite, I'm glad you seem to have found it! Algorithmic content is a double edged sword. I've found it much easier to find people on X to discuss the non-political content I want. On the other hand it's much harder on Mastodon.

I assumed you were talking about political content because you cited subscription to certain political ideologies as a reason you didn't find the platform useful, and the likelihood of being banned due to "political zeitgeist" as a flaw in the system.

I am curious what high quality non-political content you're finding on X and not Mastodon. I'm only still on X because of a few accounts that haven't jumped ship yet, but in my experience, the flood of bots and troll accounts makes it nigh unusable.

I’m not concerned about myself being banned on Masotodon as I keep away from political subjects. I don’t find the platform useful as the conversations that I’ve been able to find are highly politicised. I guess I need to work better at tuning out the noise on there.

On X I mainly occupy the indie hacker space which is focused on that topic. There are definitely more political conversations that come up but it’s much easier to filter those out.

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