Item — HN Reader

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance.

Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

2 comments

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day.

But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts.

Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still see them interacting directly on Mastodon and not just mirroring their Twitter posts on it.

I didn't expect this, but I'm finding it very easy not to use Twitter most of the time. The main exception is friends and family messaging various tweets to each other to share news or laugh about something. So I still have an account, it's still useful, but I'm not scrolling it casually anymore.

I setup a Mastodon account back in May as sort of "just in case Musk messes it up" insurance. And man, did he ever mess it up - worse & faster than my more pessimistic expectations. However, up until about 3 weeks ago there just weren't that many people to follow on mastodon. But that has changed more rapidly than I would have expected. Now I'm following several interesting people I used to follow on twitter.

> I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts.

Are you seeing your mom and dad moving over? Or your teenage kid and her friends? Or your non-tech friends?

I'm about 40 and I don't know anyone whose mom or dad is on Twitter. They're all on Facebook still.

Teenagers and even 20-somethings are already a lost cause for Twitter. They're on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.

And yes, I'm seeing artists, writers, and other non-tech people moving over and finding instances that better suit them.

My friends who consume Twitter as a passive way to be entertained by celebrities aren't moving yet. I'm not sitting here trying to say that Mastodon is a drop-in replacement for Twitter for everybody. But I am surprised and encouraged by how easy it has been for me and many others to find a better experience.

No, but they weren’t the first ones on Twitter, either.

Would you see it if they did? Finding people isn't as easy on Mastodon as it is in other places.

But a lot of people are switching over to Mastodon. In the last 3 weeks or so it went from "welp, there aren't a lot of people to follow over here" to "wow, lots of interesting people I used to follow on twitter are here now!" It's really starting to hit a tipping point as more people make the jump.

What is a lot? The forum for a niche hobby that I'm a member of has more active users.

See an update from the fosstodon.org server team. This is only for one server.

https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-vs-twitter-round-2/

The thing is, AP is not just Mastodon. Mastodon is only one software and only one usage. If Mastodon numbers grow, then the AP is more interesting and it is suddenly more interesting for other platforms to consider AP, and for users to use the-equivalent-of-X that is not microblogging. Maybe they'll start to follow people on Pixelfed for instance.

Yep. If Twitter really founders, Meta or Google will roll out something to replace it. Most Twitter users already have accounts with one or both, so it would be a very low-friction switch, and they certainly have the resources to do it. Mastodon will never catch on with the general public, for the same reasons that Linux has not.

I think it’s more likely that a new competitor arises. FB is dying and uncool; Google has no social media chops to speak of. See: Vine getting extinguished EDIT: and only being succeeded by TikTok years later

If having users already there was enough, Google+ would be king of the hill.

Vine wasn’t Google’s. It was Twitter’s.

Ugh, having a late morning.

I mean to say, that having existing users is not a panacea, since Twitter literally bought Vine with all its users, and then proceeded to squander it. And no one else made the short video format work (<10 minute) for a long while until TikTok gave people a kick in the pants again.

I don't expect Lady Gaga and her followers to move, but some tech-adjacent communities have bailed out already.

This could also be Mastodon / ActivityPub's version of Eternal September

Of course it is. While early adopters cringe, Eternal September means your platform is growing.

Well this is the problem, USENET, like Activity pub was a PROTOCOL not a platform.

Eternal September lead the the collapse of USENET largely because no company could control it, thus it got harder and harder to manage / control in a way the normies wanted, and governments wanted.

USENET today is primary binary transfers, i.e the high seas of the internet.

It is not largely a communications system anymore.

We are already seeing that as people leaving Twitter, the nice left censored authoritarian bubble and find out that the wider internet is not left censored authoritarian so they are demanding every growing block lists of servers attempting to make a little walled garden for Activity Pub, which undermines the entire purpose of federated/ distributed protocols

"Eternal September" did not lead to the 'collapse' of USENET. It was largely replaced by web-based solutions in more user-friendly domains like AOL. And USENET eventually largely ended up controlled by a few large entities (ISPs) that had the resources to support the huge message volumes. Since there was largely no monetization mechanisms people would support for the needed resources, freely available NNTP servers quickly were dropped by ISPs. Also, it has to be said that the text-only nature of USENET was generally seen as old-fashioned and it was replaced by technologies that could support a better multimedia experience.

Fediverse has all of the same problems inherent in a distributed store and forward system and may suffer the same fate, but lack of centralized control is not the defining problem here.

One major way in which "this time is different" is that the financial cost of the hosting is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and doesn't drive consolidation so strongly towards larger-cap players. It's not quite to the point of "too cheap to meter", but definitely in the realm of where donations can work.

And the underlying software has had the time to work out a lot of the nuances of this design and how to get it to a larger scale successfully. It could still break if the whole planet took up ActivityPub, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the ideal than what happened with the pre-Web protocols.