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by raphlinus·3y ago·view on hn ↗
I've also moved from Twitter to Mastodon, for the same reasons, and have a similar experience - the raw follower count is still a fraction as before, but a lot of interesting people I want to connect with are already there.

And the feeling is... very different. There was lots about Twitter that subtly enraged me, like pop-sci Covid takes showing up in my algorithmic feed after I had extremely carefully curated my followers to only include actual scientists who knew what they were talking about. And it's also refreshing not to have all those ads. In general, I feel like you've got a lot of control of your Mastodon experience, if you curate your followers well, it can be quite good. I have rules of immediately "unfollow boosts of" anybody who posts viral "boost this if..." or bullshit polls, and that's cleaning up my feed as well.

I've also been followed by my first crypto account (so I might go to followers-need-approval), and have seen glimmers of the same kind of dumb drama you see on Twitter, but overall feel like I generally have the tools I need to keep all that in check. I was finding that Twitter was bad for my mental health, and took a bunch of breaks from it even when I was having generally positive interactions and finding good info. We'll see how this goes, especially as things scale.

3 comments
> I was finding that Twitter was bad for my mental health,

Same here. It's all that rage-boosting the algorithms do to increase engagement. I deleted my twitter account back in May and went to mastodon. It's been so much more pleasant and non-addictive.

The noise you want to get away from is on Twitter because that's where the target audience is. If everyone moves to Mastodon, all the noise will move to Mastodon too.

But it is wonderful to be part of a niche community that hasn't yet been noticed by astroturfers, advertisers, politicians, and self-promoters (just like HN).

They might try, but the beauty is that in most instances the leadership is not motivated by engagement metrics and advertisements but just people wanting to stick together. Kinda like the glory days of IRC.
That works so long as:

- Small instances can still participate and engage. "Personal Mastodon server" might very much go the way of "personal email server", in a world of majors (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, etc.)

- Instances aren't acquired. One of the insidious aspects of capitalism is that firms can buy other firms. Yes, it's possible for a competitor to emerge, but a large established giant can buy out that competitor. Or take other actions, e.g., lock out any entity which supplies or interacts with that competitor. See former "Facebook killer" Ello.co (post-acquisition its new owners are exceedingly opaque and all the B Corp language has disappeared), or Mastodon instance Mastodon.cloud, acquired from its original owner by a Japanese concern.

- Management doesn't otherwise change.

- The operators don't simply diasappear (Joindiaspora.com, mastodon.cafe), or die (pluspora.com).

I AM a fan of Diaspora* and Mastodon. But I'm not blind to their actual and theoretical failings.

Here's my counterpoints:

- I always found the big problem with small email servers was the setup (ask your friends how easy it is to spin one up), not the rest. I run my own mail server and haven't had problems in years, plus Mastodon and Pleroma are much much easier to run.

- I've experienced the "instance is dead, pls migrate" pain, but thankfully it's been getting wayyy better, some of my follows have migrated and I just got a nice notification going "hey X migrated to Y" with the follow updated to the new address. This makes the platform much less of a walled garden than your Twitter/Facebook of today.

I understand the downsides of the platform, but I genuinely think they are a bit overblown. Meanwhile everyone keeps thinking of AP as a strict Twitter replacement without understanding all the possibilities that federation unlocks (esp. with the integration with different but compatible services like Peertube/Writefreely) and how those extra integrations would push everyone to keep their doors open.

The issue I have with mastodon is that it seems to cater to tech people, but there is an entire outside world.

https://mxb.dev/blog/the-indieweb-for-everyone/

So this is anecdote and not data, but I'm interacting a lot more with Quakers on Mastodon than I did on Twitter.

Honestly, I don't think services need to be dumbed down so much, people can figure it out. And having a little friction might be a good thing, unless the goal is just to rack up engagement numbers as high as they can be optimized - and arguably that incentive is one of the things that was really wrong with Twitter.

There's a thriving community for several communities beyond just tech - people who want to rekindle some of the community they found on twitter.

I'm on med-mastodon (healthcare workers and researchers) and the server has several thousand people.

This is exactly how it was on twitter during the early years.
It's not for regular folks for the time being. Because account creation from joinmastodon.org is such a mess. Try it out. Click create account, and then what? It's hopeless for regular folks.

If main server mastodon.social could handle masses it would be much simpler experience.

Tech people are patient and adopt it first. Mastodon needs a new way to join, a main server that can handle huge masses.

This, I don't get why they decided to create the fragmented UX like this.