I've been trying out Mastodon for the past 2 days. I like it, but it honestly has some problems that will prevent it from growing outside of niches. The main one being discoverability. There's simply no easy way to discover other users on the platform. And from what I understand, this is by design.<p>You can search hashtags, but not everyone uses hashtags. And the results that appear seem to be most recent, and not most liked or most boosted. It requires a lot of "work" to find interesting people and/or friends on the platform. And most people don't have time for that extra "work."<p>I'd like it more if I could see what's trending, but only if I specifically seek out what's trending.<p>Also on my Galaxy Tab S7 in portrait mode, a breakpoint is preventing the search field from appearing. I have to shrink Firefox a bit for the search field to appear. Took me a day before I figured that one out.<p>Outside of those issues, it has potential. I love everyone having a chronological feed.
I hope Elon opens up the Twitter API and lets fully-powered 3rd party clients flourish.<p>Ideally, moderation policies and enforcement actions can be client-specific to some degree. Ultra woke or righty twitter can implement their own policies without losing out on the network effect of the greater network.<p>Ben Thompson has been crusading for this direction and it’s gain traction in free-speech circles
So a new wave of people can see how unusuable it is. I guess I'm not shocked that Mastodon has improved so little since I joined 6 years ago.<p>- The very first instance I joined within a few weeks of launch stopped existing within a year<p>- Maintainers of instances got into weird internet fights and started banning entire instances<p>- DMs can be read by practically anyone<p>- in 2022, still zero discovery<p>- in 2022, fairly poor UX on a variety of web UIs, terrible UX on mobile clients<p>Mastodon really isn't worth your time unless you prioritize true decentralization. Unfortunately that appears to work against the concept of "community" and good software design.
Mastodon's onboarding UX is an absolute fail... I just didn't have the patience for it do I doubt the casual users won't either. Once I had an account it got even worse, so it's very unlikely I'll login ever again. If that's supposed to be a twitter alternative I now understand there's no competition
I've been using mastodon over the last few days and the difference between tech twitter and mastodon tech instances are dramatic. People engaging with my content has gone way up compared to twitter. I feel like unless you have a ton of followers on twitter, you get completely lost in the shuffle. Joining smaller instances increases the chances that your post will get noticed.<p>Also, joining tech focused instances means the content you are reading is almost exclusively about tech. Twitter has mechanisms to filter the content you want, but it feels totally different and a little forced.<p>For example, my sidebar has entertainment news articles on Twitter. I don't want to see that crap on my page.
How does one find the bigger Mastadon instances? They aren't even listed on this joinmastodon website. I know it is intentionally decentralized, but it seems like it can never catch on because it feels like 100s of separate websites. You have to make logins for every single one.
If that 30,000 is mostly the kind of people that like to be shouty about their worldview being so <i>correct</i> while gloating at the removal of voices they don't like or won't tolerate, then I'm sorry for your gain.<p>Curious to see if this holds or if there's a deficit of ~30,000 in three months time...
Imho mastodon's got an onboarding problem since before you even start you have to decide <i>where</i> to make an account, a decision with unclear ramifications. That'll scare a lot of people off at step 1.
Unpopular opinion but here goes 1. UX is hopeless (menu on the right, post on the left? ) and different to be different (use common design patterns, don't re-invent the wheel to be different. User have expectations from other sites they use, don't violate them)
2. Onboarding unclear
3. Non-existent discoverability
4. Tons of different domains joinmastodon.org, mastodon.social, mstdn.social doesn't work nicely with password managers and difficult to remember which to go to login...<p>Sadly, it will enjoy a bump for a few weeks...and then float back into obscurity. In my eyes this is DOA in its current state.
It seems some people find this federation aspect "complicated" . To explain it simply, just think of it like email account. I might have a zoho account, you might have gmail, we can still talk to each other. A federated system is sort of like that. We all can get account(s) on various servers/service providers. We can talk to each other by using each other's "handle" (like email address). It's really that simply for a user.<p>If you want to selfhost, cloudron and yunohost have 1-click apps. Could not get any simpler with either of them.
This comment on an older Mastodon thread is just as relevant: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789302</a><p>I've also commented before as to why I don't believe decentralization is a solution to the problems of current social media and instead introduces problems of its own: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317513</a>
> We only list communities that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia<p>That is dumb. Not because racism is cool, but actively policing is a looooooot of work to pledge.<p>How many instances are not listed here? Many? I m considering to make a directory
Is is practical or useful to self-host your own instance? Not for public use, but just for you?<p>Has anyone done this? Does linking to other servers work OK? Any upsides/downsides?
Twitter's censorship created the problem of echo chambers. Twitter was never full on hostile toward conservatives, it was more to do with specific issues/narratives.<p>Conservatives looked at mastodon. Mastodon was worse than twitter, conservatives never made it to mastodon. Mastodon was hostile toward conservatives and this was an unfortunate large mistake.<p>Conservatives built alternatives like parler or gab. But they failed because they were echo chambers.<p>>We’ve been steadily working towards the ultimate goal of providing a viable alternative to Twitter since 2016, and have proven the scalability and resilience of the platform through organic growth over the years.<p>Ironically many of these alternatives like gab stole Mastodon code to operate. Which is very interesting because why couldn't conservatives simply join the mastodon network? As an up and comer you would not only be best suited to invite anyone to your platform.<p><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork...</a><p>White supremacists?<p>>listing only such servers that commit to standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.<p>Mastodon will never be in the spotlight because they have fallen into the same echo chamber problems. Gab supports free speech? That must make them racist transphobes!
Mastodon reminds me of Woznaik's vision of what Apple should be and could be (in contrast to Steve's). It's totally awesome but lacks key insights of branding, marketing, and understanding users. This thing is built by geeks for other geeks.
There certainly is a role to be played by federated open-protocol communication in the future, but why limit your app to being a mere Twitter-clone? It will then always be worse than Twitter in terms of the quality of its network.
After having been reminded of Mastodon and the fediverse's existence, I decided to try setting up a server to go along with the rest of my self-hosted services. But kind of turned off from it all now, first tried using the Mastodon implementation, then Pleroma. Former was a complete non-starter behind a reverse proxy, way too heavy and not too useful documentation wise, latter at least worked enough to log in, but ran into some strange federation issue. In the end just nuked it all out of frustration.<p>I used to think that setting up matrix-synapse was unfriendly to users, but it's way friendlier than either of these.
This happens every time a company is acquired. I remember the “mass migration” when GitHub was acquired. In the end Gitlab did see some new users but GitHub remained on top.
Do exist some kind of blocklist services so all the bad mastodon postings and instances can be blocked easily? Mastodon is compared to email here, so it would be great to have blacklists, too.<p>Of course all kind of automated tools or services that helps to keep an instance clean would be very useful. Imagine "Fediverse Cleanup Service" where you can subscribe to "NSFW", "CP", "Right", "Left", "Spam", "Whatever" block lists.<p>Also big social networks could share their blacklists (as a service?) - selling ads and cleanup services will give them a good position in a world of decentralized platforms.<p>Does exist already a YC startup that does all this work?
It would be great to read about the differences to matrix.org - does anybody know a good explanation / comparison?<p>I can not decide which alternative to use because there are so many differences and I lost interest in researching all the details, so it would be great if somebody with knowledge would like to write about that and provide an overview.<p>As a user I would like to see a tool without censorship, but where I can ignore posters I do not like, where I still can find everybody, but also have private encrypted conversations with my peer groups and nobody is trying to profile me based on my interests. Ads would be ok, but no tracking (use tags for targeting, not user data).
It's the same problem as every alternative social media platform, no one's on it.<p>I'm active on Minds and have a niche following there, but it's still very insular on there
I think we need something simpler than mastodon. Something like an extension of email, without instances acting as gatekeepers (don't they suffer the same problems as twitter when they block other instances?). There will be a lot of spam, sure, but there are creative ideas how to handle it, in fact the follower model reduces the capability to spam.
Why is Mastodon so uncool? Is it the name? Is it the lack of cool people on Mastodon? Was it because of things like "toots?"<p>I love open source software as much as the next HN reader, but there's something so unappealing about not just Mastodon, but Matrix, and all the other social software out there today.
Bluesky, the federated social media started by twitter is looking very carefully at matrix. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(protocol)</a>
"Twitter buyout puts Mastodon into spotlight" says Mastadon in a PR piece<p>I dont use Twitter- quit 6-7 years ago due to the toxicity-- but I never understood the charm of "federated"-- I now have to join 22 different Mastadons, each with their own logins and rules, just to keep up with people, many of whom arent even on Mastadon?
> The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day.<p>How many users does Mastodon have in total? I don't want to sound dismissive, but based on that number it seems like they probably have like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…
Isn't the entire point of Mastodon to do exactly what Elon Musk is buying Twitter to do? Like how does the buy out of Twitter push people to Mastodon, if anything it'd bring people back from Mastodon to Twitter.