Ask HN: Is Mastodon the best alternative to Twitter?
I wanted to give Elon the benefit of the doubt and have stayed on Twitter through the recent turmoil because it has the momentum and it's still where most of the accounts I follow are.
But I can only see it continuing to degrade as the hunt for a return on his investment continues. I'm ready to leave.
Mastodon is leading as the top migration destination so far, but it seems to have issues of its own. And there's also nostr, which solves some of these issues but introduces others.
What have you switched to and why?
78 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI'm on Mastodon, at this point just to be another follower of all the people I want to follow - who come to check it out, but Twitter is still where it's at for my network.
Hopefully that'll change soon.
Either way, if Twitter is out for you, there's nothing else that really looks like it'll gain traction aside from Mastodon.
So far, the people who've moved to Mastodon seem happy with that choice, myself included.
I also really like the fact that you can turn off notifications for likes and boosts. I only care about replies, and this lets me avoid the noise in my notifications.
Finally, another big UX feature is that you can follow people on other platforms that support ActivityPub. For example, I follow a few photographers on Pixelfed, and some streams on Lemmy in my feed.
It is pretty wild that centralized automated content moderation amplifies their voices, but decentralized manual moderation shuts such lunacy down.
I'm sure a 200 user Mastodon instance moderated by a vigilant hall monitor will not have a problem with Taliban content, but then it won't offer any of what makes Twitter an interesting site.
It's nowhere near as active as Twitter (or to be honest, many social media sites), but it's leagues ahead of the other Twitter alternatives online at the moment, and you often get the same people chat to you on a regular basis. It's got a community feel for sure, and my posts have done a lot better than they did on Twitter because of it.
As for the others I've tried...
Hive was promising once, but the months of non availability after the security issues came to the fore basically took a sledgehammer to whatever level of activity it had, and most people moved on. It also has an issue with self promoters basically having free reign, and said folks having no interest in actually holding a discussion. This is easy to see on the trending content pages, where about 3/4 of the posts are random folks posting selfies and advertising their Twitch streams.
Post is okay... if you're interested in political content. If you want to discuss any sort of hobby, the activity just isn't there. This was probably made worse by the ridiculous waiting list that existed for signups prior, where your average (non referred) member had to wait weeks to get an account there.
Other sites and services I've seen for this are dead as a doornail, and basically have zero people using them on a regular basis.
And yet, here I am, primarily using Mastodon. Maybe it's just my server, but it's so much more _pleasant_ to be there. I don't need to wade through pages of insanity and irrelevant ads to get to the content I care about.
It's as if an annoying ambient buzzing slowly built up in my favorite coffee shop over a decade, and I never really noticed it, but now there's a crunchy alternative cafe next-door with fewer options which is blissfully silent. I just can't bring myself to go back.
Another reason is that not using hay@potato.horse as my handle feels like a missed opportunity.
In all honesty the best alternative to twitter is no twitter, until we find a better format for community discussion. Maybe it's private community chat, or similar, not sure. Maybe it's the end of public social. I think a lot of us are just looking for quieter smaller groups to share with.
A note on Mastodon. It's going closer in that direction of community specific servers but I think a better alternative would be if we could keep it private and cap group sizes. Right now it just feels like a replica of twitter segregated by topic or community. All the inherit bad behaviour still propagates because of the form factor.
Maybe it works if you only follow low-traffic announcement accounts, but when I was actively using Twitter I found that I regularly missed posts like that because they either didn't get engagement (algo timeline) or were posted when I wasn't paying attention (chrono timeline). I understand that a lot of projects have chosen to rely on social media for that kind of news for various reasons, but it's not a good situation.
There are few other platforms I can think of where someone with deep expertise on any subject can publish interesting, informed takes on their field- On a platform where the barrier to entry to publish is near-zero, provided with a random chance to go viral.
When I used Twitter, seeking out and following these kinds of experts actually made the experience of Twitter a rich and informative platform- albeit one where you constantly needed to "weed the garden".
The problem of course is that was a thin layer of wheat in a big bucket of chaff- but there is a better answer to "best alternative to twitter is no twitter": The best alternative to Twitter is one that can maximize virality for expert opinions; incentivizing other users to write engaging, structured opinions. Try to build a system where the best way to engagement farm is to show real thought leadership.
Twitter is grade school. You don't "win" by being right, you get that be being funny, sarcastic, a little cruel, and getting lots of likes.
I'd like to see a return to a platform at a slightly elevated level. Asking for it to be like a university discussion group is maybe a little bit too much, but how about like, the last year of high school, when all the drama has died down and you've all pretty much agreed to be friends? I feel like that's the time when people start listening to reasoned arguments over name calling.
I don't know what that platform looks like, and it's almost sure to be less viral that Twitter. But if that last 3 years have taught me anything it's that fast-moving viruses are bad. I think we should slow down.
I used to think this. And by "used to" I mean 3 months ago, after I quit Twitter.
Initially, I didn't miss social media. I had a nice restful period, a vacation if you will. Eventually, though, I found that I did miss it, so I signed up for Mastodon. Some of the same problems as Twitter had exist on Mastodon too, I admit. I guess I am addicted anyway. In recent years I've quit both alcohol and caffeine entirely, yet I'm not sure I can quit social media entirely. It's my weakness.
I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology.
The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.
No. Some people don't view social media as "debate club". We never signed up for debate club. I personally signed up for Twitter at a software developer conference, and I used Twitter to meet other software developers, social network, and exchange information related to tech. I had no interest in debating politics or whatever. Twitter is possibly the worst possible place in the world to debate politics, given its format.
It's a weird assumption that Twitter is the best or only possible place to have your ideas challenged. Go to school. Ready a book. Talk with people you know. Tweeting sound bites at rando strangers typically goes nowhere fast.
Again it's not about saying twitter is debate club. For the majority of people that's not the case for the outliers it is though and they don't like it.
If people want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people are debating. If they don't want to debate, then they can go to a forum where people aren't debating. Everyone gets what they want. That's good, isn't it?
Do you have any evidence for this? The proximate cause of mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon was the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.
> because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it
You're already changing your story.
> it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere
That's your characterization, which I do not agree with. Some would say that Musk himself has a cult-like following. In any case, Twitter and Mastodon have naturally segregated into pro-Musk and anti-Musk communities through no particular design by either side but simply as a result of the acquisition.
Those who enjoy Musk Twitter have no reason to leave and join Mastodon, so of course there would be less "challenge" from them on Mastodon, but whose fault is that?
Yet they didn't leave until the Musk acquisition. Huh.
This is all a very nice conspiracy theory, thank you.
> The cult leaders still need their followers.
People who tweet are now "cult leaders". Ok. By the way, how many Twitter followers does it take to become cult leader? I'm curious because I had over 3500, so I'm not sure whether I qualify or not.
> Crazy ranting folk.
Or HN commenters.
Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories. Pulling your audience to Mastodon isn't something villainous. It's an opportunity to remove a lot of the noise on twitter and focus people on your message and community. That could be anything. Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument. It's just human dynamics.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter whether people use Twitter or Mastodon or whatever else. We're transition between platforms every decade, some people stick it out for the relationships and other people move on to new things. That's life.
Do you have any evidence of this? Name one Twitter personality like this who isn't famous outside of Twitter, and who moved from Twitter to Mastodon, bringing their "cult followers".
> Also I mean I'm not here to spin conspiracy theories.
Your whole argument is a conspiracy theory. Occam's razor suggests that people moved from Twitter to Mastodon because of Musk. And indeed, that was the case for me personally. Yet you say no, it's... something else, Twitter "cult" leaders wanting to move their followers out of Twitter to avoid "challenges", and Musk was somehow just an excuse or something.
> Your Mastodon server could be dedicated to die hard star wars fans or it would be liberal tech folk on the west coast who want a smaller space in which to voice their thoughts without the other side of the argument.
This is a misunderstanding of Mastodon. It's distributed. A server is just a server. I personally switched servers because of technical difficulties on my old server. You can follow and communicate with anyone on the fediverse. You're not restricted in any way to activity on one server.
1. A server to join. Try techhub.social or hachyderm.io or infosec.exchange or ioc.exchange or sfba.social or even one of the official servers like mastodon.online -- any of those will be fine
2. An app. I use the web interface and am happy with it, but I've also tried Ivory and it's a pretty good app
3. People to follow, to get started. That's going to depend on your interests. There was a HN post with a lot of good recommendations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413641
Having a model like Usenet, where perhaps you could have some groups federated among a few instances, others that are global, and still others that are purely local, would likely improve upon the situation as it currently is.
Basically, everything social on the Internet is trying to find its way back to Usenet, which was the high point of electronic socialization.
Now, more about Mastodon itself:
In short, Mastodon is less toxic and the feed doesn't artificially amplify content made to generate engagement.
People tend to mistake free speech and discourse artificially shaped to pump ads in your eyeballs and that shows. Your content IS moderated but more subtly, and your mod is an advertising company.
On Mastodon, you'll _still_ see weird crap on the federated feed (including controversial stuff, like xenophobic content), but quickly you'll realise that the ratio of truly disturbing, aggressive or xenophobic content is much, much lower.
This is partially due to:
- the fact that algorithmic feeds rely on controversial, divisive, emotional responses as they turn into higher engagement.
- the fact that people are still weird, but _way less_ evil and mean.
You can think of Mastodon as a mix of an internet forum and a chat from 2005. For instance, the default client UX can be clunky (no sweet ad revenue $$), but it doesn't go in your way like the dark patterns on Twitter (e.g. the chronological feed resetting to the algorithmic one ever x days).
Also, you can always change the default client. Elk is neat.
Mastodon will perform worse in terms of reach, but better in terms of engagement (let's appreciate the irony here).
One of the comments says:
> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter
And I 100% agree with that. Better go outside and touch grass, pet a dog. I wish internet forums were more utilised, because I use micro-blogging mostly for announcements regarding my projects and this format encourages shallow discourse.
Edit: be more specific about the UX issues pertaining mostly to the default client. Thanks @wowfunhappy
Once you've chosen an instance (which I realize is fundamentally a bit weird because of how we've been conditioned to use the internet), what exactly is wrong with Mastodon's UX?
To my eyes, it's basically Twitter circa-2013 or so.
Following across federated instances using the default client would be the first issue that comes to my mind. It should be a single click.
Not a big deal and already fixed in alternative clients.
What I wanted to highlight (poorly) is that because the UX isn’t adversarial (dark) it’s still much more of a pleasant experience to use.
Mastodon is currently the most popular software that implements that protocol. However, I think Mastodon is very flawed. There are many design decisions that are just awful both in the realms of UX and also software architecture.
Thankfully ActivityPub is an open protocol. Anyone can come up and make a competitor. And that's what I hope happens. Some other social platform(s) implement ActivityPub and replace Mastodon.
It's similar to how back in the day Apache was absolutely the dominant web server, but nowadays nginx is on top. Anyone out there reading this, please make the nginx of ActivityPub.
But be careful of the server you choose. I submitted this some days ago to see what people think, albeit it got no traction, so I'll put again here just in case:
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mastodon2.html
If switching servers is not made painless and straightforward, we'll end up having a single, mostly trusted, mostly centralized server (whatever that happens to end up being), because nobody wants to see themselves in the situation of losing their accounts on a server that seemed to be trustworthy. And also nobody wants to put on themselves the burden of having to make a full research on the viability of each and every potential server that they might want to use, that's something that shouldn't be a problem solved by individual users, but a problem solved by the service itself, somehow. A Covenant is far from enough.
One difference that sticks out to me is that mastodon isn't designed to goad for more engagement. For example, 'likes' on mastodon are public but not the same thing as 'resharing' in terms of appearing in timelines. Twitter used to treat likes similarly, but over time it changed. I imagine they saw more engagement when 'likes' were treated more and more like 'retweets.' I appreciate that on mastodon I can show the author of a post I like the content without automatically putting it in the feed of my own followers (and it's easy to do both if I chose to).
Stuff like support for code blocks, different reactions are a draw for me, coming from Mastodon.
I was finally able to make an account (when I tried most servers weren't allowing it) and I followed a ton of people that moved off twitter... but I came to realize they seem to have stopped posting all together or quietly migrated back. (our very own pg, for example)
There was also a very very good comment here on yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934996
>... every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan can exist without impacting each others reputation
Personally I will keep using Twitter unless a critical mass (+50%) of my followings (37 accounts) will move permanently. But not even a single account I follow moved... Anyways I just use the linear timeline, no ads, no algorithmic tweets. Nothing really have changed so far.
I’ve no regrets other than now having two places to check daily.