Why does this feel so forced and astroturfed on this site and yet has essentially no traction

For what it's worth, it doesn't to me.

Discussing Mastodon is hardly "forced" when the overall topic is a new decentralized alternative to Twitter, since Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter that's been around for a while.

It seems unlikely that this is astroturf given that the person who posted it has been on HN for over a decade (though admittedly not super-active) and their comments are on a wide range of topics and not just Twitter or Mastodon.

Musk's idea is to piss off 10% of the left and right of the spectrum and keep the middle 80% happy.

The left 10% will hang out on Mastodon or Fediverse, the right 10% will go on Gab or whatever. I think what's happenning is great for all. You do you™.

Gab is a Mastodon fork that's basically locked out of the Mastodon Fediverse by the moderators. There's no reason why Mastodon qua infrastructure should be identified with the "right".

Works for me. Getting these clowns off the main sites sounds wonderful.

The 20% has caused so much havoc in society, 80% needs to push back and make the world better.

That could be a hint to reflect on your thought process

Mastodon is only free of issues because the masses haven't found it yet. Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.

Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.

The key here is mastodon isn't a business, so moderation isn't entirely focused on being cheap. Mastodon, correctly in my opinion, identifies social networks as community resources not as entities to extraft profit from.

> Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

Why is lack of moderation a problem on Mastodon?

Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow, that creates a responsibility to moderate (plus they need to keep the advertisers happy).

The Mastodon timeline is direct follows. If I see some stuff I don't like, I can talk with that person or simply unfollow them.

> Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow

and the TweakNewTwitter browser add-on rejects it, along with "trending" and all the rest. Add in ublock origin and you've pretty much got Twitter the way I thought it should be.

Mastodon has plenty of moderation: every instance has it's own people, when questionable content makes its way from a non moderated instance to others, the moderators of the others can moderate it. If an instance receives moderation requests from the rest of the fediverse and doesn't act on it, it eventually gets defederated.

Having a process that distributes the load of moderation is better, IMNHO, than piling all that work on underpaid people.

this is written as if you don't understand federated services.

How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it?

Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.

Interesting. So you're creating your bubble just because you don't want anyone challenging your opinions.

Let's see how that goes a year from now.

What about me, who never used Twitter and wont use this either? Did I make a bubble because I don't want people to challenge my opinions? How many tweets do I need to read a day until I have sufficiently challenged my opinions?

What? If you've never used twitter, why do you even care now? If you use ig, reddit, fb, that's ok. If you like to have conversations with people in person, that's ok too. I just don't understand why people are worked out by Elon buying twitter. If you think twitter is going to become more of a cesspool, then by all means use mastodom, gettr, truth social, etc...

I was just stating that if twitter was bad before, these new alternatives will be 10x worse since they will create truly silos and radicalize even more people. To each their own.

Why would I care that I'm in a bubble? Because I don't want to be. You were just suggesting that by not using these certain apps, the poster was forcing themselves into an ignorant bubble. I'm asking you, is that true of someone that doesn't use twitter outright?