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 [flagged] Ask HN: How many are switching to Mastodon?
48 points by beauHD on Oct 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
With Musk officially at the helm of Twitter now, I noticed a few prominent people on Twitter saying they have jumped ship to Mastodon or other platforms. How many on here are considering disbanding and choosing Mastodon as an exit strategy? Does Musk = Bad hold any weight?

I know for me I noticed a sharp decline in engagement on my Twitter account, and a recent study said Twitter's core users are leaving in droves. I don't even get any new followers. They used to trickle in over time, but all that has stalled. Twitter has now devolved into bread and circuses IMHO.

Anyone jumping ship?



I'm not going to up and close my Twitter account for no reason, but I did just finally get around to opening an account on a Mastodon server. I've been meaning to start moving more to the Fediverse anyway, so this isn't a complete knee-jerk thing. But all the recent brouhaha over Elon buying Twitter did serve as sort of a nudge to finally take some action in that regard.

I do eventually intend to (at least mostly) wind down my use of all "walled garden" sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc., but I will probably do so gradually. And I may leave the accounts open and populated with a bot that periodically posts a reminder of where I can be found, or something. Not sure yet.


+1 to the winding down by trying to use alternatives, and working on the gaps

Facebook Messenger < Signal < XMPP. I have a few stragglers on FB Messenger, but don't have the app installed.

Facebook Marketplace < Gumtree. Gumtree at least is searchable without an account.

I subscribe to Mastodon and Twitter accounts via RSS.

Github < Sourcehut: I only use Github for contributing to other repos.

Mobile Linux > Open app stores > closed app store: WIP. :)


I created a Twitter account for the first time since 2014. Excited for the show.


I was on in 2011 and tweeted for a while there when I had a friend network that did the same. Time changes us and people grow apart. I dropped off the tweet train hard in 2015 and got on with my life.

I'm just sad that social networks are dying under the strangling weight of advertising instead of being simplified, made robust, and turned into public utilities.


I've had a Mastodon account for a pretty long time, but I've never really done anything with it. I've found discoverability to be quite difficult.


I moved to Mastodon almost 6 years ago, but I didn't close Twitter.

It's amazing that in the professional world, some people still raise an eyebrow if you don't have a Twitter account. It's better to have a dormant one, than none at all in my experience.

After 6 years, my Mastodon account has fewer followers than my Twitter inactive one. It shows that Mastodon is smaller, less active and (if you filter out bots and spam) you start to recognise most of the active people. It's like a small town. But with the passing years, I start to see that as an advantage. It's less stressful, there's not as much FOMO.

I'm currently in the process of setting up a small instance just for close friends and leave behind the mind-numbing daily drama of planetary social media for good.


This is a "free speech" guy, not a free speech guy. If Twitter follows other "free speech" platforms, it will become very one-sided. I'd expect all the newly banned folks to set up elsewhere. Maybe Mastodon, maybe something more established like Tumblr.


I don’t know if that will be the case. Previous free speech platform attempts only attracted a specific crowd - but Twitter has the opposing crowd quite firmly entrenched, so it may balance out better.


Is it really gonna turn into a hellscape just because people you disagree with will no longer be silenced?


The concern is not about disagreeable ideas, it's about abuse and threats.

Not all censorship is de jure.


The motte: censoring abuse and threats.

The bailey: Twitter censoring NY Post during election time.

Disclaimer: I don't follow US politics, but do follow online censorship.


A hellscape for people with fragile ideological bubbles, thin skins, and too much time on their hands, absolutely.


I don't do Twitter, at all, who are we talking about?


No one in particular. The decrease in moderation will, logically, make Twitter worse for anyone who can’t stand opposing viewpoints (whatever they may be), or who loves spending hours arguing.


Every once in a while I'll think, maybe Twitter isn't really the garbage dumpster fire I think it is, and I'll go try to find some useful information via Google searches. Just tried it for something I'm interested in, i.e.

site:twitter.com financialization of the economy

Yup, still a useless pile of garbage, full of one-liners, silly memes, links to corporate media articles that aren't worth reading because you already know what PR message they'll be putting out, etc. Best thing that could happen would be for Musk to buy it and then just pull the plug, although that seems fairly unlikely.


I think there's valid criticisms of Twitter; the medium encourages a writing style that I find pretty cringe-worthy a lot of the time. It does encourage hot takes and isn't a very good place for nuanced discussion of charged topics. It is, like all social media platforms, a contributor to polarization in all sorts of topics, some that matter more than others.

The value in Twitter depends heavily on how you curate your feed, though. If you fill it with thoughtful people that are experts in the fields you're interested, it can be quite enlightening. If you fill it with people who mostly post memes, you'll get memes. If you fill it with pundits, you'll get bite-sized takes. You get to choose that.


The easiest way to have a sense of the numbers of account deactivations by day on Twitter is to see how many followers Obama loses: https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/barackobama

Most movement is happening in specific language and thematic communities, so a global average may tell little. https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/109275934357821538


Because people never learn. We have Usenet, a decentralized network no one own who demand VERY LITTLE resources, almost no setup for a mere client usage, performant enough to being used as a file-sharing pirate platform by some (binary groups) and already widespread.

But no, since some giant have pushed a tech against the users, like the modern web people want to copy it "making it free" not understanding that they work against their own interests.


Created my Twitter account in 2007; one of the first 700,000 accounts on the service.

I’m not jumping ship; I’m taking a wait and see attitude.

I did signup for Jack Dorsey’s new social network: https://blueskyweb.xyz

I’ve had Mastodon account for while but I’ve haven’t used it much, but that may change…


What is the point of Mastodon? (not a flame bait)

It has a character limit, it has separated instances on which you really can't subscribe (at least I couldn't a few years back), and it is realtime feed.

So who is the target audience really? Big influential public figures with millions followers? - not possible due to federation

Small thematic communities or specific professionals, not popular with masses? - very problematic due to federations first (all need to get on the same instance), then due to character count (no longform posts by professionals), and real time, so that rare good posts of people you care about are simply lost in the feed.

Even smaller groups of friends? - none of the problems above are blocking, but now the question is why Mastodon specifically, instead of a more usable and friendly chat room in any of the messengers.


It's decentralized twitter basically... There's more nuance but for now just consider it twitter for this examples sake.

So imagine everyone can host their own twitter server, each server connects to each other... Or inversely not connect to certain servers if they want.

Now instead of a single server being a catchall for everyone, you can have nuanced servers.. since you have both a local timeline and a federated "all servers" timeline as well as the timeline of people and hashtags you follow.

Let's focus on the local and federated timelines.

Let's say you're on a mastodon instance that's all about pokemon Minecraft, people on this server will probably share that same like.. so when you look at the local timeline you're seeing people only on your pokemon Minecraft server.

When you look at the federated timeline you're seeing EVERY other servers feed.

So instead of seeing mastodon as a replacement for twitter, ask yourself, what kind of community do you want to be a part of.... Then find that using the mastodon community finder, go sign up and post a introduction and you'll find new people on the local timeline.

Think of it kind of like forums, but twitter.


Some instances have a large enough character limit that there effectively isn't one.


> it has separated instances on which you really can't subscribe

What do you mean? You can subscribe to people on different instances.


Oh, that nice. I somehow missed that feature while playing around the app. Then I guess it can be at minimum current Twitter replacement. We'll see.

PS: personally I've abandoned Mastodon and never used twitter because the feed format is really not userfriendly. I prefer forums, like those older forums or newer like Reddit.


It's been ~6 hours since Musk closed the deal. Maybe he shadow banned your account in the afternoon


I would give Musk a fighting chance to make the platform less toxic while making it an open square. He does have a track record of brilliant engineering skills and thinking out of the box. Musks twitter will be something different than today’s twitter, I think.


Yeah, pretty keen on moving to services that don't optimize for engagement, which so often has been things like "the new terrible thing person x has said". Hoping there's a new wave of non-algo sites and forums and things.


Don't use twitter. So not jumping ship, mostly avoided it in the first place. Too much politics in the way it is run, for my taste. Been using Mastodon for the last year or two, once NA fired one up. ITM!


I created a mastodon presence a while ago, and then forgot about it, and then got back on there today after deleting my twitter (I had an acct since 2008 but barely used it anyways) and it seems there is a bit of an inbound wave happening. But as it's not really an environment much like Twitter, I think a lot of people will sign up, poke around and leave.

I also just made it on mstdn.social, but probably I should have applied into one of the more specialist fedi-thingies. I dunno.

Should be interesting to see how it all shakes down.

Personally what I want is an alternative to Facebook.


I have an old account that I created as a placeholder when Twitter formed but have not signed in for a long time. Assuming that old account still exists maybe I'll give it a whirl to watch the show. There are a lot of rumors about what comes next, including rumors of integrations with a few other platforms.

As for Mastadon, I like the idea and even thought about spinning up a few instances but I really don't do social media beyond HN so I expect even the chirping crickets would bail on me.


I have jumped ship, but i haven't deleted my Twitter. For one good reason. I did that with my Tumblr and someone's taken the username and just posts porn.

I don't know if twitter allows for reising inactive account names... But i won't risk it.

Either way, twitter made me angry, where as mastodon doesn't.. pretty simple.


I'm not jumping ship because I want to see/experience what happens. If he turns it into something I don't want to be part of (it's close to that already, as I just don't gain much from being on it), then I'll stop using the platform, I guess. I don't think I'll go to Mastodon though, I'll just be done.


> I know for me I noticed a sharp decline in engagement

I noticed this a little while ago. If I tweet now noone ever replies, unless the tweet is a response to a popular tweet. I have over 3000 'followers' and suddenly noone is interested in what I have to say? Maybe I got dull


I think Twitter will have a standard, organic death that comes from a space with absolute free speech. It’s going to be too soul sapping for most people and will gradually lose its audience except the fringers.


Not jumping ship yet, but certainly not happy about Musk being in charge.

I've tried Mastodon a few times, but it never seems to stick. I don't know anyone irl on it, or even any accounts that focus much on my local area. I think federation is interesting, but I think it'd work better if individuals had a close affinity with a particular community that chose to maintain a server (like a town, university, church, volunteer organization, etc). As it stands, people try to use it as a clumsy Twitter and join random servers they know little about.

The best thing that would come out of this is that I break my Twitter habit and hang out with friends at the pub more often.


For all Norwegian users that want something better you there are two popular Norwegian servers @Oslo.town and @Snabelen.no.


I used to have an account and forgot long time ago. It's so difficult to keep using it while most of my friends are using facebook or twitter.


I welcome all to check out Sqwok (https://sqwok.im). It's been a labor of love and it continues to be developed with a goal of becoming an excellent place for live public discussion.

Personally I'm interested to see what happens at Twitter with Elon at the helm.

A friend and active Twitter user who lets say isn't a fan of his, has stated that they don't think he'd be foolish enough to burn it to the ground and thus won't be going anywhere. I agree.


Is there ActivityPub federation yet?


Not yet but I am curious how that might work? I do want to build an api soon and planning to make some changes to the Posts, add rss, other stuff.


There might already be an ActivityPub library for whatever language you used.


Nope, going to create a twitter account shortly.


Who are the prominent people advocating for leaving Twitter?


Giving away content to Elon Musk for free is not on my dance card. Downloaded my data on Wednesday and deleted the account Thursday. Now on Mastodon but still searching out servers.


If you're inclined to close your account to protest the Musk takeover, it would probably make more sense (and carry more impact) to do it when he reinstates Trump's account, not simply because there was a change of ownership.

And yes, I imagine there are some people who resent Musk's takeover of Twitter yet who would welcome Trump's return. But I can't think of anyone who would fall into that category.


Yeah, people who need "fact checkers" banning people for misinformation, which are proven to be information only months later should jump the ship.

But to be honest, Musk is just controlled opposition, don't expect really significant changes from him.


I've been intending to for a while, but felt locked in since some folks I never got a way to IM with them when they stopped using AIM or I had no PGP or Signal for, so while they're not encrypted at rest it was at least better than plaintext.

I never was an IRC user, I'm from what I term the "vBulletin era". Folks were super adamant I shouldn't be writing malware, building botnets, or siphoning up large swathes of credit cards and selling them to the Russians... but then they'd never connect me with anything except a PhD, the FBI, the CIA, or some other... agency.

That sort of annoying obstructionism is why I bounced around a lot in my 20s, then loudly declared they're gonna nuke DC, not Pittsburgh, and moved back to 412.

Anyways, I can't tell you how Mastadon is, socially. But I can tell you that the folks who were on Twitter when I joined it with the pormanteau of my first and last name I also stupidly used on a video game forum when I was 11ish to ask for help... I thought we were all on the same page about not showing up in what was obviously a public facing account and interacting in the same way you would on Facebook, which was, at least for me, always a walled garden -- I'd blocked a few family members and the intent was nothing went out to the public internet, as well as quite obviously a personal account.

Anyways, the short version is if you just want to have technical discussions, I've heard it's decent, but I have no idea how they navigate the ever present issue in online communities of sea lions[1] who have the same interactions over and over, waiting for you to respond in a way that gives them more cause to complain.

Like, at one point this week someone knocked on my door, and I had to politely remind them I'd asked them not to come into my apartment building without permission, then I wanted to say how about I throw you out the window if being politely asked not to come in here doesn't work... but despite that being a perfectly legal thing to say to someone who is trespassing -- or to just do it -- to just grab someone, throw them down the stairs, then throw them straight out the back door, possibly injuring or killing them along the way.

There's a type of person, on Twitter, who reads stuff like the above then has an absolute fit if told well gee, if reading something dontbenebby posted on Twitter scared you then... don't.

I guess I could file an appeal or something, but this has been a problem all they way back to when the folks who'd make a show of not giving you detention for standing up for yourself as they stat raped their way across the county... someone obtains an unpaid volunteer position they're only energized enough to do because they're a privlidged white man (or woman) -- then abused their access to that position to keep folks from expressing ideas they don't like.

(And I know that sounds Qanon-y -- I'm talking about ideas like "I'm not a communist, I'd be part of one of the largest political parties in a country like Germany and conflating the two is fascist".)

Anyways TLDR: Mastadon might be cool, but it might be better to just lurk for a bit OP


Twitter will be all the better with people like that leaving honestly. You can't fathom a platform with people you disagree with not being silenced?


I very much want to be in discussions with people who disagree with me. That said I equally want those discussions to be had in good faith, without lies or conscious distortions. I’d like to be free of bots, or maybe better, to have bots labelled as such. The “marketplace of ideas” requires transparency and “perfect information” at least as much as does the economic marketplace after which it was named. If Tesla were to knowingly post false numbers it would be heavily penalized and eventually forced out of the market. Why should standards be lower in the marketplace of ideas?




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