Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I do game development on the side, just fun small indie games. I like using twitter to follow other game devs and see what they are working on. It's fun tracking down new devs and seeing new and interesting projects, and it's fun sharing progress on my games and getting some positive comments from them.

What's not fun is the sheer amount of topics on twitter I have zero interest in invading my timeline. I don't like how much marketing spam there is, since every post is secretly hoping to 'go viral', which even for the indie devs I follow makes it fairly bland sometimes. Twitter is just so huge that it's not possible to have any small communities.

For all its warts, there's a fantastic twitter community around the FGC (fighting game community) - members in the community regularly post really interesting questions or statements on fighting games and/or their design, and it usually kicks of dozens of videos from other people I follow on that topic. The FCG's usage of Twitter is probably the best I've seen.

Personally, what I would like is something more akin to a mailing list or RSS feed I suppose, but with the ability to reply to threads, a bit like a forum. I want to be able to follow people I find interesting manually, with zero discovery in the app itself. I want to hear updates from them, and without any 'retweet' functionality there's less incentive for small players to spam the ever living hell out of their account in the hope of getting lucky.

I think that would be my dream app - something that works like an RSS feed, but without the technical overhead of actually setting up and publishing to your own RSS feed, with the ability to respond with comments on the posts without having to repost it to a site which does allow it (like HN or Reddit) with one shared identity. That would be cool.

Does Mastodon fill that role? Does anything? If so I'd certainly use it.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: