[jasode]

>I’m fed up with “platforms”. Growing a garden on someone else’s land is dumb [...] To top it off, there’s very little upside to you as a user.

The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences. Similar reasons for mass audience "broadcast" platforms like Twitter, Youtube, TikTok.

Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

[boplicity]

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

Not true; you can build and own your own "island" and grow the population of your "island" to be quite large. This can and does happen quite regularly. It's the only sensible thing to do, really, if you want to build a sustainable platform.

[TheRealPomax]

Island influence stops at the water. Yes, you might get quite famous on your own island, and if that's what you're going for, power to you. Everything from mailing lists to mastodon will do that for you. But if you want to reach "everyone", you need a network that will potentially broadcast to "everyone". Should you want to reach "everyone"? Very different question, but that's not the issue raised. The upside to users on a centralised platform is that their potential reach is that entire platform's user base. The exact same is true for any other platform, but the numbers differ by orders of magnitude, and as we all know: bigger number must be better.

[the-printer]

This is not a refutation because I think that you’ve given a nice response to the topic. But I think that the people who are concerned or interested with reaching “everyone” deserve being beholden to the Big Box platforms of today; whichever ones rise and gain steam in the future that use phrases like “foster dialogue and bring people together” in lieu of “drive engagement and bring in ad dollars” then crash and burn under the weight of internal whistleblowers and damning The Guardian exposés.

I think the future of online communities will be community for the sake of community…and nothing else. Very mundane and boring on the outside, driven by nothing other than “I’m sharing waffle recipes and I’m going to just upload them to the internet on my hosting provider or via my old Compaq Presario and I do not care about engagements just email me later and goodbye.”

[pjc50]

"quite large" is very different from "everyone", and that's what has been so great (and terrible) about Twitter: it feels like everyone.

[horsawlarway]

It might feel that way, but I promise you it's definitely not "everyone".

Hell, it's only about 45 million in the US (assuming you believe Twitter's own numbers - which I definitely do not).

So at best, you're getting 1 in ~8 folks in the US. More realistically, I'd assume your audience is more likely 1 in ~20 in the US - assuming you manage to get literally everyone to follow you.

Is that larger than you're going to get on your own site? Probably.

Is that everyone? fuck no. It's basically no one. You're reaching the worst 5% of the country - those who have nothing better to do than browse twitter, or those who are using twitter to promote themselves.

[lelag]

Tweets often do reach much further than active users of the Twitter platform as they are often embedded in mainstream news stories and such.

[horsawlarway]

Sure - but that's true of every site on the web. Conflating mainstream media's reach with Twitter's is fairly disingenuous, since mainstream media also highlights basically every other platform in similar ways.

The brief exception to this is politics - where Twitter was an easy way to get a relevant soundbite from a politician on a topic. I think that era is waning very quickly.

[yunwal]

Definitely not true of every site on the web. I tried searching for mentions of hackernews (a relatively large forum, and also vc backed, not independent) on the nytimes website. One result https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/magazine/the-3-10-13-issu...

Most media sources aren't embedded in small forums.

[kibwen]

Which, if they can be spread outside of Twitter, refutes the earlier point that "influence stops at the water". The web is the platform.

[darkwater]

Mmmh everyone that I follow or Twitter thinks I should read. I follow Musk on Twitter and I don't see any of his shitposting, or I don't see many celebs or journalists tweets either. Am I not one of the everyones?

[twobitshifter]

Why should people populate your island when the smart thing to do is make their own?

[babypuncher]

That is exponentially more difficult.

[moron4hire]

> Small islands of decentralized communities (USENET newsgroups, dial-up BBS, vBulletin/phpBB forum websites, this HN website, and recent Mastodon interest, etc) do not accomplish the same thing.

One of those things is not like the others.

This HN website, phpBB forums, etc., don't interface with other systems. Mastodon does. Usenet and BBS' problem was more that they just predated the massive influx of always-online users that came with the advent of smartphones.

It's not like Twitter is a single server through which all content gets pushed. It's a replicated, distributed network of servers. ActivityPub servers are too, except the shards in network are not all owned by the same entity.

How would you learn about something via Twitter, sans promoted tweets? You'd find out about it from the retweets of the people you follow. That's literally the same thing you'd do in a Mastodon instance.

The big difference is that nobody in the ActivityPub network has the power to force content into your feed. Hasn't that been one of the biggest complaints of mid-2000s era social media? That the algorithm takes presidence over your own preferences? Never in my life do I want to see another "here's one weird trick you can do with a couple of pennies in the bottom of a plastic bag" click-bait article. That's basically impossible to propagate within the ActivityPub network. But that doesn't mean nothing can propogate through the network.

I'm having long, engaging conversations about topics I care about with people within the ActivityPub network. Almost none of those people are on the Mastodon instance I am currently inhabiting. I'm having more of these conversation than I had on Twitter, where I have 15x the number followers. From my perspective, my word is getting out further through ActivityPub than it ever did on Twitter.

[sleepybrett]

Let's just go back to FIDOnet

[barbazoo]

What makes Mastodon not able to accomplish this?

[mikeryan]

The trouble with Mastodon that I’ve seen (on Twitter) is folks are a bit confused with its federated nature. They’re not sure which server to use nor the “rules” governing that server.

Mastodon is really better suited as a collection of smaller communities much like Reddit's r/ forums then for one “universal” platform.

It’s already had some scaling issues with folks trying to use it as well.

[dymk]

Key technical decisions made early on kneecap its ability to be performant and to scale to anything approaching Twitter's userbase size, if instances want to still be part of the fediverse.

[gre]

What are those decisions, got a link?

[tshaddox]

As far as I know, Mastodon is a federated system, so there‘s no mechanism to have an algorithm pick certain content and massively boost its distribution across the network.

[registeredcorn]

>The "upside" for users who post/write is reaching larger audiences.

But reaching a larger audience is inherently negative, not positive. What is the purpose for speaking to 10,000 users vs 10-20 users? If for marketing, or some other money making scheme, sure there is an advantage. But for users who care about specific content, what value does a cacophony of noise offer? As it is, unity and cohesion will always master diversity and confusion, so shouldn't a "larger audience" be the antithesis of what adds value to a platform?

To a degree, such things can even be seen in major platforms themselves. If we go to something like YouTube, there are different categories of content, and within each categories, sub-genres of content sorted by various factors users are truly interested in. It then does not make sense to attempt to reach the audience invested in makeup tutorials, to also foster users and content around HFT on NASDAQ. If anything, one group would accidentally stumble over the other, and be the worse off for it. This in turn, would hurt both communities atmospheres, and degrade the "convenience factor" of the platform itself. (The more categories and unrelated categories, the harder it is for the user to navigate the platform to find "worthwhile" content, and the harder it is for the owners to curate the UGC.)

[ceres]

Not everyone is a wanna be influencer who wants to reach a billion people. If that’s the case private Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and Telegram groups wouldn’t be as popular as they are.

[EamonnMR]

But many people are. It's the same mentality as buying a lottery ticket.

[jasondigitized]

Why is broadcasting the high order bit? I personally don't want to scream my message to thousands of people. I want a high signal:noise two way dialogue with a small group of people who know what they are talking about.

[wcunning]

Discoverability, basically. You can get a lot of incredibly good information from Twitter with a very carefully curated follow list. You can get that from Mastodon as well, but you're going to have a much harder time finding the same people in a fully decentralized world. I think I'd rather that existence, which I'm noticing as I wind up in more niche Facebook groups and Discord servers than on broader platforms like Instagram or Twitter, but it's not zero value per se.