It's so funny to me how many people post links to Mastodon just to try and get people to use it on HN. There's literally no value to Mastodon being the linked to piece of content when one could actually link directly to that content! What's worse, it took >10s just to load!
Yes, agreed, in addition to being utterly useless as an intermediate step between HN and the interesting content OP found, Mastodon is a bad product that doesn't scale.
As much as I share a similar disdain for these kinds of things, it loads much faster than any twitter page I've been to in recent years. I also get very different numbers than you: twitter: 3-6 seconds. This mastodon post ~1s
Hm, how so? What would be a better comparison be, for discussing the relative page load times of a mastodon page be, in your opinion?
If X product exists. Then Y comes and is largely considered an alternative to X, and someone says Y is slow. Does it not make sense to compare it to X?
Because Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable here. If this same person posted the original content as a Tweet and there were a pattern of users posting Twitter links to boost Twitter engagement, the problem would stand.
Ah, so you're point was more that regardless if its mastodon or twitter, they are both terrible hosting options, and we can do better, like hosting the link itself? Gotcha, and I agree.
Yes, exactly. I was just lamenting the load time as an additional problem with that being the submitted link.
I would note as well that the Mastodon instance clearly struggled with the initial load from the HN traffic. Testing its load time when few users from HN were being directed to it won't be a very good benchmark against Twitter.
