Show HN and trending on Product Hunt, GitHub (Patreon)

Hey! Last few days have been a bit crazy. I've decided to post a "Show HN", that is, Show Hacker News, a community for tech people. And it actually took off to the frontpage (and stayed there for about 16 hours)! There were lots of comments and I've tried to answer every question. The project page on GitHub got over 500 stars which made it trend over there, too. Then someone submitted the flagship instance, mastodon.social, to ProductHunt, and it took off there, too.

Although part of the message got lost on PH, people were not aware it was not a finished (or commercial, for that matter) product, and didn't realize it was building on top of an already established network (the fediverse), so a lot of comments were comparing it to closed platforms like Ello, app.net and what have you.

Many were comparing it to Twitter, as well. That's more fair, but an important distinction for me is this: Mastodon might not become better than Twitter, perhaps, but it's fine if it's better than GNU social. Because in that case it fills a niche that already is in demand, everything else is a bonus.

About 5000 people signed up for an account on mastodon.social. Though only about 300 decided to follow my account, which I think is a makeshift metric for being an active user. That fraction is understandable, there isn't even a mobile client for the platform yet, and user discovery features were severely lacking when the Show HN went up. In retrospect, that was a mistake - it took me only a day to implement a public timeline column and add a little "getting started" message that explained the basics. Should've had that at the start. But I didn't expect this, either. I thought I'd just get a bit of technical attention on my GitHub project page.

On a higher note, we now have a public timeline column! And I've optimized the UI a lot so the lag's gone. I got lots of feedback, good feature suggestions, a few pull requests; most importantly I got the message that Mastodon struck a chord with at least some people and it's worth continuing :)