Software Alternatives & Reviews

Hacker News VS Mastodon

Compare Hacker News VS Mastodon and see what are their differences

Hacker News logo Hacker News

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator.

Mastodon logo Mastodon

Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network. This is just one part of the network, run by the main developers of the project It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome!
  • Hacker News Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23
  • Mastodon Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Hacker News videos

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Mastodon videos

Mastodon - Emperor of Sand ALBUM REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - MASTODON Emperor of Sand Album Review | Overkill Reviews
  • Review - A Closer Look at Mastodon, The Twitter Killer!
  • Review - Mastodon App: The Social Media Alternative to Twitter? | Tech News Briefing Podcast | WSJ
  • Review - 5 Reasons to DITCH TWITTER For Mastodon!
  • Review - No, Mastodon Will Not Replace Twitter

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Hacker News and Mastodon)
Social Networks
54 54%
46% 46
Social News
100 100%
0% 0
Decentralized Social Network
Knowledge Sharing
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Hacker News and Mastodon

Hacker News Reviews

Great Products for Finding Startup Jobs
Hacker News—Not a job board, per se, but the HN Who’s Hiring post at the start of every month has dozens of engineering-focused job posts. HN also regularly pushes select YC jobs to the front page.
Source: medium.com
18 Best Sites for Finding a Startup Job
Hacker News has a job board that lists jobs exclusively at various startups. Obviously, as Hackers News is associated with Y Combinator, most of the listed startup jobs are at companies that have gone through the accelerator’s program.
Source: tech.co

Mastodon Reviews

If You Want to Leave Twitter Because of Elon Musk, These Are Your Options
The most obvious Twitter replacement is probably Mastodon, a decentralized series of social networking sites that are, in form and function, the most similar to Twitter. The one big difference is that instead of just one Twitter, it’s more like a network of Twitters that can interact with each other but don’t necessarily have to. It’s theoretically possible to be a part of...
Source: www.vice.com
Facebook Alternatives 2020 – Social Networks That Won’t Sell Your Data
Mastodon launched in 2017 and made quite an impact on the social network scene. Mastodon is a free, open-source social network. When it launched it was presented as an open source Twitter competitor, but as people are leaving Facebook its being used the same way you would Facebook, which makes it a really good alternative to Facebook.
8 Best Facebook Alternatives With Focus On Privacy For 2018
Last year, Mastodon made splashes as an open source Twitter competitor but you can also use it as a Facebook alternative. Apart from all the differences in terms of privacy, character length, what really sets Mastodon apart is the “instance” feature. You can think of the service as a series of connected nodes (instances) and your account belongs to a particular instance.
Source: fossbytes.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Mastodon might be a bit more popular than Hacker News. We know about 610 links to it since March 2021 and only 500 links to Hacker News. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Hacker News mentions (500)

  • Show HN: Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
    Thanks for the feedback! One big distinction with the "site:https://news.ycombinator.com" hack is that the search on Hacker Search directly runs against the underlying link's contents, rather than whatever happens to be on HN. We also more directly leverage HN's curation by factoring in scores. Appreciate your suggestions; will look into building those! - Source: Hacker News / 8 days ago
  • Show HN: Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
    Nice work! I'm sure you know that you can also search Google with site:https://news.ycombinator.com. If I were you I would probably think of a niche where one can get better results by searching HN and other relevant data sources. Another suggestion is not about the search so much but about the UI. One of the worse things about sites like HN is that it's really hard to... - Source: Hacker News / 8 days ago
  • I want to create IMDB for Open source projects
    I'm not sure how much value making something "not fugly" really matters. Design should be based on functionality, not anti-fugliness. In my experience, design considerations should come after building a successful growth "feedback loop." (Or whatever you want to call it.) At that point, you may decide making your website look "polished" isn't even necessary. IMDB was certainly quite ugly for a long time.... - Source: Hacker News / 25 days ago
  • Ask HN: What is the ideal format to structure AI prompts?
    User input does not need to be sanitized if it is programmatically inserted into the document as the value of a key in a regular dict section. To work, I assume the target model needs to be trained on Braq documents with emphasis on the fact that only the top unnamed section contains root instructions (equivalent to the "system" role in ChatML). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988748 [3]... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Show HN: Skyvern – open-source browser automation tool
    This can definitely be used for front end testing. Just tell it to do something like a user and monitor whether it's successful or not Here's a prompt example to try out { "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com", "navigation_goal": "goal is met if you see a post from basiep2. Terminate if you don't" }. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
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Mastodon mentions (610)

  • StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI
    Here's a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity: https://mastodon.social/@ben@m.benui.ca/112396505994216742. - Source: Hacker News / 3 days ago
  • Apple Introduces M4 Chip
    Today’s Xcode 15.4 RC suggests that “Donan” is the M4 core codename, and that it may support ARM’s SME instructions. https://mastodon.social/@bshanks/112401605018159567. - Source: Hacker News / 3 days ago
  • Apple Introduces M4 Chip
    "The M4 is so fast, it'll probably finish your Final Cut export before you accidentally switch apps and remember that that cancels the export entirely. That's the amazing power performance lead that Apple Silicon provides." #AppleEvent https://mastodon.social/@tolmasky/112400245162436195. - Source: Hacker News / 3 days ago
  • TIL: You can open man or info pages in Firefox by man:<page> or info:<page>
    Addendum from https://mastodon.social/@mofosyne/112385581085525369 Turns out that it's because KHelpCenter in some linux distros hooks to these uris. So typing this uri would autoopen these man entries in KHelpCenter. - Source: Hacker News / 6 days ago
  • Systemd Rolling Out "run0" As sudo Alternative
    Good news! Run0 will use polkit[1], which uses JavaScript for its rules[2], so there's no limit on how complex your rules can get! On the other hand, maybe adding a JavaScript interpreter to Linux's trusted computing base isn't such good news... [1] https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/112353420303876549 [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/polkit/docs/latest/polkit.8.html. - Source: Hacker News / 11 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Hacker News and Mastodon, you can also consider the following products

Reddit - Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place. Get a constantly updating feed of breaking news, fun stories, pics, memes, and videos just for you.

X (Twitter) - Connect with your friends and other fascinating people. Get in-the-moment updates on the things that interest you. And watch events unfold, in real time, from every angle.

Lobsters - Lobsters is a technology-focused link-aggregation site. The site is driven by ...

Facebook - Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates.

Lemmy - Federated link aggregator and Reddit alternative built with Rust

Gab - Gab is an ad-free social network dedicated to free speech.