- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- technews@radiation.party
To be honest I like the idea of being able to move my account from a server which is offline to a different one. We should have it with ActivityPub too.
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I mooched over to Twitter yesterday to gawp at the car crash, and saw a number of people begging for Bluesky invites. And all I could think is that Mastodon is right there already, working essentially the same way…
I “feel” like one of the main issues with foss tools like Lemmy and Mastadon is lack of an advertising budget.
Going to throw a wild guess out there without a lot of supporting data, but I suspect Bluesky has a decent budget for influencers and that’s driving the traffic too.
Just a thought. I’ve been sitting here wondering why most people have not jumped and Lemmy and Mastadon yet. I personally don’t find either platform hard to use or confusing.
A lot of people did jump to Mastodon, and apparently it had had another large influx of users yesterday after all the Twitter shenanigans. Not everyone stays though, obviously.
I think part of the issue some have with Mastodon is the lack of Twitter’s algorithm. It’s absolutely true to say it’s harder to find people and topics to follow on Mastodon for the simple reason that you’re not getting anything shoved in your face, which is a massive plus point for many (myself included) but can also make it appear initially less appealing.
I agree I think once somebody makes an honest attempt at an open non-exploitative content recommendation algorithm, big social’s moat is completely gone. I do think Mastodon’s take that the people are the algorithm is a great alternative, but we definitely need some sort of algorithmic approach in the fediverse.
I have got to be a weirdo, algorithm curated content was never what i wanted, so i always had to use the hashtags. Mastodon basically is hashtags, I don’t know.
Do most people really just… Baby bird their content? Open up and let it all fall in?
Yep. Finding new users and Content on mastodon is impossible because the nerds who run it hate THE ALGORITHM and social media addiction. Same reason they held out on basic features like quote tweeting until recently.
Bluesky is basically just OG twitter, plus you can make your own algorithm feeds. It’s cool.
I honestly did not have any issues populating my timeline through use of hashtags and local timelines. Boost-heavy peeps are good connectors as well.
Being able to follow hashtags on Masto is amazing. You find shitloads of good follows by virtue of them just liking the stuff you’re into.
I had issues trying to depopulate my timeline. Junk kept showing that I didn’t subscribe too.
You can turn boosts off in filter settings. That might be why you’re seeing stuff you didn’t subscribe to. Either that or you may have subscribed to some hashtags.
I’m ok with the influencers not bothering with Mastodon, tbh.
I mean, sure they’ll take the numbers with them where they go, but from my own perspective, I’m not struggling to find good people to follow so does it matter to me if the usual celebrities don’t keep getting boosted into my TL all the time?
Mastodon is working fine. There are plenty of people using it. It doesn’t need Twitter’s scraps.
I deleted twitter ages ago but never jumped to Mastadon because the initial descriptions seemed overly technical and confusing. Like people went out of their way to describe how it was different and unique, making it sound difficult. It was only after the Reddit debacle and trying out Lemmy did I realize it was basically the same thing to an average user. I could get my content drip without specialized knowledge. That makes me consider trying out Mastadon.
I think most people don’t care how they get their memes, just that they get them. That should be the focus, and learning about federated systems is a byproduct.
I tell people that Mastodon is Twitter with an RSS reader mashed in.
Honestly, from what I can tell, and if I think back to when I jumped over in November, I think it mostly comes down to how much quieter the feed is to start with.
If you think, you’re going from a site with an algorithmically generated feed that’s made to feel intentionally noisy, to a chronological feed that’s only as busy as who you follow. That didn’t bother me too much because 95% of my Twitter intake was done via Tweetbot, which didn’t use the algorithm at all, so Mastodon felt much the same.
But to someone who uses the website, it’s a huge change.
Ultimately - and the same is true here - you can jumpstart your experience by following everything and everyone, then filter out the stuff you’re not so much into. But you need to hang around long enough to see someone suggest that. And that’s where the problem lies.
but no one uses Mastodon and also it’s so haaaaaaaaaaaaaard
Funny enough, I posted this over there yesterday.
…of course there’s a Discworld-themed instance.
Idon’tneedtomovemyinstanceisfineIdon’tneedtomovemyinstanceisfineIdon’tneedtomovemyinstanceisfineIdon’tneedtom
I tried signing up for an account on the main instance of Mastodon but couldn’t because they were having technical difficulties.
Mastodon.social? Yeah, they’ll have been getting absolutely hammered yesterday.
It’s worth signing up to a smaller server if you can find one. It’s really easy to migrate your follows and followers to a different server (though you’ll lose your post history).
FYI, as great as Mastodon and the fediverse are, there are issues that prevent their mainstream adoption:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
I was able to move from Reddit to Lemmy with minimal learning curve but I tried Mastodon about a year ago and it felt impenetrable and confusing. The author is absolutely right that people don’t see decentralization as a selling point. Anecdotally, the people I have talked to about federated alternatives have nothing positive to say about their experiences except the small handful of people that use things like Lemmy or Kbin.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it’s a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She’s also pretty tech savvy, so I can’t imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people’s eyes glaze over. People don’t care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren’t philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that’s much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Nah, I don’t buy it, people have been telling me that they don’t understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It’s not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a username@domain.tld address and nobody is complaining about that it’s not just @username for email. It’s more that it’s not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
I think decentralized social media isn’t really analogous to your email example and is going to be much more confusing and frustrating to an average user. I may sign up with Gmail, but I can still in almost any use case send or recieve an email to whoever I want at other domains. The fact that someone is @X or @Y doesn’t matter to most users–it’s just an extension of the address.
Decentralized Social Media I think would be viewed more like having @Gmail001 through @Gmail100, with users frustrated wondering why they can’t receive an email from their cousin who is on @Gmail088. We’re both on Gmail, what gives
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It’s about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it’s generally not an interesting place to be so people don’t stick around very long.
Personally, I like to follow specific journalist and news orgs that report on topics I’m interested in. That def helps with the breaking news aspect. Besides following talented shitposters like dril ofc.
I am brainstorming some features:
- default normie instances that you don’t have to choose from (auto choose all)
- default migration between top normie servers (keep profile history and basically auto log into the next one if one is down)
- community aggregation - if multiple communities are the same topic across different servers, auto aggregate posts and comment that are cross posted.
- don’t worry about it, if it has better content than Google and reddit, people will come.
I think it’s telling that people haven’t really cared about the consolidation of the internet at all until recently when the likes of Reddit, Twitter, etc have started to falter and threaten the internet as they know it. They were fine with the status quo and don’t know or want anything different. Not only do they not understand decentralisation - they wouldn’t care or desire it anyway. You’re absolutely right that things are going to have to be masked if we want to see increased adoption of alternative services. We also desperately need increased accessibility options and better instructions and education. Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc don’t work like any other service that people commonly use. They have no idea how it functions or what to do, and it confuses them and turns them away.
Exactly, I have an annoying tendency to ramble on about whatever cool thing is happening in the tech world and why I’m using X technology now but nobody cares about that
Managed to sell friends and family on Signal by just explaining it as “WhatsApp without the Facebook spying”, think that’s the way to do it
I’ll say that trying to use Lemmy on a browser was a lot more confusing than using liftoff or summit. I have…I think 4 or 5 accounts put into them and they all sorts of work together seamlessly. It’s kinda cool and impressive. I forget which instance I’m signed into/posting as, which, IMHO is how it should be.
Same. I probably still have a mastodon account… Somewhere.
This was a great read. Thanks for sharing
Someone posted the arstechnica copy of this article the other day and I gave my thoughts on it.
My mastodon server just has a big influx of new users. So they are not all going to bluesky thankfully
Bluesky isn’t ready for primetime and is way to complex.