this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?

After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and ... whatever they use.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 months ago (4 children)
  1. marketing
  2. not having to pick the instance when registering
  3. people who have experienced Mastodon's hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
  4. algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
  5. marketing

and I'm saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (4 children)

2 and 3 are massive. I'm on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Who are these people who actually FIND users go follow on either service???

I have Bluesky. I have Mastodon. I log into each every few months, realize nothing has changed, and there is nobody to follow.

Then I don't use either, until I wonder a few months later "heeeey, I wonder if people are on these services yet......"

Still no.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Mastodon revolves around following topics and hashtags, not individuals. I learned that early on, and am having a much better experience.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a worse lemmy 😅

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it's worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there's just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people's random, one-off takes that wouldn't really warrant a post on Lemmy.

I would argue too that it's not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.

To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it's maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn't make it inferior, just a different use-case. It's pretty apples-to-oranges.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well then it will never be useful for me. I want to follow PEOPLE. I want people to follow me for the random shit I say.

Then they retweet the random shit, and now a whole NEW group of people can wonder what's wrong with me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I follow hashtags I like, then see who the people are who use those tags, then follow those people.

I find that I discover people that way I would not have found otherwise.

It's worked well for me so far. I wasn't a twitter person before though, so I don't know if I have the experience you did for comparison.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

See, I already know who I want to follow. I want to follow Nintendo. I want to follow Game Grumps. I want to follow my local pro wrestling indy. I want to follow MXRPlays.

But none of them are on the fediverse. Although, Andy Richter is on BlueSky. So that's something......I guess......

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Use lists on bsky to find people.

And just gained a million people, biggest spike yet. So should be a bit more active.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, but won't those 1 million all be speaking spanish?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Nope, portuguese

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

Potato/Tomato.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The over policing thing is so true. I’ve gotten messages from techhub.social mods with warnings about making jokes that even hinted at breaking one of their precious rules. Like if I did something wrong, ban me I guess. It’s pretty clear I didn’t and the mod just wanted to flex his power towards me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

like Twitter 12 years ago

So don't use it then. Gotcha.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
  1. Is bigger than the rest.

Take Brazil. Blusky saw the writing on the wall with Twitter, so they threw a ton of money into media. Guess where everyone went.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a source for that?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Nothing specific, just knowledge from those closer, and not likely they'll publicize ad spend, but uptick was seen. Bluesky ads started around April when they had the big influx after the first suspension. Overview, but not a reference: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cm2nkdkypk7o

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not on any of the services currently, but I have tried Mastodon in the past and point 4. was what made me bounce off it. I know Mastodon flaunts its algorithm-free feed as almost a point of pride, but as a user it just doesn't do it for me. I could not get it to serve me the type of content I wanted the way I wanted, and it just felt like way too much work for what I was looking for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I solved this issue by following multiple tags that interest me. People tend to tag their posts on Mastodon it seems, so discovering posts about, say, wine and cacti is as easy as following #wine #cactus #cacti #redwine #oragewine and so on and so forth - it's working pretty good for me without an algorithm recommending stuff to me, maybe it's worth a try?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'd still rather have algorithmic recommendations of what's been "hot" lately in the tags I follow over a chronological feed. But I'm considering giving Sharkey/Firefish/Iceshrimp another go.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Why are there three forks(?) of what I assume is Misskey? I think the original is still kicking, even.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Marketing, sure, but the onboarding from Instagram was a massive factor for Threads growth.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.

All these other "like Twitter but ______" micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they're profitable.

If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they'll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can't kill it.

I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.

For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a "just do this part for me" option, probably automatically enabled.

#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.

#4 is hard... Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the "early" Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That's some very strong "lizard brain" stuff.

So... let's get going y'all! :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.

There's no way in hell, even if you ignore #5

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then