this post was submitted on 10 Nov 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).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I guess but with mastodon I literally cannot imagine it getting any easier.

Download app -> make an account (the app will default to some instance, at least it did for me) -> use it exactly like Twitter.

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

How do you follow someone you discovered while browsing a foreign instance?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 22 hours ago

Open app on phone and search them up.

Or go to the instance I use and search them up

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

Bluesky:

  • Download official, fully featured app and not something utterly crippled
  • Looks and feels like Twitter
  • No weird tech mumbo-jumbo (WTF is a server, is that like a Discord server, what's that gotta do with Twitter) confusing you because there are no instances to choose from
  • Make an account
  • UI, UX, look & feel 100%, 1:1 fully identical with immediate pre-Musk Twitter
  • No need to get used to anything because literally everything stays precisely the same as what you're used to, only that it's no longer "Twitter" or "X" or "tweets"
  • Use it literally precisely the same as Twitter
  • Pretend you're still on Twitter, it won't make a difference

If Mastodon wanted to compete with this, it would have to

  • replace its default Web UI with an even more faithful clone of the immediate pre-Musk Twitter Web UI,
  • replace its official app with something that's absolutely identical to the immediate pre-Musk Twitter app in all but name and branding
  • remove the instance chooser without introducing any other option of joining any other instance than mastodon.social
  • completely hide decentralisation and instances from newbies, ideally for a few months or years after they've joined
  • introduce a content-forwarding algorithm like the one on X, but better
  • forcibly ban Mastodon's user-grown culture and force pre-Musk Twitter culture upon everyone
  • mollycoddle its users for months or years so that Mastodon really feels like "literally Twitter without Musk" by shielding them from not only all hints that Mastodon is different, but also from the entire rest of the Fediverse
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe wasn't that way before, but when signing up on Bluesky now you are asked to choose a instance (bsky.social being the default), and the username contains the instance name, exactly like any Fediverse account.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Good to know.

Strangely, people don't seem to mind.

I guess then a key difference is that Bluesky is presented to 𝕏 users as the same kind of monolith as 𝕏 whereas Mastodon is presented to them as a huge number of instances from which they absolutely have to pick one.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

As far as I'm aware, the big "problem" with Mastodon (and the Fediverse as a whole) is that you have to choose an instance to join. It's an aditional step that mainstream social media does not have and it's already enough to push regular people away. It's kinda like trying to convince a Windows user to jump ship to Linux, by the time you begin explaining what a distro is you've already lost them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Like I said in my comment tho. When I downloaded the app it automatically chose for me. I just made an account there and boom.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

So you didn’t get the choice at all? I guess people who sign up this way are going to be really confused why they can’t follow some accounts their friends can.

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

Yes the choose was there but it automatically was filled with a default instance.

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

You can choose. But you don't have to.

The official Mastodon app has a box where you can pick one out of several hard-coded instances. It defaults to mastodon.social. You can pick a different instance if you want to. But you can also ignore it, scroll past it and let yourself be conveniently railroaded to mastodon.social without even knowing what an instance is.

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

Better than no one having the ability to follow that person because a centrally controlled social media banned them.

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

But worse than anyone being able to follow that person because they’re using a platform where moderation is separate from identity, as in AtProto.

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

You are misrepresenting it. You would still run into this issue. Moderation being separate doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You will still not be able to follow someone your friends follow because your moderation service banned then.

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

You can choose a different moderation service. That’s the point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And you can choose a different instance on ActivityPub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

That choice is tied to your identity and can’t be easily changed later, which is what I’m complaining about.

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

Is that helpful though? Isn't that the same as everyone registering at Lemmy.world?

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

I feel with mastodon it's different because instances don't host communities to subscribe to. Just people to follow

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

@secret300 @fediverse @can There are bots that cross-post posts, they actually implement groups.

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

Oh neat I didn't know that.

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

If you've never in your live chosen anything that has to do with IT, if all you know is centralised, monolithic silos, then you can't be expected to first choose one out of literal dozens of microblogging projects in the Fediverse and then one out of dozens, hundreds or thousands of instances.

The Fediverse would be a whole lot smaller if not all newbies who didn't come from Reddit were railroaded hard to mastodon.social. Oh, and Lemmy would be a whole lot smaller without Redditors having been railroaded first to lemmy.ml and now to lemmy.world.