It's crazy how many people will just click accept on security warning them that an app will access literally everything on their phone.
It's also crazy how many people don't even know that Threads is Meta... where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
Living with influencers in their feeds.
ugh. influencers are the worst. old man grumble
I've never cared for influencers, but they also never effected me personally. Until last summer... I was blueberry picking one morning with my mom. We picked 3 very full buckets and called it a day and headed for the checkout hut. We're hot sweaty and tired and just wanted to checkout and go home, but we were suddenly blocked in the middle of a row of blueberries with no way to get out! Why? Because someone was photographing a lady in a sundress and hat caressing the blueberry bushes. We ended up walking through the photo and I've never felt such "get off my lawn" sentiment before.
Lol for real though, ruining an influencer’s shot - or even better, a live broadcast - when they’re being an obnoxious asshole gives me no small degree of pleasure.
When my wife and I got a chance to go to musee d'orsey in Paris there was a beautiful manual clock on show. There was this annoying influencer standing about 15 ft in front of it and not letting anybody get closer. She would constantly whine that they were in her shot.
I walked right up to the mechanisms of the clock to inspect it while she just yapped at me and my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Best experience in Paris by far.
where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
They've been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn't visible affected them negatively.
Of course it will eventually and they'll Pikachu face then but that's hardly comforting.
Will it? Why? It won't affect most people personally ever, hence why most people don't really care.
I fear you are right. While I do believe that further policital abuse of that data is inevitable (Trump or the Malaysian civil war were at least partial results of campaigns of Cambridge Analytica, for example), people probably won't see the impact data analysis had and how they've been manipulated.
I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
It's just another form of notification fatigue.
What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it's always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don't click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.
There's no point in reading the EULA, because it's not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It's always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.
It doesn't even matter if you're smart enough to wade through the agreement, it's still take it or leave it, and the dummies don't even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn't the right word. Coercion. That's the one.
Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I've said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon's use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a "trending" tab, cause that's what users want to see.
Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.
Funny, that's exactly the reason I like Mastodon's feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I'm following and the posts they make.
But twitter people love bullshit!
No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.
That’s not what I want to see.
The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you've got your sea legs
The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
No, it's mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there's a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it's easier.
I've been trying to hammer this point home.
I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click "advanced sign-up" if you choose to do so.
The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I'm a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Yeah, it's unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That's a massive number of people who could be easily informed "hey, wanna try our new product?" As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads' numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
There was a time - when facebook/ig didn't exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn't make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
I've been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
It's one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
We'll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we'll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the 'cool' thing around.
Until then, it will be much much better.
Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
Great opportunity to educate them, and then have them host your own instance :)
The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user's perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta's not telling us...
To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn't anything fishy in there, but that's part of the reason.
I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.
The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won't sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads' algorithm is pretty bad, but it's still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I'm not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don't have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
I'm curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
The biggest L is watching porn artists try to move to Threads when the platform doesn't even allow their content.
The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.
Die average Twitter user doesn't even care about not knowing what it is.
I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic
Anyone else notice the cursor on the top left?
Federation is so confusing! Why can't I just sign up at facebook.com where the rest of the internet is? You guys and your cryptofederatedarkweb.
