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.
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
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
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.
Mastodon revolves around following topics and hashtags, not individuals. I learned that early on, and am having a much better experience.
Sounds like a worse lemmy 😅
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.
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.
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.
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…
Use lists on bsky to find people.
And just gained a million people, biggest spike yet. So should be a bit more active.
Yeah, but won’t those 1 million all be speaking spanish?
Nope, portuguese
*Portuguese
Potato/Tomato.
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.
- 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.
Do you have a source for that?
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
like Twitter 12 years ago
So don’t use it then. Gotcha.
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.
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?
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.
Why are there three forks(?) of what I assume is Misskey? I think the original is still kicking, even.
Marketing, sure, but the onboarding from Instagram was a massive factor for Threads growth.
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! :)
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
There’s no way in hell, even if you ignore #5
Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then
Several reasons:
- Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
- Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
- The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
- Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.
Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?
To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
To add, on top of that, the fediverse is like if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it except make another email for when they want to email outlook users.
I don’t think fediverse proponents know just how catastrophically this terminates their entire pitch in the minds of 99% of internet users
if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it
This is the case right now.
There’s good reasons GMail doesn’t do that, but there’s absolutely nothing technical preventing from doing that, and I can’t think of anything that legally prevents them from doing that.
Not leagaly but users will be frustated and leave. They will rollback within a day so you will not need to worry too much.
“users will be frustated and leave” exactly the same thing can happen to an instance that adds an instance (or wildcard domain) block. I’d be very surprised if no instance has ever rolled back a block.
Users don’t need to worry about instance blocks on ActivityPub, any more than they have to worry about DNS RBLs for email.
and those that do post don’t really interact with others
I’ve found quite the opposite on Mastodon. I get WAY more interaction on there than I ever did on Twitter.
I do a radio show on Monday nights. Despite having more followers on Twitter I never really managed to attract many listeners. Dropped it for a few years and started up again a few months back, publicising solely through Mastodon. Engagement with it is three or four times what it was before.
It’s essentially a request show, and there have been a couple of weeks where I’ve not had to pick any songs to fill the time, all of it has been filled by listener requests.
That said, that’s only my experience, it may be different for others.
No ads. Lightweight app/website.
Its easier to just sign up and find everyone immediately, than to go learn what are instances and which one should you choose to make an account on, and then go and learn how to find other people that are not on that instance, or how to check do they have a mastodon account at all, then go and learn how to XY.
The “go and learn” is something that people, most of them, just don’t want to do. If you need to learn how to use something, this is the first indicator of a bad user experience. It should be obviously easy for a new person to get around.
Mastodon overwhelmed me. I hopped on the website and had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t understand federation. I basically had the option of what niche hobby to join on Mastadon and no indication that I would he able to access a broader forum, so I said “Well, this fucking sucks.” and left.
Threads and BlueSky are likely as accessible as making an account and you’re done.
Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.
Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.
Most people didn’t have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.
for me, it was discoverability. Like, several guides said “use tags” but 4 out of 5 people DON"T. And more often than not, when you do search the tags, you see several posts that aren’t what you wanted at all. Or worse, the tag you search doesn’t have any posts newer than several months to a year. Basically it relied on an honor system where few people had honor.
I needed to scroll way too much to see people mention marketing and advertising. It’s a huge deal.
The power of good advertising is not to be underestimated. There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it. And it’s not only traditional advertising but viral and “astroturfed” advertising.
There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it.
Too many smug people think, “advertising doesnt work on me! Hah! Only weak minded normies fall for it…”
Wrong… Advertising works. And that’s the reason a shit ton of money that goes into it.
You want to know the reason why i run adblockers in my browser AND DNS levels? Because i KNOW advertising works on me… i KNOW i’m not smart enough to outsmart the army of engineers, and copywriters generating this stuff.
Source: i work in advertising lol
The “this would never happen to me” mindset really is cancer to logical thought and reasoning.
I somewhere read (maybe it was thinking fast and slow by Kahneman?) that even psychology students learning about certain behaviors would later anonymously claim they would never fall into these patterns. But plot twist: they are also only human, so of course they also could fall into these patterns.
Another example: People that think they would never fall for a scam. If it is the right scam they will fall even more easily for it than people that know that it could happen.
“Of course it can’t be a scam. Scams are obvious and only idiots fall for them.”
“Advertising doesn’t work on me!” I mutter smugly, before loading up the Apple keynote to see what my next phone will do.
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causing a horse of reply guys?
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🐎…ok I’ll get this thing outta here… and by the way. I’m happy not having people who don’t care about the fediverse in the fediverse.
Is it really that surprising that large companies with lots of money can advertise better than user run instances of open source software?
Instance picking can be overwhelming. Making people just not even try it.
I do think a big challenge for the fediverse is how to ease that. And make it like e-mail where @whocares is not that important and it’s easy to actually have a custom domain/instance.
And, of course, to achieve this instance admins should be really be responsible with defederations and bans. And only use it as last resort, probably only because of legal reasons. Not because “I don’t like that instance admins main political thesis”. Probably that kind of blocks are better to be left to the user.
I think the mobile app developers should run their own instances and default to that so it feels less confusing to new users.
that’s not a bad idea at all. much more beginner friendly to download an app and register from there rather than having to do it externally and then coming back to the app to log in
https://vger.app/ exists for Voyager
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They probably have good discovery and trending post mechanisms. Mastodon makes it a point not to have one, which results in a wholly uninteresting feed for the average user. I’m only on mastodon, but I very rarely use it, because it mostly sucks unless you spend several, several hours trying to track down fun accounts to follow yourself.
That is my experience too. It’s because there is no distinction between posts and comments, I think. It’s about as interesting as my sms chats with friends would be to strangers.
My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:
- Easier onboarding overall since you don’t have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
- despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter’s
- Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it’s easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
- Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing “starter packs” with lists of people to follow
- I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
- meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I’m following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I’m interested in
- quote-retweets don’t exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
- the stackable moderation also helps a lot
Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon’s side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo
They have marketing budgets.
Does Bluesky? Have they been running marketing? Much of what I’ve seen/heard of it has been more a result of Twitter imploding and people bringing up alternatives than any concerted marketing pushes.
edited for clarity, realized I’d overlooked Threads mention
I still don’t understand those platforms. Didn’t when Twitter launched and still don’t now that there’s several of them. Same thing for like Facebook or its predecessors. They’re all more about the person than the message and I honestly quite frankly don’t give a shit about random people on the internet.
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Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.
Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.
These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.
Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.
because mastodon because dismissed twitter users concerns and thoughts the first exodus and bluesky implemented them in a way that’s closer to twitter.
… what
There have been some complaints about Mastodon for years; both specific (“quote tweets”) and vague (get rid of shitty, often bigoted replies for profiles with a lot of followers or with a marginalized identity).
Mastodon largely hasn’t implemented them. Maybe Bluesky has. (I don’t have a BS account.)
The fediverse has many micro blogging implementations outside of mastodon if you don’t like their featureset (and they federate with each other, unlike bluesky). The only features I couldn’t find are those that contributed to making Twitter the dystopian toxic space that it is.
Using another ActivityPub-based interface is a LOT to ask for many users. They want a simple to pronounce name, they can stick in their browser’s universal bar and be on a sign-up page in less than 3 clicks without making any more choices.
😞
Well I am speaking about users who may be picky about mastodon’s features. If someone is picky, I don’t imagine they’d care much about just finding a platform with their preferred features, similar to how they didn’t like mastodon and found bluesky instead.
How was your dentist appointment?
