As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.
Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.
i like the idea of a server choice virtually invisible feature!
Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.
Maybe a vote of 75% minimum would be good?
If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn’t get overloaded?
You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname
This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.
That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.
Basically, a single instance
When you make an account
Where?
When you go to comment on a blog, where do you sign up?
Man, it feels like you guys haven’t spoken to a real human in decades…
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can’t even get noticed by fediverse users.
But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you’re a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).
For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.
In what regards what normies would use of the featureset, they are identical tho - pretty much everything is identical these days. Log in, go to your timeline / flood / jeep / whatever, click “post new”, copy-paste a meme, hit toot / blarg / weep / whatever. There. Done.
99% of people use the exact same 1% of the features of a service.
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.
Yeah, they’ve implemented this a while ago, this year IIRC. People are on old information bashing Mastodon.
This is the exact reason email never took off. /s
Email was invented in 1983.
It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.
Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.
Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.
Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.
The best thing for on-boarding are topic-specific instances, it makes picking one much easier.
Why can’t mastodon influencers create content on how easy it is to pick a server.
Ah make it like a food hall and anthropo the servers as food.
You don’t have to choose. Joinmastodon.org chooses for you, and you can choose one yourself as well but only if you want to.
Somebody definitely needs to make a frontend that makes it smooth.
I mean, it’s a network of indeoendent websites. I’m not sure what kind of solution to this people want.
People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they’re signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It’s not like it’t that weird of an idea.
They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!
Maybe if we stopped treating “Mastodon” as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.
mastodon.social exists
It’s literally there to take the choice away from new users
It actually doesn’t.
Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it’s no more complicated than Twitter. It’s just that nobody knows that.
Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It’s no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.
Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won’t be the bee’s knees, and you won’t know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it’s easy-peasy.
As long as email has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.
If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.
I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with “it’s easy, maybe you’re just dense?”.
Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn’t have the kind of people I’d want to interact with on it.
Unironically, this makes me pine for the old days where usenet discussions were lively.
Mm, reminds me of the old world of IRC. I still remember fondly when I asked for help installing FreeBSD, and got banned with a message of “try linux”.
So I did, never looked back. (Until I got a Mac at least, which counts as a BSD.)
That’s kind of hilarious :D
I’ve never see anyone respond with hostility to any ‘how to’ question on mastodon. What you’ve described sounds totally unlike anything I’ve seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I’d be interested in seeing how that happened.
I think that if you want BlueSky like growth for activity pub… You federate with Threads. Or another hypothetical flagship where everyone is sent. Stop worrying spreading users around so much. People who join that network on the flagship can learn about federation and instance switching later.
I’m sure many people on activitypub would prefer that it grows more like it has though.
You federate with Threads
Nice try, fed.
im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they’re BAD things
Those are precisely why I like BlueSky. I don’t know if this was normal for twitter or what, but I learned you can search for a hashtag of your kinks (exp. #bigboobs) and you can see porn from people that have posted pics or posts about it. You can also hide other tags from ever showing up in the results, which lets you finetune what you’re looking for. I know the search works relatively the same as twitter with respect to hashtags, but was porn on twitter this whole time?
Porn industry is certainly a bad thing though. It is quite hostile to women, and many have been harmed by it and wished they had a good exit.
Bit I definitely agree that progressive lean is a good thing. Fwiw I didn’t read this article.
The modern porn industry is much more independent than it used to be. Most creators control and own their content and choose where it gets uploaded initially. In the past, the porn business was absolutely abusive to their stars but I think it’s much less the case these days. Filmmakers have to fight for actors because if they don’t treat them well or pay them their worth, they’ll just post their own content directly to their fans. I’m sure there are still huge negatives but I just don’t think it’s as bad as it once was and I certainly don’t think the porn industry is something to be upset about these days.
I know women in porn who say the opposite.
Certainly some will say that, and even more would do if your environment is privileged (such as a safe neighborhood in the west or USA). You have to look at aggregate data, not anecdotes.
When there in it, i’m sure there is going to be a bit of a bias.
NGL I’m old enough now that I’d rather not see random tits in my feed.
I’ve been on Bluesky since February. I have yet to see any nudity that I didn’t actively seek out. It’s not too difficult.
I’m on a (streams) instance on which someone else is following pr0n accounts. That instance is small enough (13 channels, including clones of external channels) to suggest them as contacts to me until I’ve removed them as suggestions.
Only boobs I saw without searching mastodon.social for non-pr0n hashtags.
Curated tits then?
It’s weird to me how obsessed some people are with proving to the world that their social media platform of choice is superior. The Fediverse works, we have content, and anyone who decides to seek out a platform that offers what the Fediverse offers can join. Tell your friends about your experience if they might be interested but if they don’t stick with it you don’t have to be all salty about it.
Agreed. It’s silly.
I like Mastodon. It’s like social media from 2010, chronological, only seeing what you want, great curation tools, and no ads or stupid algorithm. Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, though it can vary by instance.
I haven’t used BlueSky, but I imagine it feels pretty familiar, which is what a lot of people want, and that’s cool too.
They can both be good things.
rolls eyes
I thought the whole point of the fediverse was that it doesn’t matter which service you use, just as long as you’re in the pool.
The problem is partially that bluesky isn’t really the Fediverse. It doesn’t use the standard, and isn’t truly interoperable. Accounts can be bridged, but that’s a hacky workaround, not actual intercompatibility.
And threads is run by a company whose human rights violations would take a week just to read out loud.
The idea that the specific platform doesn’t matter isn’t a blanket statement, it’s a description of being interoperable, nothing more. Bluesky isn’t truly interoperable, and threads is run by Meta who facilitated ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the burning of whole villages in Myanmar despite countless explicit warnings that these things would happen if they didn’t take safety measures (not to mention all the other garbage Meta has done or enabled)
Yeah but they’re fighting over the inevitable ad revenue.
I do not see Twitter, Threads, or BlueSky as any part of the Fediverse since they are all for profit corporations. Fediverse is about being free of the corporate overlords.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
Threads is fully integrated. You can personally block them from your end, but thats all you.
It would be like saying “Dominos doesn’t make pizza. It has never been a pizza company”. With your logic being that you don’t like their pizza. Doesn’t make it true just because YOU don’t eat the pizza.
Bluesky I hear conflicting reports on. Some people say it is, because it can be, others say it’s not, because it’s not official. I get both sides on this.
But the last part…is objectively not true. It happrns to work that way FOR NOW. It just isn’t profitable enough for the major players to sink any real resources into.
The fact that it’s adfree has more to do with the fact that 60k people on all of Lemmy with most instances having a few hundred people “on” it, and also advertising companies not understanding the concept of federation.
I could start my own instance, and sell ads to corporate overlords. The biggest problem I’d face is the idea of trying to convince any company with money to spend that money on me putting an ad on for such a small audience.
If/when the fediverse ever gains momentum and becomes mainstream, you can guarentee that ads will be everywhere.
Because nobody owns the fediverse. Which means if I sell an ad on my instance, all federated instances will see the ad. Sure, you could defederate from my instance. But what would happen right now if lemmy.world sold ads? Is every instance going to defederate from the biggest instance, with the majority of communities? That would essentially break the fediverse.
We’re all on a service that you think is immune to centralization, but forgot the core concept that humans like to socially congragate. Which means it’s inevitable that there will always be one big dominant instance. Which means if this thing ever goes mainstream, the ads are coming, and they’ll be on all the big instances.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
I included it because the article title included it, and I agreed it never would be. I then went farther and said I don’t consider any of those beside Mastodon to be Fediverse because they all are corporations creating platforms for shareholders, NOT users.
It would be like saying “Dominos doesn’t make pizza. It has never been a pizza company”. With your logic being that you don’t like their pizza. Doesn’t make it true just because YOU don’t eat the pizza.
To use your analogy, It’s actually more like they have the appearance of a pizza-like substance, but eating it you know it’s not pizza and never will be because it’s made of human waste.
Because nobody owns the fediverse. Which means if I sell an ad on my instance, all federated instances will see the ad. Sure, you could defederate from my instance. But what would happen right now if lemmy.world sold ads? Is every instance going to defederate from the biggest instance, with the majority of communities? That would essentially break the fediverse.
If it was pushing ads, absolutely! I believe the majority of us came to the fediverse to escape the ads/corporate enshitification, so the moment this stuff starts creeping in we can all just defederate them. Every admin knowing this would be the outcome I think also helps keep the fediverse “honest” as well.
Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is
Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)
The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)
That’s definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha
And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn’t allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?
The fact that the fediverse has been mentally limited to “Mastodon and Lemmy” is so sad. The features many people complained weren’t on Mastodon were right there on Akkoma, Misskey, Friendica, Hometown, and others. But nobody would even look at them.
Even on the fediverse nobody wants to discuss the sea of alternative services.
Because nobody knows they exist. Especially not on Mastodon. And even less outside the Fediverse, tech media included.
And truth be told, way too many Mastodon users don’t want to know. They want the Fediverse to remain what they thought it was when they joined: only vanilla Mastodon.
Really goes to show that Lemmy is full of tech-curious geeks: Tell a Lemmy user about a Fediverse project that’s neither Lemmy nor Mastodon, and it’s much more likely for the reply to be something along the lines of, “where public instances.”
Mastodon would be fine if all I cared to follow was Linux news and if I understood German and Japanese.
Hell yeah! Sign me up!
People tried to bring more content through bridges. Mastodonians promptly started crying about how it literally puts peoples lifes in danger. Some still have #nobridge tags in their profiles to this day, thinking it matters somehow in an open network.
I think in many cases it was never about Bluesky or Jack Dorsey who never really had a saying on Bluesky proper anyway. It was more about keeping the Fediverse ActivityPub-only or even Mastodon-only.
In that light, I think the only reason why there haven’t been any calls for totally Fediblocking all of Hubzilla is because 75% of the Fediverse have never even heard the name, and maybe a few hundred people outside Hubzilla know how it works and what it does. No critical mass to be appalled. And Hubzilla not being based on ActivityPub and technically being bridged to Mastodon via its own per-channel bridges would be only one out of many possible reasons to want it “gone from the Fediverse”.
Yeah swear. Gardening would be fine if all I cared about was dirt and weeds.
Fucking me the change you wanna see. Invite your friends to use the platform and post your own shit
Or I could go to bluesky where that change is already in place.
Bad idea. Bluesky’s just gonna end up like Twitter.
The Fediverse could get shitty in new ways too, but it can’t get Elon’d. Bluesky eventually will. The future is on the Fediverse. All we’re doing is delaying that future by swapping one corporation for another.
Though maybe that future needs to be delayed, because the Fediverse needs to lose its “yeah our app can do that thing you want, just edit a few variables in the source code”-style github energy.
Mastodon is ultimately usable, because I figured it out, but it should have been easier, and needs to get easier. Maybe it has the rise and fall of bluesky to figure that out.
Though maybe that future needs to be delayed, because the Fediverse needs to lose its “yeah our app can do that thing you want, just edit a few variables in the source code”-style github energy.
Self-defeating: that “github energy” is not going to get lost if first not enough people use the Fediverse that having to make that kind of change at the source level becomes a hindrance.
If all Mastodon wants is linux shit then only linux people are gonna stick around. Never mind that I get the exact same linux posts on bluesky from the same people on top of other topics I care to follow.
Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.
installs both
Now… fight for my amusement.
This is the correct attitude.
Bridgy.fed is nice for bridging also for using both at the sametime. I think what a lot of people like on BlueSky is the feed algorithm without having to curate yourself like on Mastodon or posts sorted by the time it was posted. That probably makes a huge difference.
Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.
You can bridge the two now.
What do you like about bluesky more?
their discover feed and ability to create custom feeds
I cry a little bit every time someone acts like Misskey and its forks don’t exist
I never used misskey and it’s forks. How are their discover feeds and UI/UX?
It is odd when I see people compare Bluesky unfavourably with Mastodon when a lot of the features they want are on *key forks.
deleted by creator
Yeah maybe posting it here doesn’t really help?
Nope. Every post I’ve seen about Bluesky has me confused for this exact reason. If it wasn’t for people talking about Lemmy in mass on another platform, I’d have no idea what the Fediverse is.
Mastodon isn’t even the best micro-blogging service on the Fediverse.
Which would you say is best?
Now there’s an argument to be had. I ave tried Mastodon and Firefish and found the latter to be far superior, feature-wise. I think Iceshrimp will be the *key fork that will finally the big breakout hit, especially with the Iceshrimp.net rewrite.
Lost me at .NET. Hard pass.
Why?
A summary of the standard mastodon front page:
- News report about Trump
- The temperature in Sudan
- The travel trajectory of a plane carrying people you’ve never heard of, going somewhere you’ve never heard of.
- A penis
- Ai art of Bart Simpson and a worm from Dune
- An AOC quote
- Furry porn, diaper optional
- A Linux distro professing a new update
- Someone’s Chaos Space Marine (it actually looks really nice and they really took their time)
I like it in a flea market kinda sense but, I mean, come on, man.
I’m not really following what’s the issue here? Sounds like a wide variety of content that is the perfect medium to find people to follow so you can get a more filtered and curated feed, which mastodon comfortably supports.
I don’t know any social media that boasts a decent news feed that you put 0 information into.
Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.
Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.
It’s not too hard to understand. Some people just like to pretend it’s complicated. It’s literally the same system email uses, and almost everyone has figured out how to use that. There’s no marketing for it though. It’s only word-of-mouth, and let’s be honest, us fediverse users often aren’t the best at communicating simply.
It’d be smart if some fediverse instances provided an email account with your account. Then we can just tell people to create an email account and they’d accidentally have a fediverse account.
I have yet to see any marketing for Bluesky. The fediverse still takes effort, even if it isn’t necessarily complicated.
I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.
Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.
Really? What other platforms?
There’s this weird one I’ve heard some crazy people use called Lemmy or something. I don’t know. They’re too niche for me to consider thinking about.
I’m not sure if people looking for something laid out like Twitter or other microblogging sites would necessarily move to Lemmy, which is more like a forum. The activities on any social media may be largely the same, but presentation matters a lot.
To me, Lemmy and other forum style SM is like going to a bar and finding people to have a conversation, where as Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon/etc are like standing on a street corner and just yelling random thoughts.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to imply it would. Just another activitypub platform.
Threads is implementing it in phased rollouts and I think they saw the writing on the wall with X that Bluesky was the next “big thing” and wanted to jump on a competitor protocol that had already been developed and already had an active base of both users and developers.l, whereas Bluesky is building everything in house from the ground up with the AT protocol.
WordPress has a plugin that is developed by Automattic (as close to core WP as you can without actually being core WP) which essentially turns every WordPress site into an ActivityPub feed. Its really cool and an incredibly powerful tool for publishers.
Flipboard is also implementing ActivityPub as we speak, and it seems like they are quite bought in on the concept. Their CEO hosts a podcast about the Fediverse.
Ghost is a publishing platform similar to Substack that is also working to implement ActivityPub and is doing a lot of the heavy work in terms of trying to figure out what longer-form publishing could look like within the fediverse, as opposed to being a network of different Twitter clones.
