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.
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
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.
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?
Mastodon would be fine if all I cared to follow was Linux news and if I understood German and Japanese.
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.
Hell yeah! Sign me up!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Basically, a single instance
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?
When you make an account
Where?
Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Having actually read this now, the biggest valid complaint is the same one rehashed in the past. It’s VC funded to start and the future there is uncertain. The board has openly discussed funding plans and There are some mitigations like having the code be open source from the start and almost completely self host-able with improvements to come at this early stage that try to fend that off though.
Saying Mastodon is better because there’s no algorithm is true of Bluesky too. And if they are seeing as much porn as it sounds like (unless you’re talking about Alf’s Hog or Tom Bombadill’s Big Naturals which were a bit like when Lemmy Shitpost goes gets on a bean streak) their feed was built by who they followed.
Just some hours ago I read a post about how Bluesky will be the one to defeat Twitter… who should I believe?? ;_; XD
I promise you mastodon will never, ever be a true Twitter competitor.
