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.
Mastodon is better.
The advertising industry used to call this an Advertorial, now it’s known as native marketing. All the same, it’s an ad disguised as news. You pay the journalist to make it look like there’s some crazy spike in traffic and the piper plays his pipe as the mice fall in line behind him to see what the hype is.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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 had no idea the Fediverse is.
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.
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.
You mean it has not what it takes as a platform?
The name “Mastodon” sucks as much as “X”. I’ve never had a Twitter account nor do I want to open an account in any of the services, but Mastodon does not sound catchy to who they need to attract.
As someone who uses both. I think Mastodon also just doesn’t have the users, it is not as easy to setup and I think understanding instances and its UI are less user friendly.
Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.
It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.
There’s a lot of that. A ton of FOSS software is somewhat exclusionary because it’s made for the people who make it.
But a lot of the UX issues on Mastodon have nothing to do with the tech, nor the UI. They’re social in nature.The existing userbase skews technical, which affects what people discuss, and people looking for help are met with a deluge of tech savy people giving tech savy advice.
Oh, and there’s the mass of very vocal users on niche sites that have strong feelings about having their niche safe space invaded by “normies”, and who let it be known that new users should learn and adhere to “the rules” and respect the unlisted, unagreed upon nettiquite of social outcast “progressive” fedi or GTFO.
And then, on top of the social, there’s just the fact that most Internet users don’t really grok the Internet these days. Twitter or BlueSky aren’t websites to them/ they’re “apps”. The very nature of federation on the Fediverse runs counter to how they understand how thir “apps” work.
They don’t want to have to know about it, but they can’t avoid people talking about it, making judgements around it, and having to confront it when edge cases crop up or when admins decide they don’t like or trust the new crop of fedi websites that have sprung up this month or last.
On Twiiter or BlueSky, they don’t have to think about any of it.
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.
“Leave that algorithm riddled platform and come to this new and shiny algorithm riddled platform” 🤦
where pleroma
where akkoma
where misskey
where firefish
where iceshrimp
where sharkey
where cherrypick
where catodon
where mitra
What’s cherrypick
Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish’s first “death” which, as I’ve read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey’s original issues than the other Forkeys.
Nice! Does it support MRFs?
No idea, I’m not that deeply into it.
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?
micro$hit
Misskey and the actual Forkeys are in TypeScript and Vue.js. And they all have the same bugs that you can’t just simply get rid of.
Iceshrimp.NET is a rewrite of Iceshrimp in C#, that’s why it’s named Iceshrimp.NET. It promises to get rid of all issues inherited from Misskey because it doesn’t have a bit of Misskey left in it anymore.
But maybe we need more rewrites in more languages to satisfy as many people as possible. A Catodon rewrite in Ruby on Rails for Mastodon fanbois and fangurlz, no matter what a chonker it’ll end up being. Sharkey rewritten in PHP to satisfy those who like things as easy and lightweight as Friendica & Co. And even more because not few say that both C# and Ruby on Rails and PHP suck.
Or is there anything that doesn’t suck at all? Go sucks because Google. Rust sucks because Mozilla. Python sucks because it’s Python being Python. And so forth.
Rust has almost nothing to do with Mozilla these days though.
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.
Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)
The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.
IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.
Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.
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.
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 I built by who they followed.
