People are happy to peddle incorrect information which is easy to find. Dorsey is on the board, but deleted his account and used Nostr and Twitter significantly more than he ever did bluesky. Cultural debt: Mastodon has the cultural debt of reply guys, FOSS bros, racism etc During the great migration a lot of minorities attempted the switch and were met with a lot of racism which was easy to hide due to PM. Mastodon also has the onboarding issues. Studies show most users are passive users of social media, they don’t want much friction just to lurk. Bluesky appealed to minorities particularly Black women very early in the process and that contributed to the growth and culture. They’ve lost some of the goodwill due to some moderation issues. But, without the cultural debt and without making decisions such as no full-text search (since changed) and no QTs, two features that benefits minorities and professionals alike turned off many. There’s also no current federation so the onboarding is simple and smooth. The culture on Mastodon based on 4 polls I’ve seen with 10k plus responses, Mastodon leans older than bluesky. Unlike what’s put out there bluesky doesn’t aim to be a Twitter replacement but more so Mastodon+. Lastly, the culture on Mastodon often takes itself too seriously while bluesky is mostly horny, crapposting, awareness raising and lots of laughs
and theres your problem, looking at instances, its not a normal thing you need to do or ever had to do on any other similar website reddit would have never taken off if it where instanced like lemmy for example
I think emulating twitter was a huge mistake for mastadon, the twitter reply structure that makes it difficult to have a long conversation with multiple people to be the main part of the post but ideal for “dunks” and outrage farming. I think the Tumblr reblog structure would have been an infinitly better choice for the more actual socialising thing fediverse is going for and a small user base that isnt producing much content and can re-circulate older posts. also it’s less image-centric allowing more posts to be stored on a server, additionally (intuitively, I haven’t thought about implementation that hard) it seems like a much more natural fit for federation.
If you go on Bluesky they will tell you. Lots of people saying that they feel isolated because there is no algorithm feeding engagement, and federation doesn’t lend itself to finding your friends from Twitter easily without one of those migration tools people were using. Then another chunk describe Mastodon users as a “HOA” because someone told them to put a CW on something.
Home Owners Association (group that implements rules for homeowners in a neighborhood like what colour you can paint your house or what you can plant in the garden), and Content Warning
You think ‘oh it’s not that hard to just pick a sever’, but it is. Most people look at it and go 'well my favorite influencer or friend is on X, but I can only make an account on Y. Can I still communicate with them?! Which advantage has sever Y over server Z? etc. It’s it’s ONE barrier which is one barrier too much for many people (on top of all the new things they have to learn anyway when they decide to get on a new social network)
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do - and it’s scary to them to be confronted with a question about system architecture, when all they want to do is read news or memes.
And it’s interesting that you mention email, because I’d argue email has the exact same problem. Depending on which country you live in, you’ll notice that most people use primarily one email provider per region/country. Why? because their friends use the same email provider. You know how many people told me “well, I don’t have email, but I can give you my Gmail if you want…?” Email just ‘took off’ because it had nothing to compete with for 20 years and businesses depended on it as well.
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do
I don’t think you at all need to understand federation other than it means you can join from multiple places and that typically they mostly all talk so just pick a medium to popular one.
I still don’t really understand exactly how federation works and I don’t think it hinders me at all to not understand it.
Sarcasm aside, you’re not wrong. The top result for “Lemmy” (that isn’t about Motörhead) is for Join-Lemmy.org. I’m a tech-minded person, but when I saw this “join a server” crap instead of a front page, I decided that I’m too old and that it’s too much effort to figure out. Now imagine someone who isn’t tech-minded wants to join. They’ll fuck off even sooner than I did.
Hell, the only reason why I’m here is because I decided that Imgur isn’t a good alternative. They’re no better than reddit (i.e. no 3rd party apps). So I decided to stop being lazy and figure it the fuck out. Others might not be as motivated.
They have the main thing masses often look for: unity (as in the state of being united, not the company). Like it or not, federation is a brand new concept that regular users can’t wrap their heads around.
I can guarantee you regular users don’t ever think of email as a federated service nor even begin to understand how it works behind the opaque client page.
See my other reply. Regular users don’t understand, nor care, nor even think about it. To the mainstream, of everything you’ve listed, only email is a common concept, and even then you have some major congregation with very few providers. It doesn’t matter that your bubble is used to it, because it represents a risible percentage of the mainstream.
You have a point. I actually don’t want mainstream people in here. Because they suck so much as the youtube comments used to show before it implemented upvotes.
Add comment