To be honest I like the idea of being able to move my account from a server which is offline to a different one. We should have it with ActivityPub too.
I was able to move from Reddit to Lemmy with minimal learning curve but I tried Mastodon about a year ago and it felt impenetrable and confusing. The author is absolutely right that people don’t see decentralization as a selling point. Anecdotally, the people I have talked to about federated alternatives have nothing positive to say about their experiences except the small handful of people that use things like Lemmy or Kbin.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it’s a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She’s also pretty tech savvy, so I can’t imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people’s eyes glaze over. People don’t care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren’t philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that’s much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Nah, I don’t buy it, people have been telling me that they don’t understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It’s not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a [email protected] address and nobody is complaining about that it’s not just @username for email. It’s more that it’s not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It’s about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it’s generally not an interesting place to be so people don’t stick around very long.
This is literally the attitude that will kill fediverse alternatives chances of competing with Twitter and Reddit. Bluesky seems to be on the right track by focusing on product first before introducing the complexities of instances.
I hate to sound negative, but right now growth in the fediverse (especially Reddit clones like Kbin and Lemmy) are being driven by people who no longer want to use Reddit. But over the past few weeks, most discussions are still circle-jerking about how bad Reddit is and how glad people are to be on Lemmy. You can only beat a horse for so long before you need other content posted on here to keep most people engaged.
Mainstream users are why any social media thrives and has content. Not sure hostility towards anyone is going to help when they check it out and see this is one of the top comments…
I mooched over to Twitter yesterday to gawp at the car crash, and saw a number of people begging for Bluesky invites. And all I could think is that Mastodon is right there already, working essentially the same way…
I “feel” like one of the main issues with foss tools like Lemmy and Mastadon is lack of an advertising budget.
Going to throw a wild guess out there without a lot of supporting data, but I suspect Bluesky has a decent budget for influencers and that’s driving the traffic too.
Just a thought. I’ve been sitting here wondering why most people have not jumped and Lemmy and Mastadon yet. I personally don’t find either platform hard to use or confusing.
A lot of people did jump to Mastodon, and apparently it had had another large influx of users yesterday after all the Twitter shenanigans. Not everyone stays though, obviously.
I think part of the issue some have with Mastodon is the lack of Twitter’s algorithm. It’s absolutely true to say it’s harder to find people and topics to follow on Mastodon for the simple reason that you’re not getting anything shoved in your face, which is a massive plus point for many (myself included) but can also make it appear initially less appealing.
Before algorithms we all used hashtags. Hashtags were very important to Twitter in the before times. That’s how you find topics on mastodon. I have columns set with specific hashtag sets so I can quickly glance at toots about horror movies, birds, retrogaming, etc…
You can also follow hashtags directly in your home feed just like Twitter topics.
It’s really not a difficult thing at all, but people are so addicted to Twitter they always give a halfassed attempt at switching before throwing up their hands.
Yep. Finding new users and Content on mastodon is impossible because the nerds who run it hate THE ALGORITHM and social media addiction. Same reason they held out on basic features like quote tweeting until recently.
Bluesky is basically just OG twitter, plus you can make your own algorithm feeds. It’s cool.
I agree I think once somebody makes an honest attempt at an open non-exploitative content recommendation algorithm, big social’s moat is completely gone. I do think Mastodon’s take that the people are the algorithm is a great alternative, but we definitely need some sort of algorithmic approach in the fediverse.
Honestly, from what I can tell, and if I think back to when I jumped over in November, I think it mostly comes down to how much quieter the feed is to start with.
If you think, you’re going from a site with an algorithmically generated feed that’s made to feel intentionally noisy, to a chronological feed that’s only as busy as who you follow. That didn’t bother me too much because 95% of my Twitter intake was done via Tweetbot, which didn’t use the algorithm at all, so Mastodon felt much the same.
But to someone who uses the website, it’s a huge change.
Ultimately - and the same is true here - you can jumpstart your experience by following everything and everyone, then filter out the stuff you’re not so much into. But you need to hang around long enough to see someone suggest that. And that’s where the problem lies.
I’m ok with the influencers not bothering with Mastodon, tbh.
I mean, sure they’ll take the numbers with them where they go, but from my own perspective, I’m not struggling to find good people to follow so does it matter to me if the usual celebrities don’t keep getting boosted into my TL all the time?
Mastodon is working fine. There are plenty of people using it. It doesn’t need Twitter’s scraps.
Add comment