The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It’s still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It’s just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn’t stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That’s why we’re all here and it’s why nobody else but us are coming.
Hey Elon! I hear there’s this bigger, better Public Square that you should buy. I hear it needs more fascists to platform their hate…ahem, “free” speech in. It’s called Reddit.
I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
Small town big city syndrome, in a small community you can conceivably know, recognise or otherwise relate to a good proportion of the people in your town, and anyone you don’t know you likely know people in common - but once a community gets big enough your brain can’t deal with it and your neighbours become an abstract concept, background noise, rather than people.
I remember someone studied this real sociology. They watched people greeting each other in small towns and such and found that around the 1000 person mark people stopped greeting each other.
I’ve notice the same thing on hiking trails. If I only see a few people the whole day we not only greet each other but we may stop to chat. More people and you just say hi. A very popular trail though? You might get a nod.
That’s what every Brazilian and Portuguese thought of before they gave up on joining. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. The loop must be broken by early adopters and selfless contributors.
Does anyone have figures on subscription hikes to other fediverse systems? Mastodon is probably the best like-for-like switch for casual birdsite fans, but I wonder if there’s also an emerging desire for something a little different.
It won’t last unless Mastadon gets some serious improvements. It’s buggy, glitchy, feature-poor, and confusing to use. There’s no way in its current state it’s going to compete with the big guys for the average person’s attention.
Do you remember the early days of social media? IMHO, as the new hotness I’ve seen a rapid pace of improvements that I honestly expect to ramp up further as more utilization comes. Pure speculation but I’m basing it on my grey beard and the refreshing experience I’m having here.
I mean, they need to ramp it way faster. It’s pretty garbage right now and there’s really no excuse. Compare it to Lemmy and it’s very obvious. Lemmy still has problems, but it’s much easier to use and has way fewer bugs and glitches. If you’re used to Reddit, then switching to Lemmy is pretty easy to do, and I can see average users making that jump. But Mastadon isn’t even close to the user experience that Twitter/X offered, and I cannot see the average Twitter user sticking around and waiting for all the issue to be fixed.
I switched from Reddit to Lemmy today and I fully condone your comment. I decided to not use any microblogging service before using mastodon after Twitter. The switch from Reddit to Lemmy was a bliss.
What would you say is missing from the mastodon user experience vs twitter?
Things I would like:
better discovery/suggestions when people first join. I get a “selling point” is that the timeline isn’t algorithmically driven, but just to help people get their feet wet start showing them some stuff
when displaying a post there needs to be a better mechanism to fetch all the replies. Right now it’s possible to respond and say something someone else already did because you you’re not shown their reply. For federation reasons I guess.
better list integration
But overall, for me the functionality I used from twitter I have on mastodon too. The real missing feature is the huge variety of people, and getting that takes time.
From a user-experience standpoint I’m intrigued by the idea of someone who is comfortable using Lemmy finding Mastodon confusing to use. From a technical view it’s literally the same stuff (ActivityPub + a distributed network) fueling the same general concept (federated social media) just with a different skin on top (Twitter/Tweetdeck-flavored instead of Reddit-flavored.)
It’s all just decentralized online community organized by interest; a /c/ here is a hashtag on Mastodon. If you have already come to terms with instances and federation and such in order to use one, what about the other still confuses? Is it just the interface or are there deeper pain points?
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I’m accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don’t use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon’s interface is not. I don’t care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
That’s my problem too. Weird Twitter just doesn’t seem to be a thing on mastodon , or if it is the lack of an algorithm makes it hard to find the right kind of accounts to follow
They definitely exist - quite a lot of them in fact - it’s just after the big migrations in 2022, the kind of people who tend to get popular on Mastodon are the more “serious” posters, as they’ve eclipsed the memers in popularity. (Eternal September kind of thing)
If you check out the explore and local feeds of instances such as Wet Dry World or Beige Party, you’ll find the meme posters, who you can then follow.
What doesn’t help either is that meme posters never use hashtags, even though they’re the primary way to be discovered on Mastodon. On the other hand, people who are posting “serious” takes tend to use hashtags a lot - this also helps skew the meme posters away from people. Unfortunately, hashtags have gone completely out of vogue and just aren’t used by most people.
Mastodon is implementing full text search soon though, most likely with 4.2.0 (the next version), which should hopefully make things easier.
I root for Mastodon like everyone else but as long as there is some very good improvement in discoverability and intelligent feeds, it will never be the same in function as Twitter (not X, Twitter). Especially when it currently has a fraction of the creators Twitter had.
For real, I just want to open an app and scroll. I’m not going to put effort into reading funny microblog posts. It’s why tiktok is so successful, the app is really really good at delivering relevant content.
Add comment