What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?
After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and … whatever they use.
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago
Who are these people who actually FIND users go follow on either service???
I have Bluesky. I have Mastodon. I log into each every few months, realize nothing has changed, and there is nobody to follow.
Then I don’t use either, until I wonder a few months later “heeeey, I wonder if people are on these services yet…”
Still no.
Mastodon revolves around following topics and hashtags, not individuals. I learned that early on, and am having a much better experience.
Sounds like a worse lemmy 😅
Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.
I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.
To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.
Well then it will never be useful for me. I want to follow PEOPLE. I want people to follow me for the random shit I say.
Then they retweet the random shit, and now a whole NEW group of people can wonder what’s wrong with me.
I follow hashtags I like, then see who the people are who use those tags, then follow those people.
I find that I discover people that way I would not have found otherwise.
It’s worked well for me so far. I wasn’t a twitter person before though, so I don’t know if I have the experience you did for comparison.
See, I already know who I want to follow. I want to follow Nintendo. I want to follow Game Grumps. I want to follow my local pro wrestling indy. I want to follow MXRPlays.
But none of them are on the fediverse. Although, Andy Richter is on BlueSky. So that’s something…I guess…
Ah, yeah fair point there.
there’s plenty of that going on, too, just not on as large a scale.
If you start following hashtags, then you find interesting people. There are also curated lists that you can sign up for. That will introduce you to a lot of new content.
Then it’s not the platform for you.
IIRC there’s an iOS only frontend that fills that niche.
Also there is a trending section but its hidden behind the “explore” page, along with the search function. One of many reasons I really don’t like Mastodon.
There’s algorithms you can subscribe to and use to discover people based on your interests. Theres also algorithms that show you posts based on who you follow and what posts you like. You can also enable your normal Following feed to show you some algorithm posts
I’m following like 3 people. One is a bot that reposts things from twitter. One is a bot that posts local weather. And one is what I THOUGHT was Nintendo, but turns out it’s just Nintendo@Lemmy.World.
Well that’s the issue then stop following bots? Look up a hashtag or keyword and find people or subscribe to one of the many algorithms
Use lists on bsky to find people.
And just gained a million people, biggest spike yet. So should be a bit more active.
Yeah, but won’t those 1 million all be speaking spanish?
It’s 2m now.
And plenty of them pick up English online
Depends a bit on the type of person and content you want to follow. But if you like retro computer Shenanigans etc. I know action retro is on Lemmy and Mastodon and I follow them on mastodon. But yes General content for the normies probably not so much.
The over policing thing is so true. I’ve gotten messages from techhub.social mods with warnings about making jokes that even hinted at breaking one of their precious rules. Like if I did something wrong, ban me I guess. It’s pretty clear I didn’t and the mod just wanted to flex his power towards me.
- Is bigger than the rest.
Take Brazil. Blusky saw the writing on the wall with Twitter, so they threw a ton of money into media. Guess where everyone went.
Regarding 2: you can also join the Fediverse this way with certain clients I believe. You are automatically signed up for lemmy.world for example
like Twitter 12 years ago
So don’t use it then. Gotcha.
I’m not on any of the services currently, but I have tried Mastodon in the past and point 4. was what made me bounce off it. I know Mastodon flaunts its algorithm-free feed as almost a point of pride, but as a user it just doesn’t do it for me. I could not get it to serve me the type of content I wanted the way I wanted, and it just felt like way too much work for what I was looking for.
I solved this issue by following multiple tags that interest me. People tend to tag their posts on Mastodon it seems, so discovering posts about, say, wine and cacti is as easy as following #wine #cactus #cacti #redwine #oragewine and so on and so forth - it’s working pretty good for me without an algorithm recommending stuff to me, maybe it’s worth a try?
I’d still rather have algorithmic recommendations of what’s been “hot” lately in the tags I follow over a chronological feed. But I’m considering giving Sharkey/Firefish/Iceshrimp another go.
Marketing, sure, but the onboarding from Instagram was a massive factor for Threads growth.
If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.
All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.
If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.
#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.
#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.
So… let’s get going y’all! :)
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
There’s no way in hell, even if you ignore #5
Hmmm maybe we should ignore #1 and focus on #5 then
Absolutely agree with point 2, not just for Mastodon, but others like here on Lemmy or Misskey or whatever it may be.
The process of finding an instance can sometimes be annoying because you might find an instance that sounds alright, like I did for Mastodon, and then find that there’s the problem of sign-ups not available. That, and signing up for the instance I got on then had a waiting period for account review and all that before I could do anything.
I assume, from what I’ve heard, all you gotta do for threads and bluesky is just sign up and start posting with less effort, which is what the majority of people want.
There are some advantages to algorithms for discovery - it’s certainly is more user friendly. It’s just a shame they tend to enshitify or become toxic. Bluesky seem to offer an API of sorts to plug in feeds you create. Perhaps open algorithms are more accountable?
They have marketing budgets.
People I spoke to didn’t understand how a server and an app could be disconnected. They also didn’t want to learn what the hell federation was and why people could register the same username for some reason. By the time you get to “it’s like email” they’ve already downloaded another app.
Most people didn’t want the Fediverse. They wanted Twitter that wasn’t as shit as Twitter. Nobody cares about ActivityPub or ATProto, those are side notes to usable apps and experiences.
Bluesky also has more people go follow and interact with. Mastodon is for people who have a favourite Linux distro and people who follow people who have a favourite Linux distro. Bluesky is for everyone else.
Threads came free with an existing account. People downloaded it out of curiosity and were already signed in and set up.
The guy behind Technology Connections is on Mastodon and has explained several times what terrible consequences having more than a few friends follow you can have for usability. None of these apps were designed for a million followers, human moderation falls short and automatic moderation doesn’t work. Every server has a different view of existing comments so they’ll think they’re the first to make a certain reply, causing a horde of reply guys to all say the same thing. His complaints are very valid and I don’t expect him to last long on there, but he’s doing his best to stick around. If he goes, I’m sure at least a few people will go with him.
Platforms like Bluesky have it easier dealing with moderation and are willing to use automatic moderation. It’s hardly perfect, but it works better than not moderating anything until a report comes in.
I came to a very similar conclusion recently: https://lemmy.world/comment/11880279
Let’s hope that Brazil creates a mass-movement that makes it easier to follow. Aren’t they even like the world majority in Portuguese?
They probably have good discovery and trending post mechanisms. Mastodon makes it a point not to have one, which results in a wholly uninteresting feed for the average user. I’m only on mastodon, but I very rarely use it, because it mostly sucks unless you spend several, several hours trying to track down fun accounts to follow yourself.
That is my experience too. It’s because there is no distinction between posts and comments, I think. It’s about as interesting as my sms chats with friends would be to strangers.
- There are more people there.
- Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
- Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.
Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.
So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.
And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.
Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).
So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.
Wild! This was my exact thought as I was signing up for Mastadon. I spent like 15 minutes figuring out what Mastadon is, what server to join, what each server means. Then I did the thing like I did with Lemmy and created half a dozen accounts waiting to see which server gave me my “Account Created” email first.
I agree with you, people end up going the perceived “easy route” because of the amount of explaining and low level protocol exposure that they receive from someone who is trying to sell them on joining an ActivityPub network. And that’s just the people who are trying to encourage them to join, then there’s the people that straight up think “normal social media” people don’t belong on the fediverse because of one biased reason or another…
Several reasons:
- Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
- Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
- The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
- Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.
Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?
To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
To add, on top of that, the fediverse is like if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it except make another email for when they want to email outlook users.
I don’t think fediverse proponents know just how catastrophically this terminates their entire pitch in the minds of 99% of internet users
if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it
This is the case right now.
There’s good reasons GMail doesn’t do that, but there’s absolutely nothing technical preventing from doing that, and I can’t think of anything that legally prevents them from doing that.
Not leagaly but users will be frustated and leave. They will rollback within a day so you will not need to worry too much.
“users will be frustated and leave” exactly the same thing can happen to an instance that adds an instance (or wildcard domain) block. I’d be very surprised if no instance has ever rolled back a block.
Users don’t need to worry about instance blocks on ActivityPub, any more than they have to worry about DNS RBLs for email.
and those that do post don’t really interact with others
I’ve found quite the opposite on Mastodon. I get WAY more interaction on there than I ever did on Twitter.
I do a radio show on Monday nights. Despite having more followers on Twitter I never really managed to attract many listeners. Dropped it for a few years and started up again a few months back, publicising solely through Mastodon. Engagement with it is three or four times what it was before.
It’s essentially a request show, and there have been a couple of weeks where I’ve not had to pick any songs to fill the time, all of it has been filled by listener requests.
That said, that’s only my experience, it may be different for others.
No ads. Lightweight app/website.
I needed to scroll way too much to see people mention marketing and advertising. It’s a huge deal.
The power of good advertising is not to be underestimated. There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it. And it’s not only traditional advertising but viral and “astroturfed” advertising.
There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it.
Too many smug people think, “advertising doesnt work on me! Hah! Only weak minded normies fall for it…”
Wrong… Advertising works. And that’s the reason a shit ton of money that goes into it.
You want to know the reason why i run adblockers in my browser AND DNS levels? Because i KNOW advertising works on me… i KNOW i’m not smart enough to outsmart the army of engineers, and copywriters generating this stuff.
Source: i work in advertising lol
The “this would never happen to me” mindset really is cancer to logical thought and reasoning.
I somewhere read (maybe it was thinking fast and slow by Kahneman?) that even psychology students learning about certain behaviors would later anonymously claim they would never fall into these patterns. But plot twist: they are also only human, so of course they also could fall into these patterns.
Another example: People that think they would never fall for a scam. If it is the right scam they will fall even more easily for it than people that know that it could happen.
“Of course it can’t be a scam. Scams are obvious and only idiots fall for them.”
“Advertising doesn’t work on me!” I mutter smugly, before loading up the Apple keynote to see what my next phone will do.
Its easier to just sign up and find everyone immediately, than to go learn what are instances and which one should you choose to make an account on, and then go and learn how to find other people that are not on that instance, or how to check do they have a mastodon account at all, then go and learn how to XY.
The “go and learn” is something that people, most of them, just don’t want to do. If you need to learn how to use something, this is the first indicator of a bad user experience. It should be obviously easy for a new person to get around.
My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:
- Easier onboarding overall since you don’t have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
- despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter’s
- Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it’s easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
- Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing “starter packs” with lists of people to follow
- I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
- meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I’m following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I’m interested in
- quote-retweets don’t exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
- the stackable moderation also helps a lot
Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon’s side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo
There’s a few technical and non technical reasons someone might be on Bluesky/AT instead of Activity Pub. Protocol specific there’s:
) Account ownership (theoretically at least, migration is still in development). Though it’s hidden behind domain based identification there’s a cryptographic key that let’s you migrate to another PDS even if yours is down or banned you.
) Performance. Hosting something like a PDS is lighter than an Activity Pub instance.
) User level configuration. Bluesky let’s you set custom moderation lists and algorithms, something you can’t on Activity Pub.
) Compatibility. Building something like a link aggregator on AT that is compatible with a microblogging platform like Bluesky is likely a lot easier then Activity Pub since AT is broken up into PDSs and Relays. (To be fair compatibility does work on Activity Pub, but it’s got jank).
There’s also some less technical reasons as well:
) Bluesky is a platform and you don’t need to learn a protocol to use it. Yeah it’s not that hard to learn how any of the big three protocols work, but it’s also not that hard to change your car’s oil or sew ripped cloths instead of replacing them - but how many people do those? I’d guess 80% of Lemmy is an IT guy between 20-45 so it can get a little echo chambery on how easy tech is. One if the reasons Threads makes up 99.5%+ of the fediverse.
) Defederatiation is becoming a mess. If some random Joe has a friend on Bluesky & Nostr (both bridged), a few on threads, and a few spread across different instances; yet he can’t reach all but 1 or 2 of them from the instance he chose to join on joinmastodon it might be time to reconsider how things are done. Techy people might have no problem sifting through a long list of servers to find the right one, but somebody who’s already on the fence is probably going to quit at that point.
) Bluesky has a more mainstream culture, while the fediverse has very specific thoughts and ideas. Had I said I was on Windows you all might have put a hit out on me 😆
Had I said I was on Windows you all might have put a hit out on me 😆
Sorry for that
Mastodon and the fediverse in general are weirdly user-unfriendly, and then some fucking programmer pops in to say,
“Oh! You can fix that! All you have to do is hop over to their github page and…”
Lol
If they can make the user experience good, we might get the basis for a new internet, but they’d have to build it first.
weirdly user-unfriendly
I thought that was a feature
Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.
Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.
Most people didn’t have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.
I used mastodon for a year. It didn’t really work out for me. I just took so much effort to find content or build an audience.
I didn’t go to threads because it’s owned by Zuck. But Bluesky is FOSS add free and decentralised, so I tried it out, and honestly (I’ll probably get hate here for this) but the experience is far better than mastodon. There’s an algorithm, everything works. Mastodon had always been buggy for me. The UI is nice, the community is nice etc.
Plus thanks to bridgy, all of my bluesky posts are automatically displayed on mastodon and I can follow people from mastodon on bluesky.
decentralised
Is it really? I always heard that it’s impossible to have another server independent from Bluesky’s
Anyway, thank you for your comment!
In its developer’s blog, Bluesky stressed that “guardrails” are still in place. Most significantly, users can only self-host their own accounts for now, and in the next phase, self-hosted servers will initially be limited to 10 accounts each, with rate limits on usage.
Yeah I’m self hosting. But the fact they are working towards it is what matters most. Bluesky has only been publicly available for a couple months at this point.
Bluesky is FOSS
pretty sure it isn’t.
for me, it was discoverability. Like, several guides said “use tags” but 4 out of 5 people DON"T. And more often than not, when you do search the tags, you see several posts that aren’t what you wanted at all. Or worse, the tag you search doesn’t have any posts newer than several months to a year. Basically it relied on an honor system where few people had honor.
