The signup process for mastodon sucks massively. Unless you’re nerdy enough to sort it out, you’ll give up then and there. Bluesky is very straightforward, while offering customization to those looking for a non-mainstream experience.
I’m not an expert but I heard languages, religions and cultures has some irrational and hard to imitate rules so that outsiders can’t join in or blend easily. Is this similar? Maybe it’s an advantage?
I just went to mastadon.social for mastadon and like the biggest national lemmy instance we have, feddit. Although I have to criticize the old instance of feddit shutting down unexpectedly and I had to migrate to a newer one.
In the near term of course bluesky will, it has hype, it has rich tech people on it, it has 10s of millions of investment it can throw at stuff.
This is not how Mastodon or the Fediverse grows, our growth is real, not based on hyped and marketing. People come and stay here because it is a nice place, not because it is a popular or exciting new hangout spot that all the rich cool people are going to.
This is my question too. Search results turn up Bridgy Fed, but that seems to require the account you’re interested in following to go through those steps, which none of the accounts I’m interested in are doing. At least the Threads POTUS account turned on federation so I can view it from Mastodon, but I suspect for the next four years, that account will be pretty quiet, and if it isn’t, I’ll probably want it to be.
And blue sky got like 15 millions in two weeks. Look, do you really think that everyone decided to diss Mastodon? All major companies, celebrities, sport teams, you name it? Or maybe there’s a more reasonable explanation why Bluesky?
Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
I think the bigger problem is that the tech press starts from the perspective that Mastodon and the Fediverse is just for techie nerds and then fills out the narrative with supporting details and so unless those narratives are challenged Mastodon and the Fediverse will never be for normal people because the Tech press and the money behind it won’t let that narrative stick in the general public’s minds.
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
It gives space to do servers based on specific interests if you want. I’m part of a game development server, and my “Local” tab has people on my server often talking about, and showing, things that are related to game development. And I can still follow anyone from any other Mastodon server too.
If you’re into video games, film, maybe a specific genre of music, you can have an instance dedicated to that. (It might already exist.) It’s like a virtual neighborhood, or forum. Remember forums? Those were nice. They cultivated a sense of community which made people a little more responsible in their attitudes, it feels like. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but I like the server I’m on. It’s got friendly people I can talk to without feeling the need to fill my follows with them.
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
Billionares with mega yacht fleets are choosing bluesky over mastodon.
Talk for yourself, the average person does indeed care about the environment. In the past years there have been massive greenwashing campaigns from companies trying to please the average customer.
Yeah because it doesn’t cost them anything to say they “do their part” when they make token “commitments”. It’s not because the average person gives a shit. Give them a choice - $5 more an hour, or instantly and forever solve climate change and see how many people would choose climate change.
People complain about having to sort trash before throwing it out. Saying “most people care about the environment” is extremely naive.
Man, I wanna live in your neighborhood. I’m surrounded by bougie people or people with bougie fantasies. They talk all the time about drinking wine on a boat.
Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.
You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.
Company focus on profit. even if mean overall experience get not gooder
I dumbed it down to caveman speech for those that still wouldn’t understand. It’s a simple concept all of use that have used the Internet in the past year have experienced.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.
Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
Well the general idea of federation is not the same as “fediverse”. most “fediverse” sites are FOSS which is the main selling point in my opinion. They cannot be sold and do not rely on ad income (and thus preying on people’s cognitive weaknesses with algorithms) to operate. Federation is an added bonus on top of that which allows you to set up your own instance if you want.
Sure meta could make a federated service of some kind (like bluesky has done), but without being FOSS there’s always the high likelihood of enshittification.
Threads by Meta is on the fediverse. So by describing the fediverse as good, it sounds like Threads is just like Mastodon.
The topic is too complicated to quickly explain to a novice. Because now you have to explain FOSS, and why that’s sometimes good, but not always since bad actors have used FOSS .
Not just tech illiterate but also advertising illiterate. The regular folks I know seem happy to wade through endless platform ads and influencer sales pitches. Enshittification can really be a slowly boiling frog type scenario.
That’s great, I suppose less concentration to a single platform is a better direction.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky? I would imagine whatever ills plague Twitter would also eventually come to Bluesky, because people are there. And people are people. We don’t seem to have a solution to the problem - which is a specific subset of people intent on harm, and allowing them direct and wholesale access to the social fabric.
So easy nowadays to fabricate rage-inducing and follower-generating bait. No time for truth and no plan to really get there. How long before we see someone take a stab at a ministry of truth?
The block function is heavily used. Whole block lists get passed around quite frequently. I've never really seen much hate on there unless I'm clicking into something obviously heated politically. Other people may have other experiences, but the current culture there is to not engage the hate farmers and just block people instead
This has been my experience too. The community moderation tools on top of the tools available to moderate my own feed are leagues ahead of other platforms. Being able to temporarily block keywords feels really awesome in avoiding dumb shit that can blast through social media.
Nuclear block plus a culture of not feeding the trolls means the only toxic accounts I’ve run across are just a day or two old. Block and move on. The experience can only be as negative as each user lets it be.
Which is honestly how it should be, feeding the trolls or tolerating them is detrimental to any platform, even engaging with them to correct them is giving them fuel.
Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don’t know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.
In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out. On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with. I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.
In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out.
I mean… it depends, not everything can be descalated, dependes on the person, their intentions and the place.
On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with.
Pretty much, people know how to behave or they don’t… and they can learn or not, but we have no reason to tolerate the village idiots.
I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.
I remember old forums, there was no tolerance for trolls and you could get punished along the troll for feeding it, so people learned to leave them alone and just report them, good sites/forums were heavily moderated and curated.
I think it started to go down the drain when moderation/ownership was removed from the users, just like with community servers for multiplayer games, companies care only about their own interests so allowing trolls who cause engagement by bait were more than welcome, they just pretended to moderate the services.
Nowadays… well reddit punishes mods who actually moderate the subs so that’s a waste of time, the fediverse seems to need to learn to just not tolerate nor engage with trolls… and the users have to learn to just report and block, just like the BlueSky users do so the mods can locate and remove the trolls (either users or servers).
I think admins/mods must be MUCH less tolerant of possible trolls and not be afraid about curating the content to their liking… it’s their server/community after all.
Isn’t it more in the real world people don’t interact with close to the number of people they do on the internet, and they never encounter or avoid a lot of people which acts like a real world filter or blocklist?
Internet is like walking in a store and then being flooded with hearing the thoughts of everyone in the store like you’re experiencing a telepathic attack.
In the real world you don’t get obvious bad faith actors in your face shouting nonsense very often, and when you do, you usually walk away from them too. It’s not helpful to engage with people who are actively working against cooling down.
Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don’t know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.
I think it’s the general focus on driving engagement and feeding the algorithm.
And what’s the excuse for things like the fediverse where there’s no algorithm?
It isn’t rare to find troll accounts (specially on news communities) and people keep engaging with them, I doubt people even attempt at reporting them since they last a long time
Most people here are (or were) still engaged on other social networks. The engagement seeking mindset is just so widespread, that people bring it with them to the fediverse where it makes no sense.
At least that’s my answer. Not saying it is the cause, but it sounds about right to me.
It’s worse that this makes even more sense since we are mostly people who left reddit and it’s so obvious that people have no idea what the Report button is for over there.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky?
Yes, but I think that’s temporary. When you have tens of millions of users, that’s inevitable. Right now a lot of people are on their honeymoon periods, but I already see sprouts of negative attitude.
I really enjoy Mastodon, but it seems to be too confusing with all the servers. I don’t know why, but maybe because people have been conditioned by big tech to use centralised services. Especially Gen Z that grew up with this very big tech controlled internet.
They could just put their own instance alive,
not very hard for them, after they shown us what they can do,
They can make the changes happen, they showed us already.
And thoses who wants the feed, just have to subscribe.
Valve is already under fire for Nazi content in fringe parts of Steam Community (warranted or not); I don’t think they want to tackle responsibility of moderating another large social network.
yeah ive seen this, unfortunatelly.
But they could really hire a community manager, a little team of coms, and an enginneer/technician, devoted to theirs socials services.
If I wasn’t on Lemmy, I wouldn’t even know about Mastodon. It’s not really something you hear of outside of the fediverse, in my experience. Meanwhile, BlueSky is gaining traction and talked about everywhere. Most people don’t care that it’s not exactly decentralized. Most of the things the users on the fediverse care about are not things the average, not-very-tech-saavy person cares about.
Mastodon is annoyingly gatekeepy too. They are super heavy on content warnings, and tend to not play nice when someone doesn’t respect those unspoken rules.
Also, servers are much more likely to defederate with each other, due to what some perceive as “minor scuffles”.
All in all I understand why people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon, it’s simpler and the search function isn’t borked to hell and back either. Blocking is also incredibly effective on Bluesky, if you block someone neither you nor they will ever see each other’s content again.
Valve ceo built a billion dollars mega yacht fleet off selling proprietary games through a proprietary third party launcher. A free and open source decentralized platform does not appeal to them for obvious reasons.
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