Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.
im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they’re BAD things
It’s weird to me how obsessed some people are with proving to the world that their social media platform of choice is superior. The Fediverse works, we have content, and anyone who decides to seek out a platform that offers what the Fediverse offers can join. Tell your friends about your experience if they might be interested but if they don’t stick with it you don’t have to be all salty about it.
Agreed. It’s silly.
I like Mastodon. It’s like social media from 2010, chronological, only seeing what you want, great curation tools, and no ads or stupid algorithm. Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, though it can vary by instance.
I haven’t used BlueSky, but I imagine it feels pretty familiar, which is what a lot of people want, and that’s cool too.
They can both be good things.
Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is
Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)
The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)
That’s definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha
And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn’t allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?
Mastodon would be fine if all I cared to follow was Linux news and if I understood German and Japanese.
Hell yeah! Sign me up!
People tried to bring more content through bridges. Mastodonians promptly started crying about how it literally puts peoples lifes in danger. Some still have #nobridge tags in their profiles to this day, thinking it matters somehow in an open network.
Yeah swear. Gardening would be fine if all I cared about was dirt and weeds.
Fucking me the change you wanna see. Invite your friends to use the platform and post your own shit
Or I could go to bluesky where that change is already in place.
If all Mastodon wants is linux shit then only linux people are gonna stick around. Never mind that I get the exact same linux posts on bluesky from the same people on top of other topics I care to follow.
While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.
lol
That cracked me up
That’s it, pack it up. We’re done here
Yeah maybe posting it here doesn’t really help?
Nope. Every post I’ve seen about Bluesky has me confused for this exact reason. If it wasn’t for people talking about Lemmy in mass on another platform, I’d have no idea what the Fediverse is.
As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.
This is the exact reason email never took off. /s
Email was invented in 1983.
It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.
Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.
Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.
Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
Basically, a single instance
If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn’t get overloaded?
You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname
This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.
That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.
When you make an account
Where?
Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.
Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.
Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.
i like the idea of a server choice virtually invisible feature!
Man, it feels like you guys haven’t spoken to a real human in decades…
Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail
I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
Wow, I wouldn’t have thought that Apple Mail is more popular than Gmail.
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
Same with Apple mail right? I never used an Apple device and was shocked to see them over Gmail because I thought Apple actually gives email service when I saw the graphApple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.
TIL
Apple does give email service for two decades now
Oh I see. Thanks for the clarification.
I don’t think I’ve ever received an e-mail from an Apple Mail address.
So you are saying Mastodon won’t take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a “default” where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned
It’s the solution on the user experience side, but not the backend/server side. For both infrastructure and idealogical reasons. These two things don’t have to be the same.
Disney parks wants park visitors to feel like their exploring, but design in such a way that thepy don’t actually stray that far from the preferred paths. Also they have clear sign posting.
There’s no reason the fediverse can’t design the opposite. Helping users into feeling like there’s a set path, and that they’re doing the right thing, while subtly encouraging exploration.
It’s just the opposite of where all talent and techniques of internet software design are right now, so it’s going to take some work.
Edit: Most people don’t jump into a hedge to get off the main road, they find a small, unplanned trail or desire path, then learn to navigate the jungle when that path ends.
Nevertheless email stays the defacto standard for business communication and has stayed intercompatible with a wide range of clients, servers and plugins. So this graph could be better but is apparently not a big issue as long as companies and unis keep running their own servers, forcing big tech to stay with the standards.
That works when the decentralized protocol is the 800 lb gorilla first. You can’t get there with the fediverse in this internet era, sadly.
Email also doesn’t have a moderation factor that requires emotional work.
The matrix protocol is a good example to prove you wrong. It has been popularized in the past 5-6 years (i.e. this era of the internet) it has well over 100 million users and growing, is being used in hundreds of universities and wont stop growing, is being used by government bodies all over the world and has unified most of the software dev landscape into one protocol. Its hard fucking work and you have to start with exactly those groups which are easier to convince and then you can move on to the average consumer. Thats how email did it and thats how matrix will do it.
I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.
It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).
All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.
For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
At least in the early days of email before gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, you would get assigned an email from your work, university, or ISP.
Not really. I mean, sure it’s the same concept, but email has been getting semi-centralized between the big players now, with gmail and maybe icloud getting the largest chunk of users. That would be similar to letting users choose between .world or .ml to sign up with, which is against the fediverse principle to spread the load as wide as possible.
When you present the lowest common denominator internet user with hundreds of instances to choose from and requiring them to think further than clicking through a sign-up page, you lose user interest pretty quickly.
I’m actually okay with semi-centralized. Most people need that to trust a platform, but it still gives you the option to self host if you really care.
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?
Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
Then it was fate and they should just accept it.
oof, i learned about hexb the hard way, so i feel for these hypothetical users already.
Yes honestly, we can manage what instances are pooled for on boarding.
The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.
Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.
If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.
See my reply to u/Rentlar, but for most users, yes, the easier the onboarding, the more accessible it is; the more people won’t immediately run away because they’re afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.
Or you make it like a traditional website with an API used by people making frontends, but the backend (the database) is decentralized, just like regular websites but instead of having a bunch of servers owned by AWS it’s just a bunch of people providing storage space on their servers.
What would be the incentive for people to do that?
What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
What is the incentive for people to share files via peer to peer networks?
What is the incentive for people to host Minecraft servers?
Need me to go on?
If in your mind the only incentive that people have to host instances is to have power over it and its users then they’re exactly the kind of people you don’t want to see hosting instances.
What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.
Well, in a system like I’m talking about, adding your server and storage space in the mix would make the whole thing more reliable and add to the storage capacity so more content can be hosted/backed up, just like paying for a second server to host a website allows to store more stuff and to start creating backups. You would still help build the community (the website), you just wouldn’t have an administrative role outside of the communities you would want to moderate.
The best thing for on-boarding are topic-specific instances, it makes picking one much easier.
Why can’t mastodon influencers create content on how easy it is to pick a server.
Ah make it like a food hall and anthropo the servers as food.
Just log onto mastodon.social and be done with it. That’s the one that will still be running until the they turn out the lights on the service, I figure. And then go kick in a buck or two a month on Patreon to help defray development and server costs. (Not being the product is worth a donation by itself, I figure.)
All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.
If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.
I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with “it’s easy, maybe you’re just dense?”.
Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn’t have the kind of people I’d want to interact with on it.
Unironically, this makes me pine for the old days where usenet discussions were lively.
I’ve never see anyone respond with hostility to any ‘how to’ question on mastodon. What you’ve described sounds totally unlike anything I’ve seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I’d be interested in seeing how that happened.
I think that if you want BlueSky like growth for activity pub… You federate with Threads. Or another hypothetical flagship where everyone is sent. Stop worrying spreading users around so much. People who join that network on the flagship can learn about federation and instance switching later.
I’m sure many people on activitypub would prefer that it grows more like it has though.
Mastodon isn’t even the best micro-blogging service on the Fediverse.
Which would you say is best?
Now there’s an argument to be had. I ave tried Mastodon and Firefish and found the latter to be far superior, feature-wise. I think Iceshrimp will be the *key fork that will finally the big breakout hit, especially with the Iceshrimp.net rewrite.
Lost me at .NET. Hard pass.
Why?
micro$hit
Misskey and the actual Forkeys are in TypeScript and Vue.js. And they all have the same bugs that you can’t just simply get rid of.
Iceshrimp.NET is a rewrite of Iceshrimp in C#, that’s why it’s named Iceshrimp.NET. It promises to get rid of all issues inherited from Misskey because it doesn’t have a bit of Misskey left in it anymore.
But maybe we need more rewrites in more languages to satisfy as many people as possible. A Catodon rewrite in Ruby on Rails for Mastodon fanbois and fangurlz, no matter what a chonker it’ll end up being. Sharkey rewritten in PHP to satisfy those who like things as easy and lightweight as Friendica & Co. And even more because not few say that both C# and Ruby on Rails and PHP suck.
Or is there anything that doesn’t suck at all? Go sucks because Google. Rust sucks because Mozilla. Python sucks because it’s Python being Python. And so forth.
Rust has almost nothing to do with Mozilla these days though.
rolls eyes
I thought the whole point of the fediverse was that it doesn’t matter which service you use, just as long as you’re in the pool.
The problem is partially that bluesky isn’t really the Fediverse. It doesn’t use the standard, and isn’t truly interoperable. Accounts can be bridged, but that’s a hacky workaround, not actual intercompatibility.
And threads is run by a company whose human rights violations would take a week just to read out loud.
The idea that the specific platform doesn’t matter isn’t a blanket statement, it’s a description of being interoperable, nothing more. Bluesky isn’t truly interoperable, and threads is run by Meta who facilitated ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the burning of whole villages in Myanmar despite countless explicit warnings that these things would happen if they didn’t take safety measures (not to mention all the other garbage Meta has done or enabled)
I do not see Twitter, Threads, or BlueSky as any part of the Fediverse since they are all for profit corporations. Fediverse is about being free of the corporate overlords.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
Threads is fully integrated. You can personally block them from your end, but thats all you.
It would be like saying “Dominos doesn’t make pizza. It has never been a pizza company”. With your logic being that you don’t like their pizza. Doesn’t make it true just because YOU don’t eat the pizza.
Bluesky I hear conflicting reports on. Some people say it is, because it can be, others say it’s not, because it’s not official. I get both sides on this.
But the last part…is objectively not true. It happrns to work that way FOR NOW. It just isn’t profitable enough for the major players to sink any real resources into.
The fact that it’s adfree has more to do with the fact that 60k people on all of Lemmy with most instances having a few hundred people “on” it, and also advertising companies not understanding the concept of federation.
I could start my own instance, and sell ads to corporate overlords. The biggest problem I’d face is the idea of trying to convince any company with money to spend that money on me putting an ad on for such a small audience.
If/when the fediverse ever gains momentum and becomes mainstream, you can guarentee that ads will be everywhere.
Because nobody owns the fediverse. Which means if I sell an ad on my instance, all federated instances will see the ad. Sure, you could defederate from my instance. But what would happen right now if lemmy.world sold ads? Is every instance going to defederate from the biggest instance, with the majority of communities? That would essentially break the fediverse.
We’re all on a service that you think is immune to centralization, but forgot the core concept that humans like to socially congragate. Which means it’s inevitable that there will always be one big dominant instance. Which means if this thing ever goes mainstream, the ads are coming, and they’ll be on all the big instances.
Yeah but they’re fighting over the inevitable ad revenue.
Mastodon emerges as the clear winner. It’s free from investor influence, ad-free, and controlled by a community that values user autonomy over profit.
That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this. The tech-abled and tech-writers are in as much of a bubble as the Democrats were this past election.
The vast majority of people using social media do so for entertainment and passive news consumption and a ton of rage bait. Who owns or controls it is entirely irrelevant - ex., TikTok.
Ads? You think people in 2024 still care about ads? I think a lot of them enjoy it. Moreover, if you’re a small or local business, you want a platform that allows you to promote your goods and services. This kind of opportunity is what made social media explode. If you were a community business, would you prefer to operate on a platform that was strictly chronological or one that allowed you to pay to get noticed? What if you were an “influencer”? While normal people may dislike this stuff, it’s this stuff that generates revenue for the platform and, like it or not, increases engagement.
This lack of openness confines users to BlueSky alone, making it difficult to connect with friends on other platforms without creating a separate account.
How has this prevented Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube from succeeding?
You’re trying to force a platform to do what you want it to do. You’re not objectively looking at what the majority of social media users want. When I tell people about interconnected platforms, they have no clue what that means or why they would want that. They just want one platform.
You and I recognize the benefits of the Fediverse meaning one application to access many platforms. That may be a reality we observe one day but for now, nothing is fully developed. You’re trying to convince people that robotaxies will replace vehicle ownership today when they’re not done deploying them.
Mastodon’s structure, lacking an algorithm to push specific content, gives users freedom to create a feed that genuinely reflects their interests. For those who are politically inclined, Mastodon has communities and accounts covering all sides, but there’s no algorithm driving you toward any specific viewpoint.
If Bluesky has an algorithm, I haven’t seen it. I get chronological posts from the accounts I follow with an occasional and subtle suggestion to follow other similar accounts. Many of the accounts I follow are news outlets, journalists, civic leaders, etc. Some of the accounts I followed on Twitter are finally joining Bluesky while less than a fraction of those are on Mastodon.
I’ve been using Mastodon more than Bluesky. I like the instance I’m a member of which is operated by people in my physical community. Today I saw that more and more members of my community have joined Bluesky, including my local paper. I can not express the joy I’ve felt this afternoon seeing a platform blossom like the Twitter of old.
Betamax was superior to VHS. DVD Audio was superior to SACD. You may think the flexibility of Windows or Android makes them superior to MacOS or iOS. Ultimately, it comes down to marketing and convenience.
How do you make Mastodon better? You have to get brands over there. You have to get journalists and news outlets over there. When CNN reports that someone said something on Twitter, that’s marketing for that platform. When [the news] starts reporting that [celebrity] or [president] posted on Mastodon - then maybe you’ll start getting some traction. But why would that person post something so important on a platform with so few users?
If Bluesky has an algorithm, I haven’t seen it. I get chronological posts from the accounts I follow with an occasional and subtle suggestion to follow other similar accounts. Many of the accounts I follow are news outlets, journalists, civic leaders, etc. Some of the accounts I followed on Twitter are finally joining Bluesky while less than a fraction of those are on Mastodon.
Bluesky does it even better IMO. Their default feed is a chronological feed of all the people you follow and you can add additional feeds that have their own algorithms (You can even create your own either with simple logic through something like skyfeed.app or code it entirely from scratch). This makes it much easier to choose what you want to see compared to Mastodon.
The feeds are the strongest feature Bluesky has.
Yeah - it feels more organic to me. Bluesky feels like a more well thought out Twitter. Mastodon feels like something built from Google Wave scraps.
I’m not sure how much of Dorsey’s DNA is left but it’s hard to imagine someone who has had so much success wouldn’t know what they’re doing. The board could certainly screw it up, just as Twitter’s did by selling, but it seems like they’re growing slowly and doing things in a productive way. Slow and intentionally growth seems to be the growing trend in tech.
With that said, I’m aware of the funding concerns and I’m trying to pay attention. Where will their money come from is still a question. Will they use ads or subscriptions? I’d prefer the option for either and not both. Is it actually an issue that someone tied to blockchain is involved? I’m not sure but I’m open to a plausible argument.
Personally I would prefer a subscription instead of ads. I hate ads. I’d rather pay directly.
Wouldn’t be too bad if they did the model of showing you a persistent banner ad with the option to pay $35 a year to get rid of it. I’d be down with that.
That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this.
For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.
To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.
I fully agree. This is why it won’t work. I dunno - maybe Gen Alpha or Gen Beta will care about this, assuming there’s a pendulum swing?
i know so many ppl that purchase products: “from an ad i saw on (whatever social media they use)” it blows my mind, seriously.
Yeah absolutely. I have never clicked through an ad on the internet. My click through rate is literally zero. On the incredibly rare instance that I see something I like from an ad, I do some research first then go to the relevant website.
That’s why they’re so pervasive, they work on the majority of people (that’s not us).
Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)
The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.
IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.
Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.
deleted by creator
We cannot win by changing the fediverse into something like what we left behind because it will no longer be the fediverse we know and love, all we have is the good fight of educating people on why it is better and ourselves as an example - a city on a hill to which others may flock if they see the shine, and it may not be a fight we can win but it is the only fight worth fighting.
