Mastodon isn’t even the best micro-blogging service on the Fediverse.
A summary of the standard mastodon front page:
- News report about Trump
- The temperature in Sudan
- The travel trajectory of a plane carrying people you’ve never heard of, going somewhere you’ve never heard of.
- A penis
- Ai art of Bart Simpson and a worm from Dune
- An AOC quote
- Furry porn, diaper optional
- A Linux distro professing a new update
- Someone’s Chaos Space Marine (it actually looks really nice and they really took their time)
I like it in a flea market kinda sense but, I mean, come on, man.
I’m not really following what’s the issue here? Sounds like a wide variety of content that is the perfect medium to find people to follow so you can get a more filtered and curated feed, which mastodon comfortably supports.
I don’t know any social media that boasts a decent news feed that you put 0 information into.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Bad idea. Bluesky’s just gonna end up like Twitter.
The Fediverse could get shitty in new ways too, but it can’t get Elon’d. Bluesky eventually will. The future is on the Fediverse. All we’re doing is delaying that future by swapping one corporation for another.
Though maybe that future needs to be delayed, because the Fediverse needs to lose its “yeah our app can do that thing you want, just edit a few variables in the source code”-style github energy.
Mastodon is ultimately usable, because I figured it out, but it should have been easier, and needs to get easier. Maybe it has the rise and fall of bluesky to figure that out.
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.
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.
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
Porn industry is certainly a bad thing though. It is quite hostile to women, and many have been harmed by it and wished they had a good exit.
Bit I definitely agree that progressive lean is a good thing. Fwiw I didn’t read this article.
The modern porn industry is much more independent than it used to be. Most creators control and own their content and choose where it gets uploaded initially. In the past, the porn business was absolutely abusive to their stars but I think it’s much less the case these days. Filmmakers have to fight for actors because if they don’t treat them well or pay them their worth, they’ll just post their own content directly to their fans. I’m sure there are still huge negatives but I just don’t think it’s as bad as it once was and I certainly don’t think the porn industry is something to be upset about these days.
I know women in porn who say the opposite.
Certainly some will say that, and even more would do if your environment is privileged (such as a safe neighborhood in the west or USA). You have to look at aggregate data, not anecdotes.
NGL I’m old enough now that I’d rather not see random tits in my feed.
I’ve been on Bluesky since February. I have yet to see any nudity that I didn’t actively seek out. It’s not too difficult.
Those are precisely why I like BlueSky. I don’t know if this was normal for twitter or what, but I learned you can search for a hashtag of your kinks (exp. #bigboobs) and you can see porn from people that have posted pics or posts about it. You can also hide other tags from ever showing up in the results, which lets you finetune what you’re looking for. I know the search works relatively the same as twitter with respect to hashtags, but was porn on twitter this whole time?
Mastodon is better than Bluesky, but unfortunately everyone is flocking to Bluesky. You have to go where the people are
@[email protected] people still seem to be flocking more to Threads since it is growing by more than million users per day for the past three months. Have to accept there isn’t just a single place people are going.
Bluesky is weird to me. I tried to use it for all of 15 minutes. One of the recommended feeds was called “Blacksky”, which is a feed specifically tailored for black users of Bluesky. I’m perfectly fine with that. I was, completely innocently, asking if there were other feeds based on race, similar to blacksky. I was threatened with a ban for racism. My question was very literally phrased “I see that blacksky exists, does the platform also have other race-specific feeds for users? Or only this one? It’s the only one that was recommended to me which seems strange for a new user.”
Being threatened with a ban goes way too far, but your question(s) as phrased does seem very much like sealioning even if that wasn’t the intention, so I can see why a moderator might think it was. Obviously, they should have clarified first.
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.
Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
It’s not too hard to understand. Some people just like to pretend it’s complicated. It’s literally the same system email uses, and almost everyone has figured out how to use that. There’s no marketing for it though. It’s only word-of-mouth, and let’s be honest, us fediverse users often aren’t the best at communicating simply.
It’d be smart if some fediverse instances provided an email account with your account. Then we can just tell people to create an email account and they’d accidentally have a fediverse account.
I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.
Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.
Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.
Really? What other platforms?
There’s this weird one I’ve heard some crazy people use called Lemmy or something. I don’t know. They’re too niche for me to consider thinking about.
I’m not sure if people looking for something laid out like Twitter or other microblogging sites would necessarily move to Lemmy, which is more like a forum. The activities on any social media may be largely the same, but presentation matters a lot.
To me, Lemmy and other forum style SM is like going to a bar and finding people to have a conversation, where as Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon/etc are like standing on a street corner and just yelling random thoughts.
I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.
“Leave that algorithm riddled platform and come to this new and shiny algorithm riddled platform” 🤦
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)
Yeah but they’re fighting over the inevitable ad revenue.
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.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
I included it because the article title included it, and I agreed it never would be. I then went farther and said I don’t consider any of those beside Mastodon to be Fediverse because they all are corporations creating platforms for shareholders, NOT users.
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.
To use your analogy, It’s actually more like they have the appearance of a pizza-like substance, but eating it you know it’s not pizza and never will be because it’s made of human waste.
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.
If it was pushing ads, absolutely! I believe the majority of us came to the fediverse to escape the ads/corporate enshitification, so the moment this stuff starts creeping in we can all just defederate them. Every admin knowing this would be the outcome I think also helps keep the fediverse “honest” as well.
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.
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
Gives big “both sides are bad” energy
That cracked me up
That’s it, pack it up. We’re done here
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?
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 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).
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.
Mastodon is better.
