As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta's X competitor, Instagram Threads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn’t there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They’ve had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don’t think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you’re looking at something like Twitter.
You can not have one without the other. Influencers look for audiences. If the community has no influencer, it means that the audience is irrelevant or inexistent.
I preferred the Internet that isn’t driven by non-genuine posts by profit driven influencers. I am glad that those people don’t like mastodon so they don’t ruin another platform.
You are missing the point. The point is that there is nothing to ruin here.
The Fediverse is by and large composed of antsy, narcissistic tweenagers who never created anything and use this space as some form of support network. They think that just because they are outcasts they are part of some counterculture movement (like the punks or the OG hackers from the early internet), but they miss the very important part that these movements need to create something meaningful.
All they can do is ridicule (parts of) the status quo and resort to shoot down anything and anyone who is willing to take any risks to effect any type of change. And for all the talk about diversity and inclusivity, one can read any news headline or article here and know exactly what is going to be the reaction from the people
The only way to break away from this unbearably boring monoculture is by bringing more people. We need to get of our comfort zones, dealing with differences and learning that (some) conflict is important. The alternative is stagnation, and culture-wise stagnation is the same as death.
Is anyone here opposed to bringing more people? I’m upset that people are going to an unfederated platform like BlueSky. I wish more people to join, no matter who they are.
I haven’t been on mastodon much, but lemmy is quite diverse.
Apart from a bunch of thriving specialist techie communities, what I see there is mostly tiny spaces dominated by intolerant groupthink and tyrannical moderators.
Indeed I just had a very bad experience in one of those that left me (almost) regretting the R-site.
What are you interested in? [email protected] promotes a lot of different communities, which usually have less moderation debates than the largest ones
How do you bring more people? I don’t think people would disagree with that, the hesitancy is from for profits and EEE. People want the fediverse to grow.
You can not EEE an open standard. XMPP didn’t die when Facebook and Google dropped it.
We need to assess the power imbalances and strategize accordingly. This whole “boycott Threads” reaction, for example, works in their favor. They already have hundreds of millions of users. Because of the whole “FediPact”, now we have lots of people migrating away from Mastodon because their instance does not let them follow some celebrity or NBA player, or sports journalist. Instead of blocking Threads, we should have worked to let people away from Twitter and into Threads so that they could learn and understand how federation works.
After this would be the time to go after the popular YouTubers and say “hey, why don’t you setup your instance instead of using Threads? You won’t lose your audience, and you have more control over your brand and online presence!”
This is what any sane person with minimal understanding of marketing would think. But instead of that, we got some reactionary crybabies that want to have the Fediverse only to themselves.
The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players. It’s (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it’s not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it’d get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. …eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it’s about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. …destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it’s value is gone.
I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don’t need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is ‘linking’ with any for profit entity.
Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it’s going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.
I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.
Not a comeback. My point is that no one cares about this space at all. We had for the past two years everything in our favor to dismantle corporate-controlled social media, but the people that are here have ridiculously small ambitions and seem to keep the Fediverse completely irrelevant.
How else can I put it? Imagine that you live in corner of the woods of Bumfuck Alabama and you say, “I’m so glad we don’t have McDonalds around here”, like it was some reason to be proud. It’s not, it just means that you live in a place so desolate that not even McDonalds thinks it’s worth it to open a shop there.
You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.
There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.
Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.
Maybe, just maybe, if your followers aren’t willing to give up something vile because it’s giving them a dopamine hit, they’re not adding as much value to your life as you think.
There is absolutely nothing “vile” about quote tweets. When used properly, it is used to enrich a discussion. It’s not just because some idiot minority abuses a feature that it should be removed entirely. If well meaning people look at two different systems, and one of them is arbitrarily gutted of useful functionality, guess which one they will choose?
Sure, at the surface level of tweeting back and forth, there is nothing vile. But the very act of using the platform funds an agent of chaos that is doing very real harm, and to ignore that because it is inconvenient is at the most charitable interpretation a selfish and callous act. There are other means of discourse, and those with input that is valuable will follow you.
„The content“ is there. Its just the addiction inducing, never ending dopamine that doesnt flow as freely which is great.
If you follow the topics that are most prevalent on the fedi (eg freedom, activism, technology, diversity) you will not run out unless you scroll for many hours a day, which is suggests you find yourself a hobby.
Also, the self fulfilling prophecy of „the fediverse is too small, I go to big platform“ will keep the fediverse small.
Boring, boring, boring, boring. This is all “meta-converaation”, like this exact thread.
Where are the musicians, the woodworkers, the DIYers, the athletes, the architects, the photographers, the wannabe chefs, the contrarian educators who do not toe the line of Academia?
Totally agree. But i don’t know if there is any hope, so many fedi people seem to not want any normies (people not working with computers i guess) entering.
I feel this and some of the other comments in this thread are missing the point. It’s not about me and my followers. It’s about the news sources and topics that I search for or follow. They simply haven’t moved to Mastodon and where notable individuals that I follow have tried, it simply hasn’t worked out due to lack of interest. I’m not interested in the fediverse as a topic in itself, I’m interested in the topics and events I want to follow. Something happens and I can find and read and watch clips about it on Twitter. Not so Mastodon.
If lucifer was the only one having ice cream and you wanted ice cream, you would have to either go to lucifer or make your own (or ask someone to do it for you).
This is what the fediverse is about. Regaining control of our media. Your point that it is in any way too lacking to join or invest time into is self defeating as you and many others are needed to get it to that point.
So I‘m saying either accept that your work is needed to get any non billionaire owned/non corporate platform to work or stop pretending you care about your data.
If there aren’t people building this alternative, in their free time, for free, then it won’t exist. Fair enough. Much credit to them.
But it looks like @[email protected] is just an ordinary user with a busy life who wants to consume content in a way that better respects their privacy and autonomy. That is also a fair demand. Not everyone needs to be a producer.
Bluesky is probably going to capture more of that than Mastodon. But threads is similarly struggling to develop it as well and they have very low barrier for new signups for anyone with a Facebook or Instagram account.
My experience has been better. User engagement is much higher per follower and the discussions don’t devolve. They’re much more useful and/or interesting. KPIs don’t measure everything.
mastodon had their chance during the first exodus but they refused to listen to what twitter users wanted and shot down things like lists, quote tweets, and privacy controls.
Mastodon just went over the 2 million user mark. The switch to fediverse and fediverse adjacent is going pretty quick.
I’ve been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn’t there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They’ve had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don’t think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you’re looking at something like Twitter.
Guess it’s not for you then. I’m having a blast. A lot of my friends are now in it and the last year or so have been great.
And more and more people seem to be moving.
Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?
You can not have one without the other. Influencers look for audiences. If the community has no influencer, it means that the audience is irrelevant or inexistent.
I preferred the Internet that isn’t driven by non-genuine posts by profit driven influencers. I am glad that those people don’t like mastodon so they don’t ruin another platform.
You are missing the point. The point is that there is nothing to ruin here.
The Fediverse is by and large composed of antsy, narcissistic tweenagers who never created anything and use this space as some form of support network. They think that just because they are outcasts they are part of some counterculture movement (like the punks or the OG hackers from the early internet), but they miss the very important part that these movements need to create something meaningful.
All they can do is ridicule (parts of) the status quo and resort to shoot down anything and anyone who is willing to take any risks to effect any type of change. And for all the talk about diversity and inclusivity, one can read any news headline or article here and know exactly what is going to be the reaction from the people
The only way to break away from this unbearably boring monoculture is by bringing more people. We need to get of our comfort zones, dealing with differences and learning that (some) conflict is important. The alternative is stagnation, and culture-wise stagnation is the same as death.
Is anyone here opposed to bringing more people? I’m upset that people are going to an unfederated platform like BlueSky. I wish more people to join, no matter who they are.
I haven’t been on mastodon much, but lemmy is quite diverse.
Apart from a bunch of thriving specialist techie communities, what I see there is mostly tiny spaces dominated by intolerant groupthink and tyrannical moderators.
Indeed I just had a very bad experience in one of those that left me (almost) regretting the R-site.
What are you interested in? [email protected] promotes a lot of different communities, which usually have less moderation debates than the largest ones
How do you bring more people? I don’t think people would disagree with that, the hesitancy is from for profits and EEE. People want the fediverse to grow.
The profit-motive and capitalism is not the problem. Corporatism is.
Mastodon and Lemmy are doomed to stay irrelevant for as long as their leaders believe that “the Community” will support them.
You can not EEE an open standard. XMPP didn’t die when Facebook and Google dropped it.
We need to assess the power imbalances and strategize accordingly. This whole “boycott Threads” reaction, for example, works in their favor. They already have hundreds of millions of users. Because of the whole “FediPact”, now we have lots of people migrating away from Mastodon because their instance does not let them follow some celebrity or NBA player, or sports journalist. Instead of blocking Threads, we should have worked to let people away from Twitter and into Threads so that they could learn and understand how federation works.
After this would be the time to go after the popular YouTubers and say “hey, why don’t you setup your instance instead of using Threads? You won’t lose your audience, and you have more control over your brand and online presence!”
This is what any sane person with minimal understanding of marketing would think. But instead of that, we got some reactionary crybabies that want to have the Fediverse only to themselves.
The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players. It’s (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it’s not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it’d get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. …eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it’s about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. …destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it’s value is gone.
I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don’t need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is ‘linking’ with any for profit entity.
Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it’s going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.
I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.
I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.
It’s okay, they don’t care about you either…
Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,
Not a comeback. My point is that no one cares about this space at all. We had for the past two years everything in our favor to dismantle corporate-controlled social media, but the people that are here have ridiculously small ambitions and seem to keep the Fediverse completely irrelevant.
How else can I put it? Imagine that you live in corner of the woods of Bumfuck Alabama and you say, “I’m so glad we don’t have McDonalds around here”, like it was some reason to be proud. It’s not, it just means that you live in a place so desolate that not even McDonalds thinks it’s worth it to open a shop there.
To each its own, I like it here.
What would you suppose it is ambition, to feed off influencers? What good would that bring to the platform?
If the people who used it would benefit at least. But then again, that’s cryptocurrency culture, so I don’t know if both complete each other.
You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.
There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.
Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.
This was genuinely funny. Thanks.
That can be difficult if your livelihood depends on it. Artists for example.
Maybe, just maybe, if your followers aren’t willing to give up something vile because it’s giving them a dopamine hit, they’re not adding as much value to your life as you think.
There is absolutely nothing “vile” about quote tweets. When used properly, it is used to enrich a discussion. It’s not just because some idiot minority abuses a feature that it should be removed entirely. If well meaning people look at two different systems, and one of them is arbitrarily gutted of useful functionality, guess which one they will choose?
Sure, at the surface level of tweeting back and forth, there is nothing vile. But the very act of using the platform funds an agent of chaos that is doing very real harm, and to ignore that because it is inconvenient is at the most charitable interpretation a selfish and callous act. There are other means of discourse, and those with input that is valuable will follow you.
„The content“ is there. Its just the addiction inducing, never ending dopamine that doesnt flow as freely which is great.
If you follow the topics that are most prevalent on the fedi (eg freedom, activism, technology, diversity) you will not run out unless you scroll for many hours a day, which is suggests you find yourself a hobby.
Also, the self fulfilling prophecy of „the fediverse is too small, I go to big platform“ will keep the fediverse small.
Be the change you want to see.
Boring, boring, boring, boring. This is all “meta-converaation”, like this exact thread.
Where are the musicians, the woodworkers, the DIYers, the athletes, the architects, the photographers, the wannabe chefs, the contrarian educators who do not toe the line of Academia?
Totally agree. But i don’t know if there is any hope, so many fedi people seem to not want any normies (people not working with computers i guess) entering.
[email protected] for other communities suggestions
Come on, you know that I’m talking about the people…
I don’t want to make Mastodon propaganda, but Mastodon talks around technology are much better than Twitter ever was.
People post to the communities.
With this comment I was bringing them visibility, which is usually an issue.
On the side I keep promoting Lemmy on /r/Redditalternatives
Once we’ll get more people, and they’ll know where to find content, we’ll be able to solve that issue
I feel this and some of the other comments in this thread are missing the point. It’s not about me and my followers. It’s about the news sources and topics that I search for or follow. They simply haven’t moved to Mastodon and where notable individuals that I follow have tried, it simply hasn’t worked out due to lack of interest. I’m not interested in the fediverse as a topic in itself, I’m interested in the topics and events I want to follow. Something happens and I can find and read and watch clips about it on Twitter. Not so Mastodon.
You are missing the point.
If lucifer was the only one having ice cream and you wanted ice cream, you would have to either go to lucifer or make your own (or ask someone to do it for you).
This is what the fediverse is about. Regaining control of our media. Your point that it is in any way too lacking to join or invest time into is self defeating as you and many others are needed to get it to that point.
So I‘m saying either accept that your work is needed to get any non billionaire owned/non corporate platform to work or stop pretending you care about your data.
You’re both right.
If there aren’t people building this alternative, in their free time, for free, then it won’t exist. Fair enough. Much credit to them.
But it looks like @[email protected] is just an ordinary user with a busy life who wants to consume content in a way that better respects their privacy and autonomy. That is also a fair demand. Not everyone needs to be a producer.
Bluesky is probably going to capture more of that than Mastodon. But threads is similarly struggling to develop it as well and they have very low barrier for new signups for anyone with a Facebook or Instagram account.
My experience has been better. User engagement is much higher per follower and the discussions don’t devolve. They’re much more useful and/or interesting. KPIs don’t measure everything.
Many people are most interested in profit as their only KPI and mastodon puts up a lot of hurdles for those people.
It’s not the best platform for the profit driven, and I much prefer it that way.
mastodon had their chance during the first exodus but they refused to listen to what twitter users wanted and shot down things like lists, quote tweets, and privacy controls.
mastodon is very gatekeeper-y
And they sold out the people, who tried to help by posting, to Meta.