1y ago

As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users

techcrunch.com As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users

While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its Tweetdeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s de...

Fediverse @lemmy.world

techcrunch.com /2023/07/03/as-twitter-flounders-mastodon-refreshes-its-official-app-for-android-users/

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As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users

techcrunch.com /2023/07/03/as-twitter-flounders-mastodon-refreshes-its-official-app-for-android-users/

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I really wish more online personalities would move to Mastodon, right now it's hard to justify when most of what I use Twitter for is to follow different online creators and such. And just none of them are moving over yet. It looks like Bluesky is where a lot of them are looking. It's also decentralized, but honestly I'm not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project. I don't like ActivityPub as a tech myself and would be more interested in a holepunch kind of approach myself, but honestly it's the most mature decentralized tech there is right now and it seems like the world is moving that way. Just wish the world would move quicker!
- It’s also decentralized, but honestly I’m not a big fan of jumping on another Jack Dorsey project
  Jack Dorsey is the reason why some of these perennially online personalities moved to Bluesky. The AT protocol maybe decentralized but there's no unofficial instances of it yet (afaik).
  
  I'm on both, and both vibes are pretty great. I prefer Mastodon simply because the app is superbly made, tiny file size, no trackers etc. Bluesky is a buggy mess right now. Also, 3rd party apps on Mastodon are amazing.
  
  I see plenty of people on BlueSky without .bluesky.social in their @. Doesn't mean they're on another instance?
- That's honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta's Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it's on the record that they've been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.

Also, remember there are a bunch of nice 3rd party options for Android, like: Tusky (personal favorite), Fedilab, Megalodon, & Tooot
- I've been trying Tusky and Fedilab. They are better experiences for sure.
  Just tried the new official app and it is much better than what it was before but the 3rd party offerings are still ahead as of now.
  Just my 2 cents.
- Wait Tusky is not the official app? I always assumed it was
  
  I've heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter...uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, "it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use". At least, that's what I've heard. Never verified this myself.
  Tusky is definitely decent though.
  
  It's not! The official app is relatively new, and Tusky has more features, or did the last time I compared.
  
  It's not! But it's my favourite too.
- And don't sleep on Phanpy, despite being a PWA it really is excellent.
  
  Thanks for Phanpy. I like Pinafore and Fedilab, Tooot was nice - but I think I will stick with Phanpy. It is such a pretty webapp.

I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I'm part of on twitter. Ever since musk's takeover, I've been using twitter less and less.
- Same here. I love how fluid Mastodon's app is, especially compared to Lemmy's. But I scroll for a bit and there's nothing that interests me on my timeline.
  
  No one is going to feed you content. It's a different way to think and consume media. You just gotta start following people or hashtags and see which content and people are posting things that interest you. Go the the local feed of the instance of the world feed and watch things unfold.
  But you gotta bootstrap it. There's a lot of interesting people and content in it.
  There's a few sites that help with discovery by listing relevant people and topics.
  There's hashtags important to follow at the start, for example #fediverseMigration where lots of posts trying to help new people and guiding them appear.
  I know it may hurt a little at the beginning, but it's so worth it and rewarding. So, don't quit and give it a little bit to grow on you. It's a new experience so not everything will feel similar to what one knows previously.
  And, the amazing thing that on mastodon one being able to directly interact and comment on lemmy posts is just mind-blowing.
  So. Good luck. And Thanks for all the fish.
  
  Hit "Explore" and follow hash tags to grow your list of accounts to follow. It really helps a lot! Mine used to be like 2 minutes of scrolling and I'm done for the day. Now it's....um....I should get back to work.
  
  I mean, isn't that a good thing? You shouldn't be doom scrolling anyways
  Also, that's a temporary measure. As more people migrate, there will be more content.
  
  Same. It feels like Mastodon isn't anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users
  
  there is still some work needed to be done on sync for lemmy meanwhile, you can try connect or liftoff for Lemmy
  
  Same. It feels like Mastodon isn't anywhere close to approaching critical mass of users necessary for it to take off.
- One of Mastodon's upsides, the lack of an algorithm also hurts it, I find.
  It's surprisingly difficult to find new and interesting users to follow, since they don't suggest anything, but at the same time, the only way to find users is seemingly to browse your local instance's users, which won't cover interesting things from other instances (unless they're specifically boosted).
  
  Best thing for discovery in Mastodon is to follow hashtags. This is algorithm-like in that you will see posts from people you don't follow, on the topics you have an interest in.
  
  Discoverability was largely the reason why I got in fights with Mastodon users over the platform being in a bad place when Twitter had its first wave of musk awfulness.
  I find that the system is now much improved, but man, I can't stress out just how bad an impression I was given that everyone seemed to think searching posts by tags was a bad thing, and that tags in general were, in fact, objectively broken at the time. Like, people go on social media with purposes in mind.
  It's fixed now. Tag activity is shown correctly. Tag history also gets shown correctly. You can also follow tags. That's all I wanted, and acknowledgement of it, not a philosophy discourse.
- I find it kinda helps after using a tool to import my follows from Twitter to here
  
  I wish I knew that existed before Twitter shut down the API. It doesn't work anymore.

First time I gave Mastadon a shot now. It's nice.
Special thanks to Kbin to introduce me into decentralized social media.

Maybe I should give Mastodon another try.. I couldn't really find anyone to follow.
- To get an immediate curated feed, I recommend following @lisamelton@mastodon.social. She boosts all sorts of interesting stuff from others. It's a great way to find other accounts you might want to follow.
  
  Another good account to follow is @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services (https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows) They highlight interesting accounts to follow.
  
  I am here since the blackout using Jerboa, but I get an error when I click on it, doesn't it work in the App? I tried the instance website and put it in the search bar, but it doesn't work either and unfortunately I don't find any tutorials how to follow mastodon users from lemmy, do you know how? Another thing I don't quite understand: with my Lemmy account I can use other Fediverse services like mastodon. And my understanding is that kbin is not the same as lemmy, but another service such as mastodon? So why does kbin come up in my all feed but nothing from other Fediverse services?
- That was my struggle too... I open it every once in a while, but it's the same people posting similar things.

Despite mastadon being more active, it seems less lively. I guess it's because I preferred Reddit over Twitter in the first place.
- Lemmy is also pretry similar to old.reddit. No recommendation or anything so its an easy migration.
  I have only used Twitter and Mastodon sporadically, but its definitely more of a pain to discover communities since its more user oriented
- Longer form content is always more fun for me. Structured topics and conversations are way better to exchange ideas and shitposts.

I'm using Tusky for now. It has more customization options than the official app. One thing I don't like about the official app is that everything looks gigantic.
- I like and use Tusky on my phone, and it also works as a Pixelfed client. But it's not very good on tablets (in landscape). It not only doesn't maximize the width of the screen, but you can't scroll the feed from those unused sides of the screen. And one UI feature that Tusky is missing is the indented thread-depth lines that help you keep track of all the different reply sub-threads.
  https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/1469
  https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2541
  https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/975

The problem with mastodon is everyone is on mastodon.social
- I mean, same can be said for Lemmy, how most people are on world/ml/beehaw. Doesn't have to be the case, though. I have two accounts on Mastodon, one on Baraag the other on Mas.to, alternative instances exist
- Personally, I am non cryptodon.lol but yes you are right. It also happens with matrix as most of the people are in matrix.org instance.

How good is Mastodon in general to follow football news? Transfer rumours and all?
- Not there yet - but there are bot accounts that feed you their tweets. LOL Look up the accounts you have on Twitter for news and you'll most likely find a bot account for them on Mastodon. That's how I'm keeping up to date.

I did open a Mastodon account. But don't use it much 😶
- I made one at the same time I joined Lemmy but Mastodon seems like a ghost town
  
  I'm so confused by comments like this. I use Mastodon every day and it seems pretty active to me.
  
  Follow some hashtags. Makes it active very quickly and lets you find accounts to follow.
  
  It seems like Mastodon and Twitter operates on different principles or I am missing something.
  
  https://mander.xyz/comment/749912

The update is really great. Enjoying it a lot.
- What's a good way of finding people to follow on Mastadon?
  
  I search tags, and if someone posts something interesting under a tag I like, I'll check their page out.
  
  Like the other user said following tags is a great way to engage with things you choose. Along the way, you'll find people that you find interesting and then you can follow them directly. It's much less about seeking people and more letting them come to you.
  
  No idea. I mainly follow tags lol
  
  @jasonwaterfalls @Elegast I've just starting searching hashtags and finding people to follow that way
  
  One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.
  There's also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as http://fedi.directory and https://communitywiki.org/trunk .
  Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you're interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: https://fedi.garden Check out their feeds and see who posts things you're interested in.
  Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called "groups", which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. "retweets") every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate@a.gup.pe, and every time someone pings that (it's like including a hashtag), it'll boost that post and I'll see it too.
  
  If you're on their mobile app, press and hold the home button for a second or so, and a list of recommended accounts will show up.

Mastodon app is great for people coming from Twitter but I love my Megalodon <3
- Megalodon is the best!

Mastodon seems to become yet another rage cage like twitter, first thing I saw when I opened it yesterday was people removed about politics, that's a BIG nope for me
- If you don't care about the world, don't follow people who do?
- Thats a weird statement as you have a lot of options to change your feed and filter stuff out you don't like.
- Like all social media, you have to curate it. I follow hashtags for cats, books, writing, fandoms, etc. The rage is minimum then because my homepage doesn't have politics or news. I actually do follow a couple of news sources, but their stuff is surrounded by an ocean of fun things so it's not nearly as bad.
- Maybe this is just how all "Scream into the void" platforms inevitably ends up.
- You must've joined the wrong server then, because mine isn't like that. And you can just filter out and follow the things you want as well. There's no algorithms to automatically feed you stuff.
  
  I didn't even sign up, I just wanted to see what it was all about, whining about politics and general madness, just like twitter, not for me, so I didn't end up signing
- It is extremely political, I've had a hard time filtering it all out. Every account posting memes tends to feel like they have a huge political chip on their shoulder. Kinda exhausting. I've had trouble finding the content that I used Twitter for.

I don't think I'll ever make a Mastodon account, but I do like the rss feature so had been relying on that to get updates on certain projects. Now just need some Twitter accounts that haven't moved over to do the same. Some have websites, but don't even update it and relied solely on twitter to push update.
Twitter is mainly for self promotion than for users, so this seems pretty disruptive for them than it is for people like me.
- I've found that my lemmy.world account can be followed by my mastodon.social account. I wonder if it is possible to log in to a mastodon client with it?
  
  No. Lemmy and Mastodon federate using the ActivityPub protocol, but that's not good enough for making mobile apps or other clients. They each have their own API for their apps and an app made for one federated platform won't be able to log into another platform's server/instance.
  All your interaction with the Fediverse is done through your instance.

I couldn't find the button to follow hashtags on the official app, but it's there on Moshidon.

I tried a lot, but Toot! is the best of the bunch.

I'll have to give it another try - Megalodon is my current favourite

I tried to use mastodon but it never stuck for me. Mostly because of the lack of communities that I'm part of on twitter. Ever since musk's takeover, I've been using twitter less and less.

Maybe I should give it another look. I was frustrated that I couldn't view federated content, so I switched to a webapp.

@AlmightySnoo NGL it doesn't seem to have a #federated timeline still

I noticed it looked slightly different, but I haven't noticed much difference

Man there's literally only one thing stopping me from using mastodon and that's likes.
I know marketing, and shit, and likes sometimes skew things, but without likes any toot is given the same weight, no matter if it's a good or bad toot. There's no way for me to see through the chaos that emerges from this.
I know there are reasons not to do this, but I damn well know I'm not the only one, and I'm sure it would make it more appealing for a lot of ppl unfamiliar with mastodon. You could even make it optional so ppl can turn it off and there would be no harm done.
- I think there are likes, it's just a star icon instead.
  
  Was about to say, it's the boost function
- def likes on mastadon now

Nothing can beat Fedilab. Trunks is a close second

I use it. So far I like it.

113 comments