Twitter users right now

It's crazy how many people will just click accept on security warning them that an app will access literally everything on their phone.
It's also crazy how many people don't even know that Threads is Meta... where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
- Living with influencers in their feeds.
  
  ugh. influencers are the worst. old man grumble
- where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
  They've been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn't visible affected them negatively.
  Of course it will eventually and they'll Pikachu face then but that's hardly comforting.
  
  Will it? Why? It won't affect most people personally ever, hence why most people don't really care.
- I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
  
  It's just another form of notification fatigue.
- You expect a lot from vegetables.
- How do you know that people don't know that Threads is Meta?

I've said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon's use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a "trending" tab, cause that's what users want to see.
- Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.
  Funny, that's exactly the reason I like Mastodon's feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I'm following and the posts they make.
  
  But twitter people love bullshit!
  
  No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.
  
  You're saying this... On Lemmy. You do know we have three different "trending" settings here, right?
  I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that's what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.
- The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you've got your sea legs
  
  Counterpoint: This tiny little hurdle keeps out the lazy and ignorant.
  
  The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.
  Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.
  Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone
  
  I really dont get this "Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for". I'm a barely technoliterate 30 something who's closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.
  Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.
- The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
  
  I think that's why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, "here's some stuff the community was into recently"
- That’s not what I want to see.
- Yeah, most people aren't on social media to see "what their friends are up to," they're there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest "thing" is. Mastodon doesn't have any of that, or at least it's very hard to find.
- Mastodon’s own app is kind of trash. Mastodon confused the shit out of me until I tried Ivory.
- It also doesn't really show a like count which I kinda get but it's really annoying

No, it's mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there's a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it's easier.
- I've been trying to hammer this point home.
  I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click "advanced sign-up" if you choose to do so.
  The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
  
  How?
  
  I wish the devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for creating a web site. The web will never catch on with all this complicated stuff.
- How is it difficult to find a server? Just pick whatever server you come across first and create an account.
  
  You tell the average dude about how servers exist and the first instinct is that it matters, so they stop, fret about the importance, look for a second, then just drop it because they dont give enough hoots yet to invest more effort versus using a centralized service.
  Want ppl to join, don't even tell them about servers. No choice paralysis, no fear of being wrong, nada
  
  It looks like most people don't have enough braincells to do such a simple task. Isn't it just nice to live in a world like this?
- Centralization is the core problem of social media though. It allows a single entity control over the data and as soon as you have that, you have Zuck.
  
  Centralization isn't the problem, privatization is. If the single entity that controlled the data was democraticly controlled and not run for profitability it'd be the best of all worlds.
- Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
  If they can't manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.
  
  Tbh, this is not a good solution.
  It dumps you in front of a wall of 22 pages of servers on my laptop (equivalent to 4.35 meters).
  Most of which have completely nonsensical descriptions.
  If I look at e.g. the first page (top 6 servers) I get these:
  mastodon.social: The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
  mstdn.jp: Mastodon日本鯖です．よろしくお願いいたします。 (Maintained by Sujitech, LLC)
  mstdn.social: A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.
  mastodon.world: Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.
  mas.to: Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.
  mastodon.online: A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
  Ok, so of these I can only rule out mstdn.jp, because I don't speak Japanese.
  mastodon.social and mastodon.official are, I guess, the "official" instances, with one of them being newer, for some reason. What does that mean? No idea. Is mastodon.social running out dated software? If not, why fork the instances at all?
  mstdn.social and mastodon.world mention that they are general purpose. Without (and even with) Fediverse experience, I would expect any social media platform to be general purpose unless otherwise stated. So they basically have no description.
  mas.to mentions only that it's "fast, up-to-date and fun". That basically has no meaning, except all other instances are slow, outdated and boring. So now I am worried.
  mstdn.social says it has a 500 character limit. Without googleing a new user would have no idea what the regular character limits are. And I have no idea whether that will cause issues when interacting with other instances.
  This page is like getting to a used car dealership without a clue about cars and you ask the car dealer to help you choose a car, and the dealer is like "Yeah, so I'm gonna help you. The right car for you is any car on the property of the dealership."
  
  Yeah but, it sounds like you can read and retain information long enough to make decisions on your own.
  Most people can't even grasp scrolling past the ads in a Google search. If they even get to Google in the first place.
- Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
  https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
  And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
- I've seen people lose their shit over having to "sign up for another app" and honestly I don't want people who have no respect for their data, privacy and have the personality of a wet cardboard right-wing conservative on the fediverse. That's why Fb exists. We are here as users because we chose to, as other people chose what best suits them.
- I think it's a good thing honestly. It brings a better quality of people here in my opinion.
- Exactly, I downloaded Mastodon and deleted it in one day. It was too complicated (in an annoying way) to use. I'm very IT literate, but I don't want to learn to use a platform, or do research. I want it to work out of the box, and I want it to be easy and the content to be accessible. Now think about all the non-IT literate people out there, of course Threads will do well because it's just create an account and you're good to go... If Mastodon was like that I would use it.

Nice meme but pls.
- Or!
  
  My favourite new format, thanks
- Most of the alt templates suck and the og is still good. Why change?
  
  Having an alleged pedo as a template always bothered me. We can do better here surely.
  
  That LaForge one is pretty slick though. I'd like to see more of that. If there's a Data version I propose they duke it out.

There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I'm a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
- Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
  
  Great opportunity to educate them, and then have them host your own instance :)
- Yeah, it's unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That's a massive number of people who could be easily informed "hey, wanna try our new product?" As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
  I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads' numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
  
  There was a time - when facebook/ig didn't exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn't make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
  Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
  I've been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
  It's one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
  We'll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we'll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the 'cool' thing around.
  Until then, it will be much much better.

The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user's perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta's not telling us...
- I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.
- To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn't anything fishy in there, but that's part of the reason.
- Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.
  Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.
  But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it's own. Multiple of them will take much more.
  Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread's version's APK and unpacked it.
  It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.
  The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.
  Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.
- Just different tech used most likely. Mastodon is a native app and Threads probably something like React Native, so it has a JS runtime inside and a bunch of dependencies.
- As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it's not even worth talking about - it'd be like 100kb at worst.
  The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are "jack of all trades" type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.
  When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that's been added over time and it's easier to just "copy/paste" most stuff they've ever written than to start over.
- This is the equivalent of suspecting one of two books to be containing Nazi propaganda because it has more pages in it.
  I'm not saying you should not be suspicious of the content of Threads but using size as a metric for it seems nonsensical to a software dev.

The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won't sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads' algorithm is pretty bad, but it's still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
- I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I'm not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don't have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
  I'm curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
  
  I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I'm into photography, but I don't want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.
  Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.
  The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn't it for me, and won't be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.
  I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.
  
  The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.
  Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.
  
  I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.
  I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.
- Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn't blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances' rules against advertising.
  
  The watch what you see with your own eyes now
  
  No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.

Don't forget the amount of data you'll be sharing, including health records
- Dang you weren’t kidding. I know everyone here fucking hates all things social media but I was actually enjoying the content on Threads.
  However they seem to be collecting literally everything about me even down to my workout routines and sleeping habits…this really gives me pause.
- Seriously question, how do they get access to your health data, short of reading emails or sms?
  
  It means data that has been recorded to your health app - steps per day/hour, sleep hours/analysis, heart rate readings if you have a watch or device that does that, estimated calories burned, etc.
  Useful data for you to know and control, but incredibly creepy for a corporation like Meta to take for no reason other than to build an intrusive ad profile.
  
  I'm guessing they record if you've been viewing a lot of, say, heartburn-related content, or once said "I suffer from heartburn".
  
  These are primarily the data stored by your health apps and sos information.
  If you've Android health info stored for emergency cases, some apps with right permission can access it. You know to save your life.
  Likewise, your health record on your health apps like Google/Apple/Samsung health store a lot of information about you like steps, sleep trends, heart rate, diabetes, water intake, and even period regularity.
  In normal cases these records should only be known to you or shared with apps you approve.
  Threads has no business normally to request these data, but if they want go serve you relevant ads, these become quite useful information.
  They can show you sanitary products when you're on period, or show ads for meds when you've high blood pressure. None of these should be monetised, but they can very well will be.
  
  I'm guessing there's no direct place for it there without reading email ( but even then your doctor should not be emailing you directly without a layer of encryption).
  Probably it's more of a "hey if we stumble on it it's ours now". Like if you subscribe to a lot of parkinson's info they probably can safely assume you or someone you know has Parkinson's. And they'll use that to shove ads in your face.

The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.
- Die average Twitter user doesn't even care about not knowing what it is.
  
  Why would you want them to die?

Literally this, or the Web3 BS Bluesky.
- Bluesky is at least federated, no?
  
  Using their own new protocol that no one else uses and they probably don't even implement themselves yet.
- What's wrong with Bluesky? 🤔
  
  It's founder circle is fully made by Web3 Crypto Scam people.
  
  What the hell is Bluesky?
  
  Last I heard their invite only platform already had a Nazi problem.
- The only thing I liked about bluesky was that i could use my domain as my handle...seemed cool.

Federation is so confusing! Why can't I just sign up at facebook.com where the rest of the internet is? You guys and your cryptofederatedarkweb.
- yes, that is exactly what the Internet should be, with full VR...
  
  Instructions unclear; dick in toaster.

Back to business as usual. The reality is that the majority of people can’t be bothered with privacy and other scandals from GAFAM.
The silver lining of the whole Reddit and Twitter fiasco is that more people are interested in and participating in a decentralized network. That’s a good thing for the community.
- Except they have thoroughly infiltrated the fediverse to the point where the simple idea of not federating with FACEBOOK of all companies is somehow controversial now.
- That's how I got here. I realized how many hours I was spending on Reddit and, once Slide stopped working I really just stopped using Reddit for the most part.
  
  And now there's Slide for Lemmy

Anyone else notice the cursor on the top left?

Nah, Twitter users stay where they are. That's Instagram users seeing what Twitter is like.

It's insane how much people actually unironically shill for Meta and Zuckerberg now because Elmo is mad. Fucking Zuckerberg...
- I mean Zuck is not batshit crazy like the Musketeer. Not like he won't sell you out but atleast his platforms are stable. Apparently that's enough for people.
  
  The bar is actually really fucking low, but Musk with twitter just doesn't make it.
- It's shill. Like the shilling (old currency) which has nothing to do with being cool headed.
  
  Ah shit, this is what happens when you type too fast and don't proofread 😅. Thanks.

I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic

Threads is the narcissism of Instgrammers and the psychopathy of Twitterers

- What is Twitter then?
  
  SCO Unix
- What OS is Twitter?
  
  Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn't be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided 'vision' by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.

I much rather use mastodon. It's so much better, despite the volume, but low volume is nice at times. Feels manageable. Being able to stick to local instances but also link to others is great. All around better model compared to centralized stuff.
Also it frees up my time to do other things.

They ended up going back to Twitter lol

- Hasn't it already been established that threads would most likely deathhug most of the fediverse? It's content would be overwhelming and nothing could keep up with it. I'd rather have the fediverse be a more small scale, cozy and niche place*.
  
  In that case you can always use an instance that defederated threads
- I feel you.
  But considering that the majority of instances have already blocked threads, there would not be much of a fediverse to federate with anyway once/if they do.
  
  That's the depressing reality that could risk killing the fediverse.
- I got downvoted for saying that over in !unpopularopinion so I guess that makes it either a popular opinion or a really unpopular opinion
- Unfortunately Facebook will most likely pursue their usual goals of mass user attraction, followed by user domestication and enshittification. They'll try to attract as many Fediverse users to Threads as possible, then slowly make it a shittier and shittier experience to use Threads unless you have an account there or something, and their federation will get worse and worse until they'll just split off, but this time taking a shit-ton of Fediverse people with them (who will now likely have higher switching costs due to the network effects exploited by Facebook). Not to mention that Threads will be trying to collect as much data about everyone as possible (including those who just have an account on a federated instance), and will probably try to send out ads to federated instances.
  It's possible that Threads will attract more people to the Fediverse. It's at least as likely that Threads will end up pulling people from the Fediverse, and into an eventual walled garden.
- People using threads wont make their instances and will fill the fediverse with low quality content.
  
  Kinda refuse to believe that every single person on threads is going to post low quality content. I'd argue that content made by a bunch of people not constantly thinking about the fediverse will help the fediverse. Let's be honest, lots of the content posted on fediverse apps are somewhat forced because we all want this to work.
- I agree with you. Lemmy is way too aggressive about this.

I should try Mastodon
- Good luck. Hope you like it. I never really used Twitter because I felt like it was hard to figure out how to use it to see interesting stuff in your feed. Then I tried Mastodon and had about the same experience. Not sure how it is now, but I tried a few months ago (maybe January or something) and there wasn't a ton of activity so it was stale after a few wks using it and I gave it up.
  I've like Lemmy a lot better but I think that's because I always liked Reddit better.
  
  The thing I liked about Twitter was following:
  Writers
  Academics and scientists
  Artists
  Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people's websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.
  Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.
  
  Same here. Forum-like, message board like communication is more my style.
- When you first start do a search on hashtags for subjects that you like, and subscribe to them. That'll quickly build up a feed for you to scroll through.
  Then you can add people after that once your feed is established.
- They'll tell you to sign up to small instances. Honestly ignore that advice. There's a bug nobody's fixed since 2016 that makes smaller instances nonviable imo. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34

If they want people to use Mastodon, then make it user-friendly and easy for the general public. I downloaded it, tried it, and was lost/confused on the whole server/instance thing and finding communities etc. Whereas Threads is pretty straight forward, it's just a Twitter clone. User experience is more important than privacy to the general public and developers need to realise you can't compromise user experience/ease of use/accessibility.
- Ribbit
- I've never tried it. Is it really more confusing than Lemmy?
  
  Nah, Mastodon is a lot slicker and more robust in my experience so far (been on there less than a year, but still).
  I think the "confusion" is just from having to pick an instance although iirc they made mastodon.social the "default" one for people who didn't want to choose, so maybe that hurdle is gone now, not sure.
  
  They are about comparable, once you understand the instances it's pretty straightforward. But I'm ngl, I was confused at first. I'd made my first Mastodon account in 2018! And didn't use it till recently because I didn't understand it for the longest.
  
  I don't use it either, but I guess someone from your instance has to follow someone on another instance before you see content from there…? Maybe someone else can chime in. I just get this stuff third-hand from reading things other people say and listening to nerdy podcasts.
  
  I don't think so, not if they use a good app. Tusky is the best so far.
- I'm genuinely curious - what do people find confusing about Mastodon? What could be improved?
  I was a little confused by Lemmy at first, but downloading and setting up the Mastodon app seemed super simple and straightforward. I've never been interested in short form text content like this, and couldn't find anything I thought was interesting on the platform, but I didn't feel confused.
  Would love to hear what people find annoying/confusing as I'd love to be able to help create content etc for anything that's holding people up. Twitter owns too much social/mental weight for people and Meta is no better - would love to find a way to help move people towards something like the Fediverse.
  
  User experience is more important than privacy to the general public
  This is, ultimately, a sad truth that, in my bleaker moments, makes things feel hopeless. However, it can be addressed by improving UX, I suppose, in a pareto-efficient way that hopefully doesn't simultaneously compromise privacy, which does seem possible.

An alternative to Twitter with an Instagram flavor.

ikr! Like I'm so confused like, just get on mastodon and don't deal with threads like ??????????
- A lot of people use social media to follow celebrities, brands, politicians, etc., and Mastodon doesn’t have that (yet at least).
  I prefer Mastodon, my feed consists of the people I decided to follow, instead of an algorithmic one. But one have to accept that Mastodon lacks the kind of users that most people want to follow.
  Hopefully, if Meta ends up delivering on their promise to add support for the Fediverse, I will be able to follow the kind of people that otherwise would’ve never joined Mastodon (ie brands that would offer support for their products), from my Mastodon client of choice.
  I know a lot of people disagree with Meta joining the Fediverse, but I prefer to be optimistic about it. Also, Mastodon supports blocking domains at a user level, so if you really don’t want to interact with @threads.net users, you can do it yourself.
  Worst case scenario, we get back to the current status quo, so there’s nothing to lose.
  
  That's pretty much why I've been reluctant to join either Mastodon or Threads, compared to Lemmy. On Reddit/Lemmy, it doesn't really matter who I talk with, as long as a community exists for the topics I'm interested in. But on Twitter, I pretty much exclusively follow content creators and don't care to interact with anyone else. Until those streamers/youtubers/artists jump ship, I'm pretty much stuck on Twitter with them. When they do, I can only hope they pick Mastodon over Threads, so I can actually filter my feed to those I choose to follow, but ultimately I gotta go where they are.

Can I say that mastodon is a horrible name?
- Lemmy isn't a lot better, tbh.
  
  Also Kbin is a terrible name too. They really don't understand branding and accessibility in these new "grass-roots" apps.
  
  Devs tend to suck at coming up with names. Microsoft is particularly rubbish at this.
  
  Yes, but at least it's short, easy to remember and unambiguous when someone search it on Google.
- Why? They're like elephants but even more badass!
  Also, Threads is a super generic name which IMO is worse. Honestly sounds like a computer science student's proof of concept social media they made for class.
- Yup. And seconded.

All public content on the web is heavily surveillanced through crawling bots by Google and alike.
- I'm less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.
- That's one thing and it is hard to be free of, but here I think it is also relevant that the website/client apps surveil you too.
  
  iOS and Android as well as modern browsers actually limit a lot what an app or a website can gather and if Mastodon instances were to federate with Threads, Facebook would not even be able to see anything beyond public data which actually makes federation with Threads a privacy tool.
- This is true, but I think that this meme refers to the app though. The regular mastodon app doesn't require as many data.
  
  Talk to the "Defederate from Threads because it will steal all the Fediverse data" crowd about that even though a federated instance sees as much as Google's crawlers.
- Do you mean the bots they use to index stuff for their search engine? Isn't that how all modern search engines function?
  
  Yes, of course but a very large chunk of the super vocal crowd demanding that everyone defederate from Threads is claiming that federation somehow transfers private data to Meta.

I love mastadon, I hope threads burns down to the ground. I am not a big fan of THE ZUCKMAN
- gimme your data

Lol, I got hyped about Threads until I saw who runs it... meta... yeah no thanks!

But I don't WANT control over what I see online, I need to have a constant feed of garbage thrown in my face at all times!
- Garbage that's designed to alter my mood to keep me longer on the platform. Please, give me more of that!

I truly do not get it. I hate everything lizard boy touches :(
- Nerds, geeks and general outsiders like and look for things like Mastodon and the fediverse, the majority of people just want convenience and ease of access and things like Twitter and Threads have that. Until celebrities and companies join the fediverse you won't get normal people and at that point it won't be any different from Twitter. I like Mastodon but it has nothing on the ease and just general amount of everything that Twitter has which is what brings in users.
- I mean it's not hard to get. A social platform lives or dies by its user base. Threads has a huge user base with big names people care about. You could have a platform that's 100x better, but if the right people aren't on it, it will die.

It's like that with facebook's services too.

Is it really mastodon if no instance federates with them
- Many are, unfortunately.
  
  how many though honestly? also how long does that last until thoose instance dry up. It's all fun and games until Matt Walsh finds LGBT.social and exposes them for being "groomers"

How is twitter still alive? I have been wondering it since 2013 when i stopped using it
- dw it started its decline as soon as you left it… just took a while
- Momentum is one hell of pain, Twitter and Facebook are like mile long freight trains that stopped putting power to the wheels. They'll stop, it'll just take a long time.
- It feels like at least 50%-60% of it are bots, same with Reddit.

Are threads federated?
- Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.
  
  I was also on your boat, until I read this... Take into account this was published before Threads was official. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- Threads is federated afaik, yeah. It's just that many Fediverse instanced blocked Meta.
  
  They haven't federated yet but they say they will eventually. I'm going to change instances to ones that don't want to join them if/when it happens.
- it can interact with mastodon yeah.
  but afaik it's a one-way integration currently. (mastodon users can see threads users but not vise versa)
- They said they still figuring out how to handle the federated posts into its content recommendation algorithm and moderation tools. So not yet.
  (Sauce: https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/07/08/threads-and-activtypub.html )

Of topic, but wtf is that logo?
Sure, it's a tangled thread, but is that it?
It looks like it could be a C or E, but that doesn't seem meaningful.
- Is this a bit? It's an @ sign with the weird lowercase a most fonts use.
- It's an @.
  Pretty easy to figure out. Everyone only uses it for everything.

let them take baby steps

The biggest L is watching porn artists try to move to Threads when the platform doesn't even allow their content.

I'm using the Thunder app to access my lemmy.world account. Is Mastodon also Lemmy? Can I browse lemmy.world and mastodon at the same time? I'm so new and vv confused.
- Not really.
  They're both fediverse, but one is designed to follow communities, and the other is designed to follow people. A Mastodon user sees a community as a user, and can thus subscribe to it. There's not really a way for a Lemmy user to do the inverse and subscribe to a user.
  If you want a platform that does both (can subscribe to both communities and users), check out Kbin.

you think they know?
you think that Instagram users have any idea about what they are getting into?
most of them probably don't even know that Instangram is owned by Meta / Facebook, despite the small logo.

Shameless self promotion and brands or furries talking infosec.
- If that's the choice, the furries... But I think there's starting to be a lot of legit people on Mastodon, no? I just can't get into the whole following people thing though, it's just all so....public..... [Shuffles back into the dark anonymous safety of Lemmy]

"No corporate bullshit! It's ruined twitter!"
"OK maybe some corporate bullshit, I'm sure Facebook will be better."
- I think Musk's individual recklessness ruined Twitter a lot more than any corporatism.
  
  Fair enough. But if we're comparing CEOs, Zuckerberg isn't better though.
  
  I feel like an incompetent POS does less real harm than a competent POS. Musk is unintentionally driving users off Twitter, Zuck is deliberately priming users to be exploited, and has been deliberately exploiting them.

Mastodon but with people and content*
- I wonder if you even know you're on Mastodon right now

people also undervalue ease of use
- I agree, but also, I was never really able to figure out Twitter so I kept bouncing off. Whereas I found mastodon really easy to get into and find my communities.

And the fact that threads will be compatible with the fediverse make the mastodon’s user: 😁 😁

Corporatewantsyoutotellthedifferencebetweenthosetwopictures.jpg

In it for the long haul, its going to bathtub but we'll get there eventually

i dont undearsnt the joke where is meme

It blows my mind how anyone is being able to create something worse than twitter, truly fascinting.

Why is there a mouse in top left?

The same thing that is happening between reddit and lemmy is happening between twitter and nostr.
Human beings (a minority at least) will always seek freedom first and foremost.
I invite you to discover the wonderful community of nostr!

Is it just me or does threads symbol look like no step on snek?

It suits them though