What's Mastodon precious?
What's Mastodon precious?
250 comments
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I feel like you guys are addicted to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, Bluesky being corporate run will probably be an issue down the line, but if it becomes mainstream then people will be used to seeing .APP.INSTANCE and feel more comfortable with the fediverse interface, which I know at least for me was a big hurdle. Like seriously, the fact that the next big thing is federated, even if in name only, is a big step forward.
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Yeah I'm a huge believer in federated systems but I believe that a lot of 'normies' going to bluesky is a huge step in the right direction. Even though most don't know anything about the tech behind it and migrate because twitter has become a bot infested right wing hell scape, they still are one step closer to being fully integrated to the fediverse.
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Half a loaf is better than no loaf
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Bluesky is such a huge improvement over twitter and so many people are just ignoring that. Yes, the app is centralized, but you can still host your own data if you choose. Plus, the customizable feeds, algorithms, and moderation lists are all great.
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the irony of a bsky supporter complaining about being judged because it's not perfect.
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Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won't see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you're at...
And besides all that, bsky is not as "corpo" as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They're on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.
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As much as I like the 'decentralized' stuff, the technical part of federation should NEVER be exposed to the end user if you want the platform to be mainstream. I still don't understand why a lot of federated projects think it's a good idea to expose that to the end user.
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Whenever Lemmy or Masto gets a flood of new users, a portion of them never make it past the instance selection and totally bail.
The user experience was designed by people who literally respond to user feedback by telling users to commit new code to the project.
It’s clearly designed by engineers who assume other users will be just like them.
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Dude, do you even email?
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I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn't use the fediverse standard
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"Write a bit about yourself to join this server and if we decide you're too boring and normal we'll reject your application and say you're a spammer afterwards"
Hmm I wonder why normies aren't flocking to these fediverse platforms, what could be stopping them, couldn't be the shitty onboarding process could it? Nah asking people to apply is the best onboarding process ever (obvious big ass /s)
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I tried to join Beehaw simply because a reddit community I was actively part in went there.
I got told that's not a valid reason to join, and that further applications from me would be ignored. I mean... okay? Sure... guess I'm no longer part of that community.
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Many Lemmy instances are requiring their users to apply for an account.
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Yeah it's actually a much bigger problem here than it is on Mastodon. Probably will end up slowing adoption of Lemmy in the future. Especially considering Lemmy is one of those platforms that really needs normie content and normie interaction to keep going, something it's really struggling at currently.
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You don’t have to do that when you sign up for mstdn.social, and it’s also not a requirement for mastodon.social And there are more instances where you don’t have to apply like that.
But when it’s asked that you apply to the server, it’s usually to ease the load of moderation, to see if you would fit the vibe of that instance. And/or to protect the more vulnerable people on that particular instance.
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You don’t have to do that when you sign up for mstdn.social, and it’s also not a requirement for mastodon.social And there are more instances where you don’t have to apply like that.
Yes, and we need much more like that if we want this platform to be sucessful as a whole. Normies want to join social medias, not clubs.
But when it’s asked that you apply to the server, it’s usually to ease the load of moderation, to see if you would fit the vibe of that instance. And/or to protect the more vulnerable people on that particular instance.
We all know or should know that running a platform like a club where people need to apply and have their worth manually determined is a toxic and unwelcoming environment that does not promote any kind of growth, and the fact that it is common and encouraged is not helpful to the fediverse long term. It just pushes normies away. Because a social media doesn't ask people to apply, a club does. Most people don't want to join small exclusive clubs.
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It also acts as a filter to keep threat actors and spammers out. Open sign ups are actually a bad thing for the overall health of the network. Yes it also keeps out the lowest common denominator normies but those aren’t exactly the ones who contribute to the network as a whole anyway
This isn’t capitalism, there isn’t a need for growth for growth’s sake. There does need to be a more simplified way to onboard users but not at the cost of the health of the network.
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Open sign ups are actually a bad thing for the overall health of the network. Yes it also keeps out the lowest common denominator normies but those aren’t exactly the ones who contribute to the network as a whole anyway
This is an elitist mentality that harms the health of the network on its own by limiting the amount of people who interact on the platform and post. I've said it before and I'll say it again, turning the Fediverse into a club is a horrible way to create a platform where people interact with each other like a social media, because the nature of clubs is that they are small and exclusive.
This isn’t capitalism, there isn’t a need for growth for growth’s sake.
Please don't mischaracterize the demand for having people interacting on the platform and with as something capitalist, or big tech only for making money, it's disingenuous because people want to have their posts seen by other people, why else would they even post them publicly? Having more people makes a platform more lively, and having more people voting makes content shift and flow.
Let's face it, small exclusive clubs are one of the biggest reasons Fediverse hasn't taken off. And it makes sense since if you don't let normies in and treat it like a club the place will be dead as fuck and have very few people interacting. Only reason its active now is because many instances used to be open and gained userbases.
There does need to be a more simplified way to onboard users but not at the cost of the health of the network.
No, we don't need something new and convoluted, that'll just push out the normies who want to be here or make them not want to. We need to take the page out of big tech's book, let people and spammers signup freely, and ban the spammers automatically. No one wants to do this, they want to invent new solutions that are unfriendly, or just kick out normies and then complain that this place is sooooo dead. Stick to what works, it wouldn't have been done that way on the OG centralized social media if it didn't work.
Also don't conflate assholes/trolls with spammers, that's disingenuous as fuck both because you are over-inflating the spam problem to make your elitist solution seem more appealing and also because the solution does not work for both types of people. You're not going to stop all or even most assholes or trolls by asking them questions, they can lie dumbass have you forgotten that or do you think Instance admins are divine beings who can't be lied to, if Reddit admins aren't Lemmy admins sure as fuck aren't. Some of the biggest assholes I've met on Lemmy are on instances with applications, it DOES NOT WORK AGAINST THEM.
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I just created this account. I went to Lemmy.world to make a new one and it said I need to fill out an application. I laughed. Get out of here with that nonsense.
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It is bullshit and it will hurt Lemmy and the fediverse greatly in the long term since they've effectively crippled the onboarding process and turned their instance into a club.
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Tbf it's a good way to keep the laziest of shits out
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Elitist neckbeards like you are why Mastodon and Lemmy are still boring
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I DON'T RECALL GETTING A PAYCHECK TO POST
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If Mastodon wanted to be preferred, it should have been better. I moved to Mastodon over a year ago when the Twitter sale first happened. It was not great then and it’s gotten slightly worse since. I created a Bluesky account two days ago and it already offers exactly the experience I missed from Twitter before Elon.
Would it be better if Mastodon was good and the federated FOSS option was superior? Sure, absolutely. But, that scenario isn’t even close to the case we are presented with.
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Can you give actual examples?
I feel the only thing that Mastodon 'misses' is some feed to get you addicted.
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I’ve been a heavy Mastodon user for two years, and I honestly don’t see why so many people on Lemmy give it so much shit. Certainly not in favour of the likes of Bluesky.
I get WAY more engagement with my posts on there than I ever did on Twitter. And maybe I’m just at an age where I don’t give a shit about celebrity, but I couldn’t care less that all the Big Names have gone to Bluesky and Threads. It’s great not seeing the same people being shared into my TL all the time.
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bluesky has made better choices - the starter packs and user lists are great for new users. They managed to add quote tweets but let the quoted person opt out of dog piles. It looks like they added options for custom algorithms too.
Bluesky will be enshittified but mastodon should be taking notes if they want to pick up people next wave.
The bluesky system is just way better. The local/fed feeds on masto are just wasted.
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The block lists for various types of assholes are also a marvellous invention. It's so nice to block all of MAGA at a click
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I haven't had to block a maga in a decade. my admin already took care of that.
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What if we're wrong and BlueSky just gets better? I mean, with some of the corporate trappings of old Twitter, but still user-friendly, big userbases, vibrant subcultures and banning troublemakers?
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I mean even if it repeats "the Twitter mistake" that'd still be another 13-14 years to go. Who knows where short-form social media will be conceptually in that time and whether any competition in the space is even still relevant.
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It will, but it still has that countdown timer over its head.
The future is the fediverse, some yet-to-be-invented non-corporate equivalent, or offline.
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the concept of more than one website is so challenging for plebs.
use both and please don't bridge bsky to the fedi.
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Bluesky has useful tools. But (almost) all lists were made by the community of Bluesky users. Curation was made by users.
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Curation was made by users.
Right, users not corporations make social networks, so the community not for profit corporations should own those social networks.
Can we not all see this as the same old pattern of predatory rent seeking behavior applied to online communities just seasoned with even more jargon and condescending handwaved half explanations?
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Jumping from one frying pan into the next.
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lucky for us, we aren't running out of jumps.
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People who genuinely think like this (as in, that users going to Bluesky is somehow bad, surprising or something only stupid people do) are the very reason systems such as Mastodon cannot work. And sadly they naturally pervade such systems, at a development, administration and user level.
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I will have to agree, what I see is people on the fediverse always talking about how others should join it and complain when people have the free will to choose other options. So far, it's been painful to find a Mastodon instance, because the whole thing doesn't feels intuitive, it's hard to differentiate them, and all the topics that go on the honepage are just politics and people mentioning other platforms.
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Isn't Bluesky federated?
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Pseudo-federated from what people are saying. Something about the user accounts being centralised but the data being decentralised. I don't understand but it's something funded by the previous owner of Twitter and full of other corporate money, so I wouldn't trust it.
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In theory, yes. In practice, it's a bit different. At the very least for now.
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well, until they release all the code, and allow full federation its not a federating platform. end of story.
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I believe it's sort of tacked on and not exactly federated at the moment. Also it's corporate run
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In theory, yes / kind of.
In practice, no, not really.
It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.
To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.
Also, as others have pointed out... even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS... all of these still go through 'Relays', which BlueSky controls.
So... it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS... but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.
Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.
If the Relays go down, everything goes down.
If BlueSky decides they don't appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.
As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.
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It calls itself federated, but it's false advertising.
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Nope. It's unambiguously not federated. It maybe could be, if you take their words at face value
I think there might be some adapters bridging the distance... But the short answer is no, the long answer is not really
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If the internet has a future, it's on the Fediverse. We work around capitalism to avoid enshittification, or we let it defer our future further.
In the meantime, the Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. The sign that something is cumbersome and hard to use is people saying "it's not that bad".
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People may disagree with how BlueSky is organized and architected, but I get why they decided to do what they did. User experience.
Their architectural decisions mean that people don’t have to worry about instances confusing people, and the org structure means is easy to staff a proper dedicated experience team that can be working, planning, and testing before big expensive decisions are committed to code.
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Bluesky is apart of the Fediverse and the quicker ActivityPub sites accommodate that fact the quicker we'll have an open internet.
This pissing fight between ActivityPub sites and Bluesky is dumb and doesn't further an open internet.
Not directed at you but to a lot, go put time into making Mastodon compatible with atProto instead of removed.
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It’s almost like the average person doesn’t care about the fediverse and decentralisation and only wants muskless twitter. Nooo clearly the normies are idiot sheep
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Bluesky is Decentralized, people are moving to Bluesky because it is easier to use and has better UI and UX. The reason people are moving to Bluesky and not mastodon has nothing to do with Decentralized, it is because it is simply user friendly. I used both and I think currently that Bluesky is definitely better. One of the biggest issues is the app, many users use their phones and The mastadon apps are awful in comparison to bluesky.
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-host-a-bluesky-pds
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If the reason people only want bluesky is because it’s Elon-less Twitter then they are stupid and wrong (or just ignorant). But then they can move to the next thing in 5 years when the enshittification happens.
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Yup, there it is.
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After initially hesitating, I decided to join Bluesky after having previously tried Mastodon and permanently leaving Twitter. While I was initially reluctant because Jack Dorsey had sold Twitter to Elon Musk, I still created a Bluesky account. I later came across Jason Koebler's article on 404 Media, which validated my choice. His arguments aligned with my own reasons for preferring Bluesky over Mastodon. Link to the article: The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet.
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404 is just mad because we mocked them relentlessly for not using content warnings on their goatse posts.
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Mastodon may or may not be good (I don't use it), but the fact that it segments off users into different groups means it will never be a twitter replacement. The fact that twitter is essentially "public" and all sorts of people from different areas interact was basically the whole point of it.
Bluesky seems pretty nice so far and it has real momentum. Mastodon seems more along the lines of what Google+ turned into.
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Mastodon doesn’t silo its users, that’s what federation is for. Everything you post on the public timeline is essentially public for everyone that’s on a federated instance that hasn’t gotten blocked.
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I'm just dreading the inevitable monetization. These spaces are fun in their alpha state. But it's just a matter of time before there's a "Let AI help you spam Shrimp Jesus to your friends" button and a "Pay $5 to override the Block function" feature.
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I would argue siloing is easier on bluesky - block list manager drama can definitely have a similar effect to user admin drama. The thing mastodon does poorly is discovery. The fed and local feeds are nonsense on Masto. Imo it should be replaced with local admin/user curated topical feeds and top cross server topical feeds.
Mastodon requires far more effort to create a new feed than bluesky, and that's the major problem.
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Mastodon is social media where no one comments or likes anything.
It’s like a modern art masterpiece.
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You're hanging out with the wrong people.
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maybe when I first started 15 years ago it was like this.
now I have a community that will follow me on whatever bullshit instance I create because I got a clever domain name.
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Had to look up bluesky. Posts are called skeets 🤣
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Mutuafuckaaaaa
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That's news to me 😂
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Pronounced "shiits"
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I just looove how ppl believe that switching from one VC-funded centralised corpo platform to another VC-funded (slitghly less) centralised corpo platform is a good thing /s
Just because it's (partially) OSS doesn't make it good. The corp still holds all the power and might sell out, but at least they got free volunteers to program for them so the C-level could get more money!
(Now don't tell me that Bluesky is "federated". They still hold all the power over site rules and moderation. The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Apparently virtue signaling about pseudofederation is enough for libs to "get hope for the future of the internet" while they happily lick the boot of yet another centralized "trust me bro this isn't going to enshittify itself, not this time" corp
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The only little concession you get is that you are allowed to host your own data)
Nah, that's not even a concession. You just pay for a portion of their server costs at no gain in influence.
Problem with Masto though is that the technological leadership is really bonkers, hardly anything meaningful happened over the past 2 years with lots of serious issues not getting fixed
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I just loooove how pppl believe that whether something has VC-funding or is federated has any effect at all on how people pick software and systems to use.
I mean, users don't even not care, because "caring vs not caring" assumes that the metric they can care about or not mentally exists in their context for judging a decision. Which it does not. Which is a very important part so many software designers of user-facing software forget, to users a short-form posting instance is a tool. A hammer. You use the one you got. Once it becomes defunct, you get a new one. You pick one that all your friends use, because hey, must be great if everyone uses it. Does it have some downsides? Maybe, but frankly it's a hammer who cares?!
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Nice profile picture!
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uuu thx
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Heres the thing with federation
It will always be more complicated, and lead to smaller segregated communities. This mitigstes the network effect social media services rely on
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I think the hate for BlueSky is proof that it's important enough to work. Buhbye elon
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I like Masodon but the user experience on Bluesky is easier and great block tools too. I don't mind Mastodon not being mainstream, it is kinda good to have niche parts of the net still.
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Nice profile picture! Do you have any suggestions of content to find on Mastodon? I'm pretty new there and I can't find anything interesting when I open the app.
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Try going to the home page of instances of accounts you like (or of instances that seem interesting) and browsing their federated feed (tap globe for "live feed" then hit "all"), you can discover tons that way.
As a general mastodon instance mas.to looks good and is a nice size with a good stable history.
You can find established, more established instances on the fediverse by surfing around a bit fedidb
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Friendship ended with Mastodon
My new best friend is Bluesky
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goodbye forever
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Twitter's already served its purpose. People slagging it off because it's losing money really don't understand that it won a country.
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Seriously, seizing the means of mass communication means you own democracy, you own the governement, you own everything. Twitter, while it remains how the cultural elites communicate, is worth basically 30 trillions.
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If the userbase of mastodon is even remotely similar to that of lemmy, I sure as fuck am glad I joined Bluesky instead
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My Mastodon experience is far more pleasant than that of Lemmy.
My sense is Mastodon is far less left leaning (but still left of center) but it may just be a product of who I'm following and the tags I'm following.
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why the fuck does no one change the trashass looking shadowed white impact font default text treatment on the meme generator
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That takes effort and would invalidate it as a shitpost.
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Readability > style
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I don't understand what anyone uses twitter, bluesky or mastodon for anymore. I used twitter to follow companies (like CoffeeStain) or YouTubers/Artists.
Bluesky has some of that, meanwhile mastodon is just a circle pit of yelling and also the same stuff I see on Lemmy.
I don't understand what people use it for. There's no information to follow like company game accounts for games I play, and when I tried to do goofy shitposts like old twitter i got a grand total of 0 likes.-
Sic cat pics
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I use masto for myself, not for likes. I use it to get SilentSunday and Mosstodon photos and to goof around with people I meet in the online space.
Sure it'd be nice to see a like or a response to a shit post, but for that you need to be followed by people who share your sensibilities, as there's no algorithm boosting your stuff into other people's timelines. Unless you use a relevant hashtag that's being followed by others.
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Yeah that's why I'm on Bluesky. Twitter was always just a "check whether company XYZ said something about their servers being down"-place.
And Bluesky has a lot of these companies now. A few government places OTOH are on Mastodon. I have both, but both exclusively in this capacity.
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I moved from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter. I think what you saw on Mastodon was a product of what you were following (people and hashtags).
The other nice thing happening somewhat recently is that I can follow Bluesky (through a bridge) and Threads (some accounts now, more as federation between the platforms matures).
Not being able to follow the brands you want is just a symptom of them not being on these platforms yet. I follow a few news outlets, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kagi search, Vivaldi browser, Cloudflare, Mozilla, The Internet Archive, etc.
I'm hoping more show up on these platforms with time and that BS and Threads actually do integrate more fully with Mastodon.
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I thought that was the FreedomBox logo at first. I was confused why Billy's dad would be mad at the kid making a freedombox to run federated systems.
It is very similar
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What's wrong with Bluesky? From my perspective it looks pretty dang wholesome. Could someone please elaborate?
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It's genuinely just people feeling the need to "pick a side", and it's unhelpful. Just makes the fans look like clowns.
Bluesky's got the same vibe as early Twitter (for now). That's awesome. Mastodon / "the fediverse" can take some time to streamline onboarding so when Bluesky gets sold to Mussolini's ghost Mastodon will be ready to take the reins.
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I don't know enough to tell whether or not this sounds plausible. All I know is that the Bluesky team is selling it (to me) very dang well. The app is quite solid as well, I can't lie.
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I had originally not expected it to last a year of Peon Muck's ownership, but hopefully it'll finish dying (or fall into complete irrelevance) by the end of 2025.
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All it took was the destruction of the American Republic to make lazy people spend five minutes looking for alternatives
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They didn't look for themselves most likely, it's reached cultural osmosis levels.
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You can run your own relays, the obstacle is that each relay takes up many terabytes. But it's fully open.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094369
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture#relay
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Community owned centralized systems are the answer.
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seriously.
please show me a single, fully independant instance of their platform that federates.
you cant, because it doesnt exist.
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This post is a request for attack surface area.
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Its got faults but it's currently where the big batch of users seems to be going and since some of my interests are pretty narrow that means a lot more to read and see in those interests (or it exists at all). That's kinda hard to ignore tbh. Its not right wing infested and I've already got elon, musk, trump and a bunch of other stuff auto filtered.
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Lol
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Feed the butterflies,
Tupence a bag...
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I don't really under the hate towards BlueSky, did they do something really unacceptable that I am missing out on?
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The idea is that these social media sites always become monopolies. That occurs because no one can communicate with each other across platforms, which eventually leads to a majority of users migrating to a single platform over time. Once that happens, the social media group no longer has to try and the media site enshittifies slowly over time. On top of this, the insane amount of users also cripples the centralized system's ability to self-moderate properly, leading to user-based enshittification as well.
With federated social media, that barrier doesn't exist, and, in theory, the subsequent conglomeration of users doesn't happen. Additionally, federated instances can be self-hosted and sport much smaller userbases which can make self-moderation much simpler.
The joke in the video is that rather than switching to federated social media like mastodon and lemmy, twitter users chose to go to yet another centralized social media site (which while having a federation protocol, is unlikely to have users utilizing that defederation). Essentially, Billy is abandoning twitter to go to another site which will potentially have the same downward trend as twitter did before.
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Twitter was a vapid load of crap before Elmo took it over. I see this as a win if it knocks him down a peg or 44 billion.
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bluesky is federated and decentralised too... i don't understand why people are having problems with it? maybe they just don't know?
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The Twitter user base must be burned by, then kill 2 platforms before they can truly understand and ascend.
250 comments