I’d love to use Mastodon more than I have BUT I DONT FUCKING USE LINUX AND I DONT WANT TO FUCKING HEAR ABOUT IT ALL GODDAMN DAY
So you turned to Lemmy. Great choice.
You should just use Linux.
What do you think about Linux Mint?
Mint is a very good first distro.
Definitely go for it.
Everyone who has anything to say should post on both, then ditch Bluesky once they have enough followers on Mastodon.
Also, if you don’t mind absolute chaos because of intentionally no moderation -> Nostr
Fuck me, I wouldn’t join BS even if you paid me. I’ve stepped on the centralised social network rake one too many times.
I guess I’ll lose out on the viral influencer garbage I don’t care about and brands doing cringe shit to push their products.
Bluesky isn’t decentralised, given enough time there is nothing stopping it from becoming X
Is it cooler than Twitter was 10 or 15 years ago?
Mastodon user here since 2017. Sure, Bluesky requires less learning for those who come from other centralized platforms and nobody has to deal with fediblock drama over there. Some may also point to Bluesky’s users being less tech-savvy and less prone to dogpiling on tech companies for their poor decisions, which I don’t believe is completely true. Something I do love about Mastodon though is I don’t need any mods or admins to make decisions for me. I can calmly stay in an instance I trust and filter everything, every single small bit, to fit my own criteria. I get others think this is bad moderation and wish to depend on third parties to answer their reports, clean the servers and “do justice” but I prefer to make those decisions myself and let others make theirs.
Yup, any client will allow you to block accounts or instances but noooo the other instance’s admins must do it because someone somewhere somehow got micro-offended at something!
Bluesky is for people that want Twitter to go back to the “progressive” highly moderated/censored hugbox that it was before Musk bought it. They don’t want decentralisation or any of the supposed privacy that brings (which isnt actual privacy anyway), they just want old Twitter where everyone agrees with each other cause they ban everyone that doesn’t. Bluesky is that because it’s a literal Twitter clone from the guy who made Twitter.
I agree with you in part, but I find just wanted to put the footnote that good moderation isn’t censorship (unless it’s literally being used to suppress alternative viewpoints). Good moderation is just reminding everyone of your grandmother’s rule that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it all. And there is nothing wrong in joining an instance like that and doesn’t make your instance an echo chamber.
Let me check your comments real quick. Yeeeeaaaahhhh, that’s what I thought. “FreedomAdvocate”, it was so obvious.
For real; the second I saw “hugbox”, I was like, “Hmm….”
The important part on mastodon is that you have the choice to join whatever place you want, look at the stuff you want, have moderation as much or less as you want and cant be forced to anything really.
The fedi in total is about freedom, not privacy. Privacy in public posts is pretty much nonexistent. The only “privacy” argument i can think of is you cant be forced to link accounts and you can make thousands which makes it hard to grasp who you are today.
Still a vastly better idea than bluesky.
In reality that’s not how mastodon or Lemmy or any other fediverse place work though, especially moderation wise. Your instances mods only control content on that instance, and you’re still at the mercy of the tyrannical mods on other instances. With the much smaller population on them, there are already “default” communities about topics that if/when you’re banned from them by some wannabe dictator ex-Reddit mod there’s nothing you can do, just the same as it was on Reddit.
Privacy has been sold as one of the big benefits of the fediverse, like it or not. I just mentioned that it isn’t private at all.
In reality, you can easily just as easy make your own version of a community. The idea of community isnt that every person needs to listen to your ideas because youre brillant but that if you happen to find people centered around the same idea (which can also be less moderation), you wont be hindered by central admins.
I tried making an account on bluesky. I was using orbot at the time. It let me make an account and then instant acocunt suspension. Similar to other platforms.
I appreciate the platform preemptively stopping me from wasting my time. I should have known better.
That was incredibly thoughtful of them, not gonna lie
what topics are being banned?
Topics aren’t banned, but certain sides opinions on topics are heavily moderated/censored.
Kurdish independence is the first that comes to mind.
Yikes
Being on both…. I can say I am on Bluesky way more, more engagement, more big names etc etc. Mastodon feels dead in comparison.
That’s strange, having bridged my account to both, I actually feel the opposite. I have way more engagement on the Mastodon side to the point where I forget I bridged my account to bluesky.
I mean it certainly helps that all my posts are tech and retro gaming related but still
You seem to mix up cause and effect.
As a Brazilian, I feel that. Although I wish Bluesky has more content with “less” left wing, because I feel that I am entering a bubble (Which is why I left Twitter, also Fuck Elon).
Thank god it does. Very glad to not have literal tons of content every day fighting for my attention.
If they want to reach their customers, they likely won’t find them on mastodon… hard to ignore millions of engaged users 🤷♂️
You seem to mix up cause and effect.
Mastodon moderation is also absolute garbage.
That’s not consciously why, but it’s certainly part of the stack of reasons that made BS blow up despite coming in from the rear in both building the tech/site and having absorbed the first wave of Twitter departures.
Incidentally, I have a dormant Masto account and active accounts here and on Bluesky.
Masto is a big disappointment and surprisingly bad fit for the Fedi/AP structure.
Strongly disagree. Bluesky is extremely American-centric and basically just a bulletin board of “hot takes”. I find Mastodon much deeper, more engaging, and international. I’m glad I deleted my BS account and replaced it with Mastodon.
edit: However, I was never a Twitter user in the past
I have to say them setting themselves up to have “BS” as an acronym was a bad choice. Although I still hope it was intentional.
Look, it’s fine. You don’t need to be into successful things. But a bulletin board of hot takes is the core functionality of microblogging.
If you make a Twitter-like for “deep” conversation then… don’t make that. That’s why I prefer it here.
The character limit is in place because Twitter was a constant flow of headlines scrolling past your feed. You stepped into the stream and let the news and hot takes wash over you, get mad every now and then and ragetweet back, join a dogpile, whatever.
It’s toxic and bad, just like all social media, but it’s intended to feed you quick bites of condensed info constantly.
You want deeper, then go somewhere where you have no character limit, proper discussion threading and no focus on media posts. So… you know… here, kind of. Reddit, but by extension here.
But Twitter was successful because the flood of microhits was useful for famous people to reach out to fanbases asymmetrically while still retaining some feedback and validation and for people who needed access to those (journalists, marketers and activists, mainly) to be able to reach out and receive info from them directly and easily.
Mastodon is NOT that, and so Mastodon makes no damn sense. This does. Pixelfed does. Mastodon does not and it will never be a Twitter replacement for that reason. And since it’s made to be a Twitter replacement it will never be much of anything else, either.
Mastodon exists, currently, because enough people like it (and some of those people, myself included, like it in part because it’s less Americanized than BS). Perhaps a Twitter replacement should be better than Twitter. Maybe for many people Mastodon is an improvement.
“Enough” is true, in that as long as people can have instances up the software will run.
“Many” is a stretch, if you compare it to the alternatives.
As I said elsewhere, nobody says you have to like the popular thing. I’m fine with people hanging out in a niche alternative if that’s what they want. Hell, I’m here.
But the thought that Masto would replace closed socials and specifically Twitter that was popular when they were seeing growth coming from Twitter users came and went.
Would you mind elaborating why it’s a bad fit? No shade to Lemmy, but if anything I feel like that would be a worse fit. People always talk about how the best part of Reddit was the niche subs, and a big issue here is that now instead of one small community you end up with 50 communities that all have one subscriber each. Also, there’s a lot of reposting and cross posting to the same community on separate instances. Instances on what is functionally a more social network like mastodon make more sense, so you could for example have all players of a specific team on an instance just for that specific team, or government employees on a government instance. Make up and beauty influencers could for example be all on another instance, making their work easier to find.
I was never on any microblog sites though, so maybe I don’t really understand them.
Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you’d think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there’s typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.
And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It’s far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.
But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that’s not how those work. You don’t follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don’t stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won’t be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you’re strictly invite-only.
That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto’s instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you’re going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It’s a mess.
Here you’re subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don’t have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.
Valid points. Thank you for your insight.
Mastodon moderation is also absolute garbage.
I mean, if it’s that big a deal you can always roll up your own instance. Isn’t Truth Social just a rebranded Mastodon fork?
I’m more annoyed by the search and the front page, which forces me to switch between channels in order to put together a feed. It’s poorly integrated and difficult to navigate.
That’s before you get to simply Networking Effect. The people I want to follow aren’t on Mastodon, so I’m not going to be on Mastodon. As soon as they all jump over, I’ll join them.
First of all, if the response to moderation is “well, you can just do it yourself”, then it is absolute garbage.
But on top of that the problem with Masto moderation (and moderation here, while we’re at it) is that blocking doesn’t go far enough and the answer from the evangelists always ends up being “you should defederate”, like people were hardlocked to instances.
It’s weird, it doesn’t scale, there is no proper concept of blocking anyone and no way to enforce individual penalties. It’s a mess.
It kinda works here because the subreddit equivalents typically ARE tied to instances, and that’s something you can sorta manage, even if the individual moderation is still trash. But for a Twitter clone? Just not fit for purpose.
And I’d say while most people aren’t aware of that and Masto never got popular enough for it to be a real issue, it’s part of the cocktail of bad tech-to-design fit that made a bunch of people with big followings bounce. They showed up, had no existing userbase, the chronological-only firehose restricted them to followers in their timezone and they didn’t have proper moderation to shut down the army of Mastosplainers that kept popping up to explain why having reach is bad, actually.
So it went back to being a residual thing for progressive tech people happy to have a small chat with the same four guys who procrastinate in their same timeframe. And for porn on main, I was suprised to find when I moved to a larger instance.
Luckily there is active work on things, both on protocol level as well as with some kind of “federated moderation system”, aimed to reduce workload for mods and admins and increase consistency without weakening the strengths of a federated system (like that rules and moderation styles can differ).
In general the Mastodon gGmbh was simply overrun by demand (and they REALLY didn’t make things better by funneling people towards them with that awful Mastodon app), and both them losing tax exemptions due to bad german governments as well as bad decisions by Eugen (like working with Meta / Threads) lead to Mastodon underperforming. That shit sucks.
It can get better though, and people are working on that.
I think the reaction to Threads federating was another nail in the coffin. Threads lost its spot as the leading alternative for very good, self-inflicted reasons, but if anybody who does Twitter for a living needed proof that Masto couldn’t be trusted was that they saw the notion of a large participant with a critical mass of users, tons of resources and at least some version of a recommendation engine as an affront.
Everybody panicked about “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” and it turns out Meta didn’t need to expand or extend anything, the temper tantrum from even the suggestion that they would use AP (whose goals were supposed to be universal interoperability in the first place) was enough to crack Masto in half and throw the entirety of it into a massive spiral of open-source style arrogant, holier-than-thou ragefest. Threads became THE subject matter of Masto for the foreseeable, after Elon and Twitter were THE subject mattter for a long time. It was positiviely stalkerish behaviour and a significant reason I left the moment Bluesky gave up the PR-ish “we’re cool because we’re invite only” crap.
As for the working on that part, I’ll believe it when I see it. In the time they’ve been “working on it” Twitter died, Bluesky was made, ran under the radar for a while, then blew up and every other alternative died.
It’s too late now, anyway. It’s the husk of Twitter and Bluesky now. If Mastodon ever had a shot at mainstream prominence that window is now firmly closed and never coming back.
The Lemmysphere never had a shot at mainstream prominence and Reddit was never in trouble the way Twitter is, much as people around here are often in denial about that. It is more sustainable as a small thing, though. It’s effectively just a mid-size forum and as long as your interest overlap with the communities that do exist it’s fine being small. Probably would be nicer being a few times bigger, but hey, that may still happen over time.
Mastodon needed to be a proper social network and that is never going to happen now, new features or not.
Simple, just use Mastodon.social
/s
As much as I’d love to see mastodon grow, I feel like a lot of people here like to ignore the number one most important feature of a social network: who’s on it.
To me, that’s relevant for messaging apps, not social networks.
But then again I follow hastags first, then people I find through those hashtags.This a bold comment to post on Lemmy
Bluesky didn’t start with millions. Europeans chose it when there were none. Like Facebook getting its start because Savarin used his college frat connections across the country to get the ball rolling, I’m sure there were paid influencers who got things moving for Bluesky.
and mastodon just can’t have the social network with how confusing it is to a normal user, just like lemmy.
Decentralized platforms will never take off as long as people talk about how it works, you just need a URL with a sign up function that works and an app you can install, log in to and it works. That’s what a normal user wants.
This 100%. I barely joined here because of how confusing it was. Having to pick a community is a big turn off if you just want to try something casually.
Finding accounts to follow on Mastadon is fer less intuitive than finding some Lemmy communities to follow
That’s for sure. But just as an example a friend of mine wanted to move away from reddit but found lemmy too confusing with how people explained it. If nobody is there to actually tell him how simple it actually is he’d never move over here.
Anyone from Lemmy explaining how it works on reddit with 3 paragraphs is writing 2 and a half paragraphs too many to actually get people to move here.
Anyone from Lemmy explaining how it works on reddit with 3 paragraphs is writing 2 and a half paragraphs too many to actually get people to move here.
I agree. Anyone willing to read all that detail is already here.
And if people would just recommend or advertise instances, and try to grow instances rather than the network directly, there’d be no problem. But every Fedi platform falls into this ptoblem of hiding the host and championing the platform itself, rather than powering independent social websites.
It’s so frustrating and sad.
Yep, I only came here cause I got banned on reddit. Found it too confusing to want to give it a try before that.
Literally the term network effects
Pro: can’t really go viral on the mastodons.
Con: can’t really go viral on the mastodons.
That’s not true. I got 20 likes this week!
I’ve spent a lot of time on bsky since the opened shop but I still haunt this place a lot for a more open ended viewpoint where bsky is more the antitwitter
Mastodon ANYTHING < bsky, sadly.
explain why?
Absolutely ABYSMAL branding and accessibility.
Social media relies, no matter how much we hate it and wish it weren’t the case, on things being “new”, “hot”, and “FAST” while this service’s name implies the absolute ANTITHESIS of what people need to disseminate information in real time: mastodons are frozen, dead, ancient, clumsy, and/or fossilized. And worse, that’s how it feels to use, too.
An extinct lumbering beast from the ice age.
Also its name is a clumsy dactyllic meter full of dull woody phonemes that doesn’t feel good to say. Its name lands with a dull wet thud. Mastodon’s name is so forgettable that nobody i ever tried to tell about it can even REMEMBER it, and even my best friend for some reason imprinted its name as “WalrusChat” (which is SO much worse but silly with that it stuck) and she can’t remember it any other way to this very day.
Gods, the mileage it could have done with just, JUST a better name. Two syllables with accent on the first just like Facebook Lemmy Twitter YouTube Snapchat Discord Ebay PayPal Google Apple Samsung TikTok WhatsApp Signal and LinkedIn. Even Pinterest and Instagram, in conversation I constantly hear people pronouncing them as pint-rest and truncating to In-sta.
If it were made of bright, sharp, tinny phonemes that POP on the two syllable meter it’d have been extra good. I would have liked Trunky. It’s bouncy and playful and fun and it keeps the pachyderm symbolism so posts could still be called toots.
The problems extend to the interface experience too: Instead of liking and bookmarking there’s only FAVORITING and that adds FRICTION because just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s your FAVORITE. Favorite implies permanence in an otherwise transient medium and people mistake it for BOOKMARKING which needs to be its own separate functionality. Instead people see posts they appreciate, go to like it, but then STOP and ask themselves “wait, I like this but is it really my ‘FAVORITE’??? No, that’s a bit too much…” And their minds have already moved on!
THIS IS WHY THERE IS SO MUCH LESS ENGAGEMENT EVEN ON MASSIVE INSTANCES WHERE THE CONTENT IS A FIRE HOSE
AND GUESS WHAT: LACK OF ENGAGEMENT IN A CONTENT DISSEMINATION SOCIAL MEDIA APP IS,
UH,
*CHECKS NOTES*
BAD, ACTUALLY!They COULD have lent into the branding! For bookmarking, call it “remember” (because elephants never forget!) and their “like” analog could have been “trumpet” (like trumpeting praise) whereas “boost” should have JUST been called ReToot. But instead nothing feels right and it’s clunky as SHIT.
And if all that isn’t already BAD ENOUGH, Having created several profiles on several instances myself, the sheer disparity of content from instance to instance is VAST. You can’t just go on mastodon and see the same things everyone else sees! AND THAT’S A BIG FUCKING PROBLEM! You can’t just BE “on mastodon”, you gotta also know WHERE ON MASTODON something is and follow it. AND MAYBE YOU FOLLOWED THE WRONG ONE ON THE WRONG INSTANCE FROM THE WRONG INSTANCE.
so much
FUCKING
BULLSHIT.
AND ITS NAME WASN’T EVEN ORIGINAL! SEARCH RESULTS COLLIDED WITH A METAL BAND OF THE SAME NAME FOR YYYYEEEEAAAARRRRSSSS!
that’s why.
