Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.
Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
Bluesky is weird to me. I tried to use it for all of 15 minutes. One of the recommended feeds was called “Blacksky”, which is a feed specifically tailored for black users of Bluesky. I’m perfectly fine with that. I was, completely innocently, asking if there were other feeds based on race, similar to blacksky. I was threatened with a ban for racism. My question was very literally phrased “I see that blacksky exists, does the platform also have other race-specific feeds for users? Or only this one? It’s the only one that was recommended to me which seems strange for a new user.”
Mastodon is better than Bluesky, but unfortunately everyone is flocking to Bluesky. You have to go where the people are
Yeah, mastodon simply doesn’t have an advertising budget, and having to pick an instance, while trivial, is still enough to stop a lot of people from joining.
@drcabbage@lemmy.ml people still seem to be flocking more to Threads since it is growing by more than million users per day for the past three months. Have to accept there isn’t just a single place people are going.
The name “Mastodon” sucks as much as “X”. I’ve never had a Twitter account nor do I want to open an account in any of the services, but Mastodon does not sound catchy to who they need to attract.
As someone who uses both. I think Mastodon also just doesn’t have the users, it is not as easy to setup and I think understanding instances and its UI are less user friendly.
Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.
It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.
There’s a lot of that. A ton of FOSS software is somewhat exclusionary because it’s made for the people who make it.
But a lot of the UX issues on Mastodon have nothing to do with the tech, nor the UI. They’re social in nature.The existing userbase skews technical, which affects what people discuss, and people looking for help are met with a deluge of tech savy people giving tech savy advice.
Oh, and there’s the mass of very vocal users on niche sites that have strong feelings about having their niche safe space invaded by “normies”, and who let it be known that new users should learn and adhere to “the rules” and respect the unlisted, unagreed upon nettiquite of social outcast “progressive” fedi or GTFO.
And then, on top of the social, there’s just the fact that most Internet users don’t really grok the Internet these days. Twitter or BlueSky aren’t websites to them/ they’re “apps”. The very nature of federation on the Fediverse runs counter to how they understand how thir “apps” work.
They don’t want to have to know about it, but they can’t avoid people talking about it, making judgements around it, and having to confront it when edge cases crop up or when admins decide they don’t like or trust the new crop of fedi websites that have sprung up this month or last.
On Twiiter or BlueSky, they don’t have to think about any of it.
The advertising industry used to call this an Advertorial, now it’s known as native marketing. All the same, it’s an ad disguised as news. You pay the journalist to make it look like there’s some crazy spike in traffic and the piper plays his pipe as the mice fall in line behind him to see what the hype is.
installs both
Now… fight for my amusement.
It will be interesting to see which one wins out, like how Lemmy won out vs kbin/mbin, since kbin never accepted any outside help and stopped contributing. Not really putting the open in open-source that way, IMO.
Bluesky wins out.
Sorry, but there’s companies and interest groups at play here. No one is championing Mastodon but us fossy poors.
Would kinda be nice if I dunno… Harvard or, Brown maybe would take an interest in privacy focused social media and start lobbying for and spreading it.
We have companies spending billions on bullshit, with nobody spending a cent on truth.
I picked kbin for no particular reason and then moved to lemmy. Kbin was a dumpster fire of spam and downtime. Seems to be permanently broken as of the last 2 months minimum
This is the correct attitude.
Bridgy.fed is nice for bridging also for using both at the sametime. I think what a lot of people like on BlueSky is the feed algorithm without having to curate yourself like on Mastodon or posts sorted by the time it was posted. That probably makes a huge difference.
Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.
You can bridge the two now.
Bridging never really works.
What do you like about bluesky more?
deleted by creator
their discover feed and ability to create custom feeds
I cry a little bit every time someone acts like Misskey and its forks don’t exist
Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.
I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.
“Leave that algorithm riddled platform and come to this new and shiny algorithm riddled platform” 🤦
im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they’re BAD things
NGL I’m old enough now that I’d rather not see random tits in my feed.
Porn industry is certainly a bad thing though. It is quite hostile to women, and many have been harmed by it and wished they had a good exit.
Bit I definitely agree that progressive lean is a good thing. Fwiw I didn’t read this article.
I know women in porn who say the opposite.
When there in it, i’m sure there is going to be a bit of a bias.
Certainly some will say that, and even more would do if your environment is privileged (such as a safe neighborhood in the west or USA). You have to look at aggregate data, not anecdotes.
The modern porn industry is much more independent than it used to be. Most creators control and own their content and choose where it gets uploaded initially. In the past, the porn business was absolutely abusive to their stars but I think it’s much less the case these days. Filmmakers have to fight for actors because if they don’t treat them well or pay them their worth, they’ll just post their own content directly to their fans. I’m sure there are still huge negatives but I just don’t think it’s as bad as it once was and I certainly don’t think the porn industry is something to be upset about these days.
Those are precisely why I like BlueSky. I don’t know if this was normal for twitter or what, but I learned you can search for a hashtag of your kinks (exp. #bigboobs) and you can see porn from people that have posted pics or posts about it. You can also hide other tags from ever showing up in the results, which lets you finetune what you’re looking for. I know the search works relatively the same as twitter with respect to hashtags, but was porn on twitter this whole time?
It’s weird to me how obsessed some people are with proving to the world that their social media platform of choice is superior. The Fediverse works, we have content, and anyone who decides to seek out a platform that offers what the Fediverse offers can join. Tell your friends about your experience if they might be interested but if they don’t stick with it you don’t have to be all salty about it.
Agreed. It’s silly.
I like Mastodon. It’s like social media from 2010, chronological, only seeing what you want, great curation tools, and no ads or stupid algorithm. Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, though it can vary by instance.
I haven’t used BlueSky, but I imagine it feels pretty familiar, which is what a lot of people want, and that’s cool too.
They can both be good things.
Mastodon is better.
Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is
Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)
The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)
The fact that the fediverse has been mentally limited to “Mastodon and Lemmy” is so sad. The features many people complained weren’t on Mastodon were right there on Akkoma, Misskey, Friendica, Hometown, and others. But nobody would even look at them.
Even on the fediverse nobody wants to discuss the sea of alternative services.
That’s definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha
And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn’t allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?
As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
I mean, it’s a network of indeoendent websites. I’m not sure what kind of solution to this people want.
People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they’re signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It’s not like it’t that weird of an idea.
They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!
Maybe if we stopped treating “Mastodon” as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.
mastodon.social exists
It’s literally there to take the choice away from new users
You don’t have to choose. Joinmastodon.org chooses for you, and you can choose one yourself as well but only if you want to.
joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.
Yeah, they’ve implemented this a while ago, this year IIRC. People are on old information bashing Mastodon.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.
Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.
i like the idea of a server choice virtually invisible feature!
If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn’t get overloaded?
You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname
This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.
That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.
Basically, a single instance
Let me see how you get instance admins to agree on what to defederate.
Maybe a vote of 75% minimum would be good?
When you make an account
Where?
When you go to comment on a blog, where do you sign up?
Man, it feels like you guys haven’t spoken to a real human in decades…
Somebody definitely needs to make a frontend that makes it smooth.
Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail
I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
Same with Apple mail right? I never used an Apple device and was shocked to see them over Gmail because I thought Apple actually gives email service when I saw the graphApple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.
TIL
Apple does give email service for two decades now
Oh I see. Thanks for the clarification.
I don’t think I’ve ever received an e-mail from an Apple Mail address.
I’m pretty sure “apple mail” refers to the Mail app on iPhones and Macs, not the email address. There’s probably tons of people using Gmail addresses with the Apple Mail app.
Same, does it go by another name or something?
Wow, I wouldn’t have thought that Apple Mail is more popular than Gmail.
Nevertheless email stays the defacto standard for business communication and has stayed intercompatible with a wide range of clients, servers and plugins. So this graph could be better but is apparently not a big issue as long as companies and unis keep running their own servers, forcing big tech to stay with the standards.
That works when the decentralized protocol is the 800 lb gorilla first. You can’t get there with the fediverse in this internet era, sadly.
Email also doesn’t have a moderation factor that requires emotional work.
The matrix protocol is a good example to prove you wrong. It has been popularized in the past 5-6 years (i.e. this era of the internet) it has well over 100 million users and growing, is being used in hundreds of universities and wont stop growing, is being used by government bodies all over the world and has unified most of the software dev landscape into one protocol. Its hard fucking work and you have to start with exactly those groups which are easier to convince and then you can move on to the average consumer. Thats how email did it and thats how matrix will do it.
So you are saying Mastodon won’t take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a “default” where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned
It’s the solution on the user experience side, but not the backend/server side. For both infrastructure and idealogical reasons. These two things don’t have to be the same.
Disney parks wants park visitors to feel like their exploring, but design in such a way that thepy don’t actually stray that far from the preferred paths. Also they have clear sign posting.
There’s no reason the fediverse can’t design the opposite. Helping users into feeling like there’s a set path, and that they’re doing the right thing, while subtly encouraging exploration.
It’s just the opposite of where all talent and techniques of internet software design are right now, so it’s going to take some work.
Edit: Most people don’t jump into a hedge to get off the main road, they find a small, unplanned trail or desire path, then learn to navigate the jungle when that path ends.
I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.
It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).
All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.
For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.
IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.
At least in the early days of email before gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, you would get assigned an email from your work, university, or ISP.
Not really. I mean, sure it’s the same concept, but email has been getting semi-centralized between the big players now, with gmail and maybe icloud getting the largest chunk of users. That would be similar to letting users choose between .world or .ml to sign up with, which is against the fediverse principle to spread the load as wide as possible.
When you present the lowest common denominator internet user with hundreds of instances to choose from and requiring them to think further than clicking through a sign-up page, you lose user interest pretty quickly.
I’m actually okay with semi-centralized. Most people need that to trust a platform, but it still gives you the option to self host if you really care.
Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.
Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can’t even get noticed by fediverse users.
In what regards what normies would use of the featureset, they are identical tho - pretty much everything is identical these days. Log in, go to your timeline / flood / jeep / whatever, click “post new”, copy-paste a meme, hit toot / blarg / weep / whatever. There. Done.
99% of people use the exact same 1% of the features of a service.
This is the exact reason email never took off. /s
Email was invented in 1983.
It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.
Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.
Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.
Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.
So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?
Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.
Then it was fate and they should just accept it.
oof, i learned about hexb the hard way, so i feel for these hypothetical users already.
Yes honestly, we can manage what instances are pooled for on boarding.
The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.
Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.
If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.
The authentication could be another service, split from Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, … that only gave that service. The instance asks the auth server about “user@instance: password” and the server just says “OK/fail”. That or sending the user to the auth server to get a session cookie.
See my reply to u/Rentlar, but for most users, yes, the easier the onboarding, the more accessible it is; the more people won’t immediately run away because they’re afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.
Or you make it like a traditional website with an API used by people making frontends, but the backend (the database) is decentralized, just like regular websites but instead of having a bunch of servers owned by AWS it’s just a bunch of people providing storage space on their servers.
What would be the incentive for people to do that?
What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
What is the incentive for people to share files via peer to peer networks?
What is the incentive for people to host Minecraft servers?
Need me to go on?
If in your mind the only incentive that people have to host instances is to have power over it and its users then they’re exactly the kind of people you don’t want to see hosting instances.
What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?
I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.
Well, in a system like I’m talking about, adding your server and storage space in the mix would make the whole thing more reliable and add to the storage capacity so more content can be hosted/backed up, just like paying for a second server to host a website allows to store more stuff and to start creating backups. You would still help build the community (the website), you just wouldn’t have an administrative role outside of the communities you would want to moderate.
The best thing for on-boarding are topic-specific instances, it makes picking one much easier.
Just log onto mastodon.social and be done with it. That’s the one that will still be running until the they turn out the lights on the service, I figure. And then go kick in a buck or two a month on Patreon to help defray development and server costs. (Not being the product is worth a donation by itself, I figure.)
Why can’t mastodon influencers create content on how easy it is to pick a server.
Ah make it like a food hall and anthropo the servers as food.
