I mooched over to Twitter yesterday to gawp at the car crash, and saw a number of people begging for Bluesky invites. And all I could think is that Mastodon is right there already, working essentially the same way…
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I “feel” like one of the main issues with foss tools like Lemmy and Mastadon is lack of an advertising budget.
Going to throw a wild guess out there without a lot of supporting data, but I suspect Bluesky has a decent budget for influencers and that’s driving the traffic too.
Just a thought. I’ve been sitting here wondering why most people have not jumped and Lemmy and Mastadon yet. I personally don’t find either platform hard to use or confusing.
A lot of people did jump to Mastodon, and apparently it had had another large influx of users yesterday after all the Twitter shenanigans. Not everyone stays though, obviously.
I think part of the issue some have with Mastodon is the lack of Twitter's algorithm. It's absolutely true to say it's harder to find people and topics to follow on Mastodon for the simple reason that you're not getting anything shoved in your face, which is a massive plus point for many (myself included) but can also make it appear initially less appealing.
Before algorithms we all used hashtags. Hashtags were very important to Twitter in the before times. That’s how you find topics on mastodon. I have columns set with specific hashtag sets so I can quickly glance at toots about horror movies, birds, retrogaming, etc…
You can also follow hashtags directly in your home feed just like Twitter topics.
It’s really not a difficult thing at all, but people are so addicted to Twitter they always give a halfassed attempt at switching before throwing up their hands.
Before algorithms people said "I don't get Twitter" and stayed off Twitter. Those same people now just say "I don't get Mastodon".
I agree I think once somebody makes an honest attempt at an open non-exploitative content recommendation algorithm, big social's moat is completely gone. I do think Mastodon's take that the people are the algorithm is a great alternative, but we definitely need some sort of algorithmic approach in the fediverse.
Yep. Finding new users and Content on mastodon is impossible because the nerds who run it hate THE ALGORITHM and social media addiction. Same reason they held out on basic features like quote tweeting until recently.
Bluesky is basically just OG twitter, plus you can make your own algorithm feeds. It's cool.
I honestly did not have any issues populating my timeline through use of hashtags and local timelines. Boost-heavy peeps are good connectors as well.
Being able to follow hashtags on Masto is amazing. You find shitloads of good follows by virtue of them just liking the stuff you're into.
I'm ok with the influencers not bothering with Mastodon, tbh.
I mean, sure they'll take the numbers with them where they go, but from my own perspective, I'm not struggling to find good people to follow so does it matter to me if the usual celebrities don't keep getting boosted into my TL all the time?
Mastodon is working fine. There are plenty of people using it. It doesn't need Twitter's scraps.
FYI, as great as Mastodon and the fediverse are, there are issues that prevent their mainstream adoption:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
The biggest issue is normies are stupid. That’s basically the gist.
Yeah but normies are what make platforms thrive. I fear Lemmy may just become an anti-Reddit circlejerk but then die out due to lack of content.
I was able to move from Reddit to Lemmy with minimal learning curve but I tried Mastodon about a year ago and it felt impenetrable and confusing. The author is absolutely right that people don't see decentralization as a selling point. Anecdotally, the people I have talked to about federated alternatives have nothing positive to say about their experiences except the small handful of people that use things like Lemmy or Kbin.
My girlfriend noped out of lemmy pretty much immediately after I tried to explain how to set it up and use it. Objectively, it's a lot more confusing than signing up for something like reddit. She's also pretty tech savvy, so I can't imagine normies making the transition in mass.
If these federated alternatives are going to become mainstream, someone will have to step up with an implementation that greatly improves usability and accessibility. Meaning that federation will probably have to be masked to a large degree to reduce confusion. Maybe something more like a distributed network instead of a federated one.
As soon as you start talking techbro nonsense like federation and decentralization, people's eyes glaze over. People don't care how things work, they just care that it does what they need it to.
Hate to say it but a lot of us in tech, especially the devs, are really out of touch with end users. They aren't philosophizing about the internet. I understand why people are excited about the idea of decentralization, and why it matters, but it has to be presented in a way that's much simpler for people to understand if we actually went people to get on board.
Nah, I don't buy it, people have been telling me that they don't understand Twitter, what it is for and so on for years and most of my normal friends never got a Twitter account, while most of them had a Facebook account. It's not about federated vs. non federated, they all have a federated email account from their school, university, work, etc. and everyone has a [email protected] address and nobody is complaining about that it's not just @username for email. It's more that it's not useful for them to have a Twitter account or a Mastodon account or a Lemmy account. If it were useful they would just deal with the complexity like they do with the complexity of Facebook and Email.
Your Twitter example is spot on. Why would I want to follow specific people? It's about the content on the platform. Tildes suffers from the same issue, it's generally not an interesting place to be so people don't stick around very long.
Personally, I like to follow specific journalist and news orgs that report on topics I'm interested in. That def helps with the breaking news aspect. Besides of course following talented shitposters like dril ofc.
I am brainstorming some features:
- default normie instances that you don't have to choose from (auto choose all)
- default migration between top normie servers (keep profile history and basically auto log into the next one if one is down)
- community aggregation - if multiple communities are the same topic across different servers, auto aggregate posts and comment that are cross posted.
- don't worry about it, if it has better content than Google and reddit, people will come.