this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 157 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Surely nothing will go wrong with THIS corporate owned walled garden.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

How any times do they have to learn the same lesson?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Technically it's an open protocol. Whether or not any other implementations will surface remains to be seen.

[–] [email protected] 149 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I know a much better place. It is called mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Just pointing out the author mentions they used mastodon for a time too, their argument is that bluesky interface, content and moderation are better for them.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 7 months ago (3 children)

That mindset is the problem. A slightly better UX at the cost of freedom is a bad deal.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 7 months ago

They keep building up these companies with shiti core principles then pika face when corpos do them dirty 🤡

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

UX matters.

If open source software genuinely wants to be an option for normal people, they need to fix their shit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

That's fair! Although I fear big money will always come up with some way to make a "better" UX, either simply because they can afford more/better devs, and often by compromising privacy, accessibility, etc.

embrace extend extinguish has worked in the past and it can work again

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

It’s a little more than a slightly better UX. Dismissing the entire concept of the instance removes a fair amount of complexity and fragmentation from the equation. There are so many cheerful guides out there about how to select an instance and every single one of them loses 95% of normal people in the first paragraph.

Having a signup model that people understand helps. Concentrating everything in one schema creates a noticeable increase in density of relevant content. Having corporate money for real hosting and security counts. When you fediverse instance goes down to DDOS or implements crippling safeguards because they can’t keep up with the spam, you really feel how the whole thing is run on a shoestring.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I will give bluesky credit for their focus on moderation. Hopefully some of that design is cloned by the Mastodon folks sooner than later

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I will give bluesky credit for their focus on moderation.

Watch that focus disappear once the enshittification phase starts.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the microblog format, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is going to agree that Mastodon is the superior Twitter replacement.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There's no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I'm not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I'd rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

There's the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There's trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There's definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user's activity on other social networks.

I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. But that takes effort and time, and for folks who want an option further toward the convenience end of the privacy/convenience spectrum I suspect it would be a fairly popular option.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Leaving one privately run garden for another sure seems like a choice 🤔

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

It's built to be decentralized though, from what I read.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Mastodon: Am I a joke to you?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I wasn't a fan of the format. (and apparently I'm not allowed to have an opinion on format)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Isn't the format literally just Twitter?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

it's quite different in the sense that you don't see any recommended content, just your follows and their boosts.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's because its not harvesting your data in order to pull more engagement for ad revenue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The ad revenue part is true but what do you mean by not harvesting data? Mastodon definitely stores your boosts and likes, it just doesn't use that data to recommend more content. And the big difference is of course that it is stored on your instance's server, not a centralized location.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I'm not OP, but yes, that's why I don't use Mastodon or Twitter/X. I really don't like the format.

I tried to give Twitter a fair shake several years ago, and I found it to be a complete waste of my time. So I don't use it, or anything like it. That's also around when I found Reddit, which I found to not be a complete waste of time, and that's why I'm on Lemmy instead of Mastodon. I like following communities, not topics or people.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I value your opinion. What do you mean by format? Couldn't you just use a different UI?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It's kind of you, but not a huge deal. When I tried it (when there was an initial migration to Mastodon), it was so decentralized that you couldn't really have much of a feed and it was tough to find much of anything.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)

You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don't want to see.

Caveat: I don't spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 7 months ago

It's centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.

But all you need to know is that it's a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

When it's built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there's a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Now ditch that for mastodon

[–] [email protected] 55 points 7 months ago

Mastodon is much better for that

[–] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago

There is another alternative to twitter

Its pretty unknown, especially on lemmy, so i dont think many people heard of it, its on something called "the fediverse" and is called "mastodon"

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

Bluesky is also about as dead as tumblr

I barely see anyone interacting with anything, or anyone for that matter

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago

The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.

The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.

But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.

Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

His profile is sign-in blocked.

“Public square” indeed.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I tried Threads and it was horrible. Honestly not using Mastodon that much. But maybe that format is just not my thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

See the thing is........you have to microblog like a crazed hobo yelling things into the void. It doesn't need to make sense. It's better if it DOESN'T make sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Yup, I've tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as "federated Facebook" IIRC, and now people are claiming that it's more like "federated Twitter." I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.

So honestly, I don't really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don't want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

How about, no

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Another idea: ditch Twitter and learn to play the ukulele instead

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