The main problem with the Fediverse is that people mostly just use it to talk about the Fediverse
Something I've noticed about the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of discussion going on except for meta discussion.
For example, if you go on Mastodon, you'll find lots of people talking about how Mastodon is the future. You'll find lots of people asking how to do certain things on the platform. But you really have to dig to find actual discussion about topics beyond the platform itself.
Even when you do find people not doing meta discussion, there aren't really any people talking with each other. There's people sharing content but not a lot of people interacting with it. Even basic stuff you see on other social media sites like people giving each other compliments just isn't really there. You can see everyone's stuff but it's just shouting into the void.
I think that the Fediverse has a severe problem with holding people's interest, and the most die-hard people who are interested just want to use it to talk about itself.
I have been a daily Mastodon user since November and I have a home feed full of sick music, art, science, birds, cats, shit-posting, news and politics. And yes, plenty of meta-discussion about Mastodon/Fediverse/Twitter/etc. but my home feed and my server's local and federated feeds are giving me plenty of what I'm interested in. So really, "your mileage may vary."
How and where are you finding people to follow? Mastodon has zero discoverability, so I have a very hard time coming across interesting people who are actually engaging with the platform. It feels sometimes like it's a whole website full of only "lowbies" and I can't come across a single person who is getting and giving lots of engagement.
There's some legwork involved since there's no algorithm.
Fedi.Tips has good advice (actual links to curators and directories in the post).
Summary of the article:
Honestly, requiring legwork to make the site interesting is something that will keep it from ever taking off.
That said, I think the majority of power users there don't want it to be popular.
I honestly don't think it needs to "take off". If you can get the 10% of contributors and leave the 90% of lurkers behind on Reddit, more the better.
I think most Mastodon users do want Mastodon to be popular - but not at the expense of its unique features. The lack of an algorithm is one of them.
The lack of an algorithm means that users only see content from the specific users and tags that they subscribe to - no more, no less. Mastodon doesn't try to show you content it thinks you might like, or deliberately show you content you hate. It doesn't show you ads or promote its owner's political views. It also doesn't show you an endless feed of content to try and keep you engaged.
Mastodon just shows you what you asked for. In my view, that's a breath of fresh air compared to big tech social media.
It's not for everyone though, and that's ok. For people looking for something more like Twitter, it sounds like BlueSky might be a good fit.
I don't think it needs necessarily to show you posts you don't subscribe to/aren't interested in - but it would be handy to have a small box off to the side with "accounts/hashtags you might like". I'm not a developer, so I don't know how that could be put together without compromising user privacy, which is of course an important factor; as a user though, it would be helpful to have those recommendations! I like Mastodon but I do have trouble finding accounts to follow.
mastodon could copy a page off bluesky's book and implement user-created algorithmic feeds, which are very cool! like you have a list of feeds and you can choose one or more to subscribe to, and you can browse them at your pleasure, but the feeds themselves are programmed by users using a surprisingly powerful API
There is an “explore” page on mastodon.social and I think that’s just as toxic as anything you’ll find on any other social media site as people like to “boost” and reply to angry toots. It doesn’t help that many of the top users that get suggested either toot about primarily politics or see nothing wrong with toots that dehumanize other people (e.g. call somebody a “pig” if you don’t like their politics.)
I am now following 125 users and like my feed now although I still think a hostility filter would be a good thing.
But does it need to "take off"?
That is, why would you want that, as someone owning an instance? These instances are mostly run non-profit or from people's personal money, so naturally they wouldn't want them to be large. Plus the only way to truly make discovery easier is to either:
Both things the fediverse quite explicitly does not want. Since they're unbound by corporate interests as a whole, choosing integrity over growth is easy.
Yeah, it's something I'm seeing over and over, the fact that this or that won't be as popular as reddit/twitter/etc. Who would want that? Who wants the lurkers that downvoted anything they didn't like to be in their space? I hope it isn't as popular, because look where Reddit's popularity got it.
Well Twitter was pretty cool over a decade ago when it was pretty much exclusively people tweeting at their friends.
Well, meta just launched threads, which is a mastodon instance.
Sort of, but not quiet.
Threads isn't actually a Mastodon instance, and it doesn't use any Mastodon code. It's a completely separate app.
What they have in common is the ActivityPub protocol. Software that supports ActivityPub can communicate and exchange data with other ActivityPub apps, even if they aren't the exact same software.
This will allow Threads to share data with Mastodon instances as if it were itself a Mastodon instance.
But Mastodon isn't the only Fediverse app out there. Threads should also be able be able to federate with Lemmy, kbin, Pixelfed, and all kinds of other ActivityPub software.
Mastodon isn't even the first Mastodon-like ActivityPub thing. GNU Social came before, and Mastodon mostly was just a shinier version of that to start with.
And I want to say a lot of the effort goes back to StatusNet/Laconica/Identica a decade ago. The OStatus protocol they started out using evolved into ActivityPub over time, through a standards working group.
I see, thanks for the clarification.
It's one that most large instances have immediately decided to defederate from because "eww Facebook bad".
That's a bit of an oversimplification. There are good reasons to be very skeptical of Meta's intentions. There was a good article and discussion earlier here.
It is, tho.
It has been repeatedly proven time and again that FB does not have our best interests at heart.
And did you ever hear of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? Big companies love to do this. Jabber/XMPP has been on our minds lately, and with good reason.
Edit: to replace Google Reader with an even better example: Jabber/XMPP.
Can you elaborate on what's going on with Jabber/XMPP?
Not "going on;" it happened.
This article was linked upthread as well: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse). It talks in length on how Jabber/XMPP was slain by the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" model. It wasn't the first, and wasn't the last.
With all due respect, they took what should have been a physical headset peripheral I owned and required me for the first year or so to link my Facebook account to use my piece of hardware. A FB account that requires my phone number to sign up for. A company should not require my phone number to let me use what is ultimately a computer monitor. If you want me to live in your sandbox a la Apple, at least attempt to make it inviting.
So yes. Call it a knee-jerk reaction but to say Meta burned my goodwill is an understatement. Love to be proven wrong but I don't want anything to do with the company without a few years of goodwill and lack of shady practices. I won't hold my breath.
I don't know how it is right now, but when the Quest required an actual Facebook account, they might require more than your phone number. I used to have a Facebook account - I didn't need it or care about it, but I developed a Canvas application back in the day for my thesis. One day, some eight years ago, my account was abruptly locked and Facebook demanded photographs of legally issued ID before unlocking it.
Obviously it's still locked and I never bought a Quest (despite friends' attempts to convince me to do so). I remember that time when Facebook went down and Quest owners were left with an expensive paperweight.
Removing that legwork involves cohesion back to the very dark patterns that made that populace seek an alternative.
And the legwork isn't necessarily a foreign concept. You're not going to make a new account on Reddit and instantly find niche, interesting communities unless you search it out specifically (possibly vis Google). You're not gonna have an interesting Twitter feed except for maybe local news until you follow certain people or hashtsgs.
I guess this is the metaphorical way in how we forget the amount of time and effort we needed as infants to walk, something we don't even think about today. Even if we made a perfect Reddit/Twitter clone, you'd need to take the time to recreate those subscriptions to subs, and hashtsgs you followed
FWIW:
Yes and no. You will see posts with a given hashtag if someone else on your server is already following the posts' authors. This will generally work out well if you're on a large instance, but it doesn't work as well on smaller servers. In other words, this approach only lets you find people that at least one other person on your instance already knows about.
The page's advice is generally good. I just wanted to add that one caveat.
Is there a better mastodon app than the official one? I can't choose to follow hash tags on it or it's just not intuitive. I've had to go on the web to do so.
Nearly all of the third-party apps are better than the official one because the official one is still very new and was kind of rushed out to meet demand after Elon Musk acquired Twitter.
I like Tusky for Android.
I use Fedilab.
elk.zone is great.
I don't use Mastodon myself, but alternativeto.net is always where I start looking for alternatives to services and apps.
Ivory for iOS
I use Ivory, it’s paid but it was also made by the same person who made tweetbot, and I liked tweetbot so now I use Ivory.
I like IceCubes for iOS - has good features without being cluttered and dev is responsive.
Toot! for iOS was my favorite until I switched over to calckey (which can follow/interact with mastodon accounts but sadly doesn't have nearly as many app options)
In the early days of the old guard, there was no algorithm or suggestions either. You had to put in the effort. Finding interesting people to follow is such a breath of fresh air. It’s taken me months of on-again-off-again usage to find a good flow of interesting people to follow.
Best advice is to find someone you already know and follow from the old places, then look at who they are following or boosting and follow others too. Some high volume posters/boosters will help you discover other interesting people. Or might just annoy you in which case you just unfollow and start again.
True. And to be honest Tildes isn't much different. Got 2000+ new users in a month and I imagine many came from reddit. Lots of the most populated talks are in ~tech talking about reddit and other social media, or in ~Tildes making suggestions for the site.
Also doesn't help that Reddit/Twitter keep creating news. It'll pass.
in the early days of reddit’s june debacle, a LOT of the activity here seemed centered on discussing reddit, but now it seems a lot less reddit focused which is nice c:
Heh I have an older Tildes account but I stopped using the site for a while. I gotta say, the overflow from Twitter and Reddit has really been changing the culture on the Orange Site. I wouldn't discount the effects of these migrations. Though the only two constants of humanity really are death and change.
There’s actually tons of rich discussion going on at Lemmy (and Mastodon), you just gotta know where to find it. Found lots of great content for my specific software engineer niche.
Where?
My Lemmy instance is
programming.dev, and on Mastodon I started by following some people I know from FOSS (I’m one of the staff at Catppuccin, so I’ve met lots of similar people there), then just followed certain people they followed or boosted, and worked my way up. It’s more effort than say, Twitter, but that’s because I’m curating my own feed, as opposed to an algorithm doing it for me.That hasn't been my experience with Mastodon at all: there are vibrant communities there. The writing instance that I'm on is fairly active, and I see new poetry and writing every day. The communities are definitely smaller than what you'd find on Twitter or Reddit, obviously, but they exist, even if you do have to search for them.
Tildes has its fair share of posts as well comparing it to Reddit. I think what you're seeing is the result of users migrating to Mastodon because of Elon shenanigans, so naturally there is a lot of discussion about the Fediverse to encourage new users that would be scared off otherwise.
I don't know how anyone can find out what people are talking about on the Fediverse. You don't have access to most of the Fediverse. It's designed for privacy over discoverability. You can check what gets upvotes on your server's "explore" feed or use the "local" feed to get a somewhat more random sample. You know what the people you follow are boosting. That's going to be a biased view.
People also tend to make unsourced claims about what the community's conventions are - in short, a lot of rules are made up. That's how culture works sometimes, but who can tell how popular a supposed rule is when it's some stranger saying so? (Each site has its own policies, though, and you can follow the admins.)
Tildes is somewhat different, since it's much smaller and more of a fishbowl. We are definitely talking about Tildes more than we were. There wasn't much to say about Tildes before this big influx, so we talked about other things.
I expect our views of Tildes are going to get blurrier due to more people and more activity. This is just like any other organization's culture changes as it grows. You can't assume anyone knows your username. People may not even recognize Deimos. When the docs get revised, we probably need a FAQ, since people aren't going to read the whole thing.
Honestly, as a result of years of reddit use, I have a horrible habit of never ever reading usernames, which is carrying over here in Tildes. On occasion I've clicked somebody's profile, only to realize that I've been reading their comments all over the site without realizing it's the same person. I've already once accidentally replied to somebody who I assumed was the same user as an earlier comment in the reply thread, only to realize they were not.
Terrible habit, and having a hard time letting it go.
Same here. Eventually it sinks in, though.
I'd like some better ways to remember people. There's a browser extension that has that functionality, but I haven't tried it.
Yeah, with more people here I’m finding that I’d like some way to distinguish or remember users better. Someone suggested that each username gets an immutable color, which I like the idea of. I’ve even thought about the same idea but with maybe two or three emoji next to people’s names, to give a more visual representation of who’s who. I can see issues with either implementation, but I can also see the benefit for identifying users — both within conversations and across the site.
Yes, choosing an emoji for yourself would be nice.
I think also being able to star other people and have that show up near their usernames would be good too. Instead of having blue checks, you get to give anyone you like a star, which only you can see.
This means it’s up to you to remember why you gave them a star, so it’s only a mild memory aid.
There's a similar browser extension for Tildes, called Tildes ReExtended... if you're interested.
https://tildes.net/~tildes/wiki/customizing_tildes
The even greater thing about that feature was that you could colour-code labels, plus add a URL to the original comment that inspired the tag.
Only if I get to pick my own colour! I'd hate to end up as some shitty brown or jaundiced yellow.
This conversation has reminded me to go look for that extension again - and I saw that it has finally been added to the Chrome store (only 2 days ago), so I've just installed it and am starting to use it.
It's seamless and easy to use. @Bauke did a good job.
There's an announcement topic about that coming as soon as Mozilla Addons publishes the new version, been having some technical issues with their review process after the 2.0.0 update. :P
Edit: it's up!
As a result of years of Reddit moderation, I have exactly the opposite habit - of always reading usernames. Because I need to know if this person is someone I've dealt with before, and whether they're a contributor or a trouble-maker.
And, here on Tildes, with years of it being such a small intimate group of people, it was easy to get to know the various Tilders by name. That's changed in the past month, of course. There are so many new Tildren, it's hard to keep track. But... again... just by reading usernames, I'm already starting to remember some of the more prolific and/or outstanding newcomers.
It's actually pretty interesting then to think about how you and I have different habits due to differing usage experiences, I never moderated a subreddit and read so many that for me I just have a nebulous idea of what each subreddit's general sentiment was, as if it's a big hive mind, while you sound more able to untangle who's who. Very neat actually.
Like I said, it was necessary for me to identify users, because I had to keep track of troublemakers. That's also why I relied heavily on tools like Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Mod Toolbox.
If you didn't have that responsibility, then blissful ignorance was the better choice! :)
Speaking of usernames, is yours related to Flowers for Algernon and Isaac Asimov?
Primarily, yes. Check my user page for a more detailed explanation.
Thanks for the reply. You also just taught me how to find a user's profile. :)
That's one of my jobs around here: teaching people how to use Tildes! ;)
I recognise your username; I watched 'The Good Place' a couple of months ago. (Yes, I'm behind the times.) Good show!
I'm a visual person, I have trouble remembering peoples name outside of the internet, never mind online where there is no visual reference.
Even on Discord I've had to poke friends to pick a profile picture, ANY picture, because my mind just blurs when I see the default icons talking to each other.
Dunno if adding Gravatars or some other default autogenerated images is something Tildes does (the site is wonderfully minimalistic), but it would help at least me differentiating between people ina a conversation.
No.
It might be a future feature, but not now. Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. Set your expectations accordingly.
I'm not expecting them to be added tomorrow :D
I can live without just fine and if I can't I can whip up an userscript to do it myself.
Yeah, that was something I thought when I read @razorbeamz' post: what they're saying about the Fediverse could also have applied to Tildes for the past month. For example: "The main problem with
the FediverseTildes is that people mostly just use it to talk aboutthe FediverseTildes." Just look at the activity in ~tildes, and in ~tech under thesocial mediatag, for the past month: lots and lots of talk about Tildes.It's just a function of people joining a new site, and trying to figure out where they are, what they're doing, and where to go from here. Fediverse or Tildes - it's the same thing.
Interesting point. I think I'd prefer to call it a Quick Reference Guide, though.
So far as privacy I'd look at it the other way.
It might give the illusion of privacy (particularly in the second sense of "the right to be let alone" in that people from certain marginalized groups are likely to be protected from dogpiling) but there is no encryption, any server on the path of one of your direct messages can see it. There is nothing to stop ActivityPub clients from hoovering up as many updates at they want. If you want your stuff deleted the system can propagate a message that will tell cooperating servers to do that, but uncooperative servers don't have to do anything and probably won't get ringfenced unless they violate the second sense of privacy and make an ass of themselves.
Frankly I can't see how Mastodon is legal in the EU or can possibly comply with the GDPR because content you add to is copied in so many places and you can't hold everyone who has a copy is responsible. Contrast that to Facebook or Twitter which might be enthusiastic to build dossiers but can also be sued.
“Privacy” is a vague word that picks up different meanings depending on context. I think what you’re calling the illusion of privacy is, from another perspective, the main thing privacy is about.
Some forums are more like fishbowls and others are more like rabbit warrens. That’s less about threat models of how privacy could be violated (but usually isn’t) and more about which messages people see and reply to.
It’s important to remember that lurkers exist. From a community dynamics standpoint, though, it doesn’t matter how many there are. Anyone who doesn’t see a message and reply to it within a few days doesn’t get a say in how the conversation goes. A year later is too late; that’s reviving a dead conversation.
How much people worry about privacy violations does have a direct effect, though, since it affects what they write and often whether they participate at all.
The threat models you’re talking about are important, but that’s more about preventing unwelcome surprises down the road. Something like end-to-end encryption for a private message would help people have confidence that there won’t be any unwelcome surprises. (Unless it’s someone you send the message to keeping “receipts” for later.)
Lawsuits are a sort of third-order effect since most people don’t expect to ever be involved in that kind of lawsuit. A vague threat of some kind of legal action can affect software design, community policies, and what admins do, though. Copyright is a good example of that; certainly there are a lot of copyright violations out there on the Internet, but this isn’t a file-sharing site.
(Also, the threat of lawsuits isn’t restraining Twitter very much these days. Even actual lawsuits aren’t doing a whole lot, even though Musk owns Twitter as the result of a lawsuit.)
In some ways, Mastodon is actually worse privacy-wise, since instead of having your messages read by Twitter staff, your server admins can see them, and the much smaller size means they might actually make use of that ability. I remember there was a furry instance that blew up a few years back because admins were reading people's DMs (among other things). I don't think people can safely assume that the byzantine structure of the fediverse means they're protected.
Right, when Facebook is talking about not offering Threads in the EU it may be that it is ActivityPub that is incompatible with the GDPR, not the dossier building they intend to do to support advertising. (e.g. GDPR is a competitive advantage for large companies with the capacity to manage regulators, even regulators that they are openly contemptuous of.)
I am quite amused that mastodon.social is based in Germany and doesn’t play the consent theatre game and never even says anything about it but if there is one thing that just doesn’t exist to Eurocrats it is hackers.
There’s a very interesting market I think for a decentralized network with end-to-end privacy but key management is a devilish problem and in the end the NSA can count on an awful lot of people not being careful and practicing the same bad opsec that put assassins on Che Guevara’a trail. (Yet it is not so terrifying that the NSA can do do this, they’ve got some ethics, but consider that Russia, China, France, India, Israel, Iran, and various sorts of organized crime groups do the same.)
Personally, if you get on the right instance, you can figure it out from there. I started out by following certain people from my tech space, and eventually branched out from there. The result is a pretty well curated feed of interesting topics for me.
Sounds like you have something that works well for you. That's different from knowing what's going on generally in the Fediverse, which seems like a much tougher problem. It would require getting information from outside your filter bubble.
Perhaps it's just as well? We curate our feeds for good reasons.
Yeah, it’s a feature by design. You follow artists, you get artists. You follow tech, you get tech.
It’s reminiscent of a simpler time. There is no “general” thing going on in the Fediverse(at least, in the Mastodon portion) everyone kinda chooses who they want to hear from.
I have found Mastodon has been really great for conversations. Lots of interaction and to me, it fills that Twitter void, albeit with a smaller userbase.
Lemmy/kbin etc is definitely suffering from the meta discussions at the moment though. I’m not sure about Lemmy, but kbin being a fairly new platform it does make sense, but it’s also at the point where it’s built enough to start forming communities on there.
I think one problem is inherent in the federated nature of it though. Mainly with Reddit alternatives. There seems to be competing communities on all of them, seemingly unaware of each other. I went to post some Formula 1 content, and there’s a 100 subscribers somewhat active one, 300 subscribers seemingly dead one and another few small ones. Federation is great and I can read posts from all of them if I want to, but where do I post?
That's a common concern with the competing communities on different instances.
One proposal is Community Grouping which would be a way for moderators of communities to coordinate and share members.
A related proposal is Co-hosting or "sharding" communities, where different instances can somehow automatically move posts between instances so that they effectively form one community, just spreading the posts between different servers.
Very similar proposal but on the UI layer, lemmy-ui: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
No idea how feasible these solutions are, technically. A lot of debate on these GitHub issues on how to make this kind of feature work without breaking things. E.g. a generically named "news" community meaning two very different things in the context of a general instance versus a TV-show-specific instance, bad if they automatically connected together.
Seems to me like it would definitely require manual coordination between moderators, but conceptually doable.
This question may seem silly, but I'll ask it anyway: How are you getting this kind of engagement and interaction on Mastodon?
I've tried it out and keep an account on an instance I like the "theme" of. But it often feels like shouting in to the void. I occasionally get replies to some of the posts I've made on there (I haven't made many), but I just see swarms of others peoples messages go by with little interaction.
I have tried following hashtags of topics I'm interested in, and I follow the accounts of creators I like, such as podcast hosts. Do you just scroll through the infinite wave of messages until you see something interesting? Do you just visit accounts you're interested in? Is there some other tactic to find interesting content and engage in the discourse?
It might be that this type of platform is not for me. I was never into Twitter, even at it's peak and honestly I've never been into any other social media either aside from forums and Reddit. I'm totally okay with that if it's the case too, but I find the idea of Mastodon interesting and kind of want to like it.
As it happens, Lemmy has really scratched an itch for me, so I am definitely onboard with the 'Fediverse' in general.
I mainly follow a few tech and photography people, as well as a few journalists, and it’s basically been a very similar experience as Twitter for me. If you’re not used to following individual people it might just be that it’s not for you.
Instances hasn’t really come into play for me yet, as I just sought out people I was already following on Twitter. I browse my “timeline” in chronological order, which is how I used to use Twitter as well.
I've had this issue for years, and I'm on some pretty small and active servers. It sucks that people are basically forced to sacrifice quality of service on a big server or quality of engagement on a smaller one. As much as I appreciate not being subject to an intrusive algorithm that chooses which posts to boost, it seems like the opposite problem where you rarely feel your posts are getting read and appreciated by other users. There's still the same pressure to be viral and come up with something that'll "breach containment," but the perceived isolation/slowness mean it's hard to get that into posting on Mastodon otherwise. I don't want to just be posting for the sake of posting.
The "Where do I post?" question is pretty common on Tildes too sometimes.
I guess the difference is that on Tildes it’s one big community divided into topics, while the fediverse options have many communities, some of which overlap.
If I wanted to post something on Tildes there’s at least only 1 of each group, and most people can see all of the groups, so it’s not super important anyways
The fediverse sounds good on paper, but the fact that its loudest proponents bring massive crypto-bro energy might kill it before it takes off.
At the moment I am struggling with what parts of my identity I want to share on Mastodon.
People who are interested in recommendation systems probably don’t care that I moe for Tamamo. Insofar as I want people to subscribe to my toots I feel pressured to develop some kind of brand although I’d say an authentic human’s interests are really a mixture model. It’s when I incorporate randomness in my process that I get called out as a cyborg (when somebody described YOShInOn’s output as “random but never hostile” I took it as a compliment.)
I get into “meta” talk because it is a shared interest, a sincere interest, and connected to the reason I am there. For me it is the one bit of “us vs them” talk that I’m engaged in, although of course there is the split between “bitching about the old” and “building the new”.
I think one of the biggest problems with the Fediverse is that there's just ... too much of it.
Let's say you like to post in subreddits for specific games. On reddit, there's usually a clearly popular subreddit for each game, and it's the best place to talk about hints, difficulties, lore, or whatever. On Lemmy or kbin, I can search and find dozens of instances for each really popular game, and it isn't always clear which one is the "best". This is why I feel that the Lemmy and the like can't really replace the community feel of reddit - it's just too spread out.
That's what I've noticed on Lemmy.world, or at least the past week it's been filled up with news of Reddit. Which is understandable I guess, given the deadline that just passed, but I'm getting away from Reddit to not talk about Reddit anymore. It just seems like the All stream keeps showing the same few headlines and that's it.
bluesky and masto are all twitter, tildes and the entire fediverse is all reddit. It's slowing down, but its still there. It'll be nice once things get into a natural rhythm
There's plenty of other content to be found on Mastodon. If you're tired of seeing meta discussions, don't be afraid to use Mastodon's filtering capabilities to remove them.
During the big Twitter->Mastodon migration, I filtered out everything relating to Twitter and Elon Musk because I was sick to death of hearing about them. Those discussions were completely uninteresting to me, and distracting from the posts I actually wanted to see.
Similarly, you may find it useful to filter out any posts mentioning "Mastodon", "masto", "Fediverse", or "fedi".
Filtering is great for mental health in general. I filter out a whole bunch of things I don't want to see.
So I've been on Mastodon for a while, and don't actually use it much anymore. I've never had a Twitter account. I'd occasionally dip into Twitter if someone linked an important thread or event.
Overall, the cognitive experience of both forums isn't satisfying to me. My Mastodon feed is pretty carefully curated - the follows are interesting people, organizations, and tags. I'm not drowning in Fediverse meta. Doing the curation was engaging for a while, but not so much once the joy of discovery and exploration passed. And that joy of discovery is not something the general public seems to have in abundance. Overcoming the technical hurdles, as has been discussed elsewhere, is non-trivial.
Also, while an endless scroll of snippets and pretty pictures is diverting in small doses, I find it draining and exhausting with longer exposure. It feels like a stream of blipverts - there's still a great deal of intellectual posturing, loud virtue signaling, and clamor for attention/validation/money. At the end of a session, I almost always feel like I could have spent my time better doing something else. If I post (as carefully and thoughtfully as I can), there's sometimes the quick dopamine hit of many boosts and likes, sometimes crickets, which forms that nasty addiction-generating intermittent reward system I specifically want to avoid.
Maybe I'm just old and not well-adapted to online forums that are 90% passive consumption, 9% reactions, and 1% active participation. Maybe that's the human condition as reified in social software. Nonetheless, federation isn't a panacea for the ills of online social interaction, and today, I'm going to go touch grass.
Every time a platform dies and users flock somewhere else, you get the triple whammy of a huge influx of new users for who the widely accepted "dead horse" meta talk is still new, existing users having some new meta stuff to talk about (why the other platform failed and if there are lessons to be learned), and new users first exposure to the platform being in this "meta mode" making it more likely that people interested in meta talk will sign up while scaring away people tired of meta talk.
For Fedi in particular, it's even worse because both Reddit and Twitter are transforming at the same time, and the wider Fediverse harbors both sides with some interconnectivity here and there.
Plus Threads launching in a few days also adds to Fediverse (and Twitter and BlueSky) talk.
I've been on mastodon for a few years and this is only noticeable when there's either waves of new users or some big tech scandal where fediverse users try to have a big push towards decentralized alternatives.
In general I've had lots of nice conversations about topics I care about completely unrelated to the fediverse.
Same thing with Lemmy, the instance I'm on barely has any talk about the fediverse, it's mostly people talking about the news, sharing pics, posting memes, etc.
Everyone’s talking big about beans today and I’m not sure that’s an improvement.
I'm sorry, literal beans?
There's a big meme on Lemmy right now that originated with this post in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world:
I heard that lemmy will upvote anything. This is literally just a can of fucking beans
If you click into it you will find it's a picture of a can of beans.
Someone on a Lemmy meme group asserted that anything they posted would get upvoted (maybe due to general new user entusiasm, maybe because of lack of interesting memes), and posted a picture of a can of beans to prove their point. Yes, it got a lot of upvotes. This inspired (way too many) pics and memes of beans. It's been going on for days now and I'm finding that pictures of gooey, glossy red beans are really disgusting.
In my opinion, you'll only get the best experience if you like what you see on your local and connected instances(on my version of fediverse, they call these Bubble timelines), then you find good people to follow there. From there, what they boost and their follower lists are will help build up a feed of people in similar interests as you. This is the main way that works for all of the fediverse services and is the most reliable rather than hashtag following or curator accounts. If your instance is full of people who simply meta post, switch to a different server, or even a different activitypub service entirely
I've been saying this for a while. I love the idea and concept of the fediverse. I think the future is decentralized. But it still needs a lot of work and time before the general public is ready for it. All the tech talk around it whenever the subject comes up will scare a lot of people away. Also while the different hosted instances of each are a strength of the tech, it's also a weakness for a lot of people who don't want to bother figuring out which one is good for them, which is most active, etc. Yes there is interoperability between them but that's not going to help the perception, IMO. Not to mention, none of the Lemmy sites I've seen so far have great or polished UI/UX yet.
Then we have this topic. Go to any given instance and you see talk about the technology and Reddit as prominent. That's going to turn a lot of people away who aren't enthusiasts. Yes, you can find cool people and topics to follow, but that requires a lot of manual work on the user's part and most people are just going to give up before curating a good feed.
Again, I love the idea of the tech but the implementation isn't there yet beyond a small niche. I think Mastodon is the closest to a viable mainstream service that we've seen so far because of how easy it is and because outside of promoting specific features, they don't harp on the technology behind it every time it comes up.
This is why Threads and BlueSky will succeed - even though they are part of the Fediverse, they are likely very slick and easy to use from the start with no learning curve (I'm assuming this bc i don't have a BlueSky account and haven't seen Threads yet). What makes me nervous is that since they can federate with other instances (e.g., Threads with Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon), they can suction up updates from those instances - negating the major draw of decentralization, namely privacy and control over one's data. No one so far has discussed what happens to non-Meta data once it lives in Meta. I'm not sure what BlueSky would federate with but the possibility is there.
It's either meta or politics! Both aren't desirable discussion topics beyond an extent, most discussion should surround real topics as you said, but between the two I'd definitely prefer the former than latter.
Cant say i have had this experience. Sure there is turmoil when corporates try to mold fedi to their needs (facebook for example).
But most of my feed is programming stuff and shitposts. It's all i need and im happy with it.
I saw the same with Gemini when I was involving myself with that project, but to a more extreme degree
it's like going on tildes and only talking about tildes
I get that vibe here sometimes too…
Seems like every other day the top post is “Why doesn’t tildes do [Reddit feature]” or “What have you liked most about Tildes”
I disagree, choosing a boring instance is a skill issue tbh
"Choosing an instance" is such a glaring UX issue and the main reason mastodon will never succeed for the general public.
The fact that the signup process requires you to make a critical decision about an instance, before you even know what is on the platform, what an instance is, who the admins are, etc. And then if you want to switch, you have to sign up for an entirely new account.
Mastodon and the Fediverse at large does not need to "succeed". It's perfectly fine as it is.
You should pick an instance for its own merit rather than being a wrapper over the firehose of the federated timeline, IMO, and think of federation as a bonus rather than the focus.
The "you have to succeed" boring capitalist mindset is annoying.
I dont need it to succeed, i just want to chat with my friends.
It's hard to really know whether you like the vibe of an instance or fit in with other people on it until you're already there. If you could actually move your profile rather than the current half-solution of redirection and incomplete follow transfers, that would go a long way to easing people's experience. I've lucked out with a couple that I'm on, but it's definitely frustrating to be told "just go anywhere! it's like email!" and then run headfirst into issues that stem from choosing the wrong instance. Thankfully, I'm happy where I ended up over the past few years of being on Mastodon, but it's definitely a process.
That's true, but I'll add that you can migrate the content of your old account to your new one, so long as your old account's instance is still online (sadly migration isn't possible if the owner pulls the plug).
Migration will transfer your profile details, followers, and the list of people you're following. Everyone following you will automatically begin following your new account. However, past posts can't be migrated - they're forever tied to the original account.
So while you do need to create an entirely new account to switch instances, you won't be starting from scratch in most circumstances.
I'm having a blast on lemmy.nsfw