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Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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I'm sad that a lot of people couldn't perceive the mastodon in the room.
Mastodon isn't a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.
Why is that?
From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation
Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.
Problem is there's no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there's not as much monetization of the users to fund it.
I'm perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there's a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can't run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.
Edit: I didn't realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don't think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.
Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.
The Technology Connections guy (Alec) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:
I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.
It is. Autocorrect and bad proofreading. Thanks, fixed.
Jah, cool! Yeah there's a whole other set of problems for people with real followings... Not good
Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.
On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.
I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don't really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.
I do kind of like how it makes mastodon feel smaller since I cannot interact with or post quote replies, unlike Tumblr or Twitter. Those sometimes accrue millions of interactions. But it is a choice that will keep Mastodon small
Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.
The average user is unfortunately, still to this day, an idiot.
Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.
And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.
Mastodon does not have as many arbitrary restrictions for one.
Mastodon is a bi replacement for twitter.
the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don't know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don't give a shit
When you try do sign up on the Mastodon app it defaults to and recommends mastodon.social, which does nothing of this sort. The average user will just keep this default and be fine.
im not sure what happened i think i was taking a shit
I didn't even know Mastodon has an exclusive club streak lol.
Frankly? I'm happy that they didn't end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.
Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who'd spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That's regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.
Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying "this is fine, this is how it's supposed to be". And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.
Someone might say "but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They'd behave better." Well... we're talking about a large horde of users, they'd be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.
It's fine if it's only a handful of users. Even if they're from Musk's Xithole*. My issue would be if a lot of people saw Mastodon and said "it's Twitter, with an elephant instead of bird!", still behaving like Twitter users.
*desculpe-me pela piada besta; não resisti.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I'm referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren't able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.
Wild that Reddit's creation is closer to the start of the Eternal September than it is to today (19 years).
I agree that it's wild. And it's a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I "endorse" (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you're supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they're algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It's like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that's why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we're going to say "a shame that it died".
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
Kind of - it doesn't happen "all" the time; it has a beginning, but no end.
If you consider it's the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?
What's "eternal" in "Eternal September" is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.
That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.
Wait people didn't join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?
That's actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?
I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn't feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)
They did, but it's nothing huge.
Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word "cis" and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.
Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm "to suggest the users whatever they interested in", less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.
Or, more likely in most cases, don't care and don't want to care.
isn't that another way of calling ignorance aka being dumb?
There's only so many hours in the day. There is something to be said for doing the convenient thing that doesn't have a learning curve if you're just trying to enjoy yourself.
Of course, imho, being aware of your own lack of knowledge is something already.
Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.
Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.
Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.
Mastodon's original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X