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As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users (techcrunch.com)

submitted 2 years ago by BrikoX@vlemmy.net to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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[-] MiscreantMouse@kbin.social 32 points 2 years ago

I switched last year and haven't looked back! For me at least, Mastodon has been a much better experience than Twitter ever was.

[-] idusces@kbin.social 22 points 2 years ago

And yet you still can't follow threads on their app, so on Tusky I'll stay

[-] reclipse@lemdro.id 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

How they still don't have it I don't understand.

[-] Chippyr@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 years ago

Mastodon is just so empty as a platform. I hope for its success but I am not seeing it at this point the way we are with Lemmy.

[-] matt@lemmy.world 35 points 2 years ago

This is a strange take - Mastodon makes up ~80% of the Fediverse, whereas Lemmy makes up like 3% or something.

Mastodon is the entire reason the Fediverse as a whole ended up taking off - for most people, it is the only thing they are aware of.

[-] animist@lemmy.one 4 points 2 years ago

I think the reality is just that microblogging is always going to be devoid of content when compared to a messageboard system like lemmy or reddit

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[-] Sproux@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 years ago

According to fediverse observer Lemmy hit 2.2 million users to mastodons 8 million, so it's up to like 17% now!

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[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 32 points 2 years ago

I Iiterally cannot keep up with my feed. You have to build a network there. It is not spoonfed to you.

[-] 0xD@infosec.pub 4 points 2 years ago

Which it should be if you want it to.

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 4 points 2 years ago

Nah, man. I get things and people I like spoonfed now by active boosters. The more you interact and add to your network the better it gets.

[-] 0xD@infosec.pub 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I really don't get how people don't understand that for mass adoption you need as little fucking friction as possible, lol. What you are doing is just gatekeeping. My experience with Mastodon:

The home feed is completely empty at first. I can go to some recommendations which are (I think) based on my home instance. I have no idea what those people even talk about so I just follow them to be able to check the platform out at all.

Looking at the "Trending Topics" (or whatever) tab shows stupid hashtags like #silentsunday or #photomonday. I don't really care about those and they don't even matter for my home instance infosec.exchange. So how do I even find any topics I really care about? It's so much work.

I'm very technically inclined and I went in with an open mind and am now following quite a few people and have even found properly nice profiles like bellingcat. But that was way too much friction - there should be less, and I'm not talking for me.

Anyway, I never really used or liked Twitter and Mastodon seems the same. There's just too many uninformed opinions and people fishing for likes. I don't care about that, I want proper discussions even if I, IMO completely undeservedly, get downvoted ;) I like Lemmy way more for that.

[-] aeki@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Is it really harder than with lemmy? In mastodon, basically:

Subscribed = home feed
Local = local
Global = all

If you join a big enough instance, the local and global timeline will have plenty of posts. Possibly, what you're looking for is 'algorithms' that recommend juicy things (for you). But this is usually something favoured by for-profit sites, which want to push certain things and not others to increase the time people spend on the app and therefore maximize their ad-based profit.

I really don’t get how people don’t understand that for mass adoption you need as little fucking friction as possible.

A big factor is that most fediverse instances aren't really looking for mass-adoption. Since these things are usually run by volunteers that have to pay for hosting with their own money or donations, and not a for-profit corporation, there's no real incentive to advertise and get as many people as possible to a single instance. The ideal is that smaller instances federate together, there's no centralized "fediverse" interest that wants to get them all.

Ideally, we'd want a web that is less corporate and more federated, but if no one is currently able to give the time and money to pursue this more aggressively, it will not happen. That's not really gatekeeping. In theory you could fork mastodon, improve it to make it easier for people, market it and sustain the hosting and moderation costs. But when you complain about how nobody is doing it already and call it gatekeeping, it's not really fair.

A lot of the fediverse is also composed of 'beta' software that will probably improve with time, but these improvements are based on people that work on it on their free time.

Yes, there's an inherent difficulty in competing with big corporations, but this is an open problem so far. Yes, if meta or some for-profit company join the fediverse and use their large budgets to make them very attractive for mass-consumption, it will grab most of the users. This is the whole embrace, extend, extinguish problem that has supported other closed system that dominate the market. How to fix that is a larger problem.

[-] firipu@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Yeah, that's nice and all. But for people that just passively consumed Twitter, Mastodon requires way too much work to get a decent feed set up. I've tried multiple times, but I've always given up after a while. I don't want to put effort into my doomscrolling.

I find lemmy a lot more "content-friendly". After just 2 weeks of using it, my feed is almost back to where my reddit feed was. It's awesome.

[-] RxBrad@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

If you're looking for the exact same celebrities you followed on Twitter, you're going to be let down.

If you follow hashtags instead, there's a lot to like. In a sense, Mastodon almost seems more Reddit/Lemmy-like, in the fact that content is more discoverable by topic instead of person.

[-] dub@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago

I mean all your can do is engage with the community and actually work to get it up to what you want. I've commented more in the last 3 days then I did in 8 years on Reddit cause I want it to thrive

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[-] ootheca@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

weird, i've gotten the opposite impression! i joined mastodon and lemmy at the same time, and i'm finding that mastodon feels a lot more lively to me so far. granted, i haven't used twitter in years, so i haven't been comparing the two in my mind.

[-] boonana@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

You need to start following people and hashtags.There is no algorythm filling your timeline.

[-] aeki@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 years ago

My masto feed is really active, but I've also been there for a couple of years and migrated instances at least twice.

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[-] seacocker@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago

Is this what everyone is using now? I was using Megalodon, Tusky, and the original app, but I've skipping a few updates of all of them.

[-] Elkaki123@vlemmy.net 13 points 2 years ago

I use fedilabs, don't know if the other apps have caught up (hope they did) but the timeline function where you can add timelines from whatever instance you like and also have tags as timelines is so OP.

Since I spend most of my time browsing other instance timelines that feature is a must.

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[-] sverit@feddit.de 6 points 2 years ago

I still use and love Tusky

[-] RxBrad@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm mostly on Trunks.. and I occasionally glance at Megalodon. Both have been light on updates lately (maybe I'm just spoiled by the crazy pace of development on Connect for Lemmy right now).

Based on their Mastodon posts, it looks like the Megalodon dev has been hard at work re-basing their app on the new official Mastodon app version. Still no public release of that to use that I'm aware of.

[-] freemachine@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

Is it possible to view Matsodon from Lemmy platforms?

[-] Hildegarde@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago

In my cursory research, it seems to be possible to view mastodon through Kbin. And possible to view Lemmy through Mastodon.

Lemmy doesn't have support for following user accounts, only communities.

All the platforms use the same backend. So there's no reason full mastodon interoperability couldn't be added to Lemmy in the future.

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[-] Beardedsausag3@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago

I've reinstalled it to take a shniff and I'm impressed so far, very clean and functional.

[-] SulaymanF@lemmy.world 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You don't need to use the official Mastodon apps, they're not the best way to use Mastodon. The official apps only arrived last year, and they were intended as "Fisher Price My First Mastodon" things with a restricted set of features.

Third party apps have been around longer than official ones, and include way more features. You can sign in with the same account on all apps.

:android: On Android try Tusky, Fedilab, Megalodon, Tooot

:apple_inc: On iPhone/iPad, try Toot!, Ice Cubes, Ivory, Mona

As per Feditips: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110644814293019308

[-] Hyperreality@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

You can also use kbin to read, comment and boost mastodon 'toots'. That's what I do anyway.

[-] wutBEE@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

Any way to get the iOS apps to open Mastodon links by default?

[-] jkelol111@lemmy.one 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Ivory can do this via its Safari extension, and it does support Universal Links for select instances. It’s difficult to implement Universal Links for the fediverse because each instance would have to add an association file to their servers, and even if all instances add this, there’s a limit to how many domains you can support in an app

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[-] sneezy@lemm.ee 12 points 2 years ago

The mastodon app on f-droid is marked as "promotes anti-features" with a description "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service" and I wonder why that would be, since there's also Tusky, Fedilab, Husky, and some others, none of which have a warning like that.