• AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    7 days ago

    Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.

  • derf82@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 days ago

    Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)

    I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.

    • SeattleRain@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      6 days ago

      I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.

      Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      5 days ago

      It’s not too hard to understand. Some people just like to pretend it’s complicated. It’s literally the same system email uses, and almost everyone has figured out how to use that. There’s no marketing for it though. It’s only word-of-mouth, and let’s be honest, us fediverse users often aren’t the best at communicating simply.

      It’d be smart if some fediverse instances provided an email account with your account. Then we can just tell people to create an email account and they’d accidentally have a fediverse account.

      • derf82@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        5 days ago

        I have yet to see any marketing for Bluesky. The fediverse still takes effort, even if it isn’t necessarily complicated.

      • ProtonFiber@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        6 days ago

        Bridgy.fed is nice for bridging also for using both at the sametime. I think what a lot of people like on BlueSky is the feed algorithm without having to curate yourself like on Mastodon or posts sorted by the time it was posted. That probably makes a huge difference.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 days ago

      It will be interesting to see which one wins out, like how Lemmy won out vs kbin/mbin, since kbin never accepted any outside help and stopped contributing. Not really putting the open in open-source that way, IMO.

      • prof_wafflez@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        I picked kbin for no particular reason and then moved to lemmy. Kbin was a dumpster fire of spam and downtime. Seems to be permanently broken as of the last 2 months minimum

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          When /kbin was zerg-rushed after the Reddit enshittification, it wasn’t ready yet. It was a public alpha. It had five instances, all official, all experimental, only one of them public. I guess the dev had intended to calmly and orderly develop it until it’d be ready for prime-time. But all of a sudden, it was either developing missing features or removing bugs for those who daily-drove it in this state in expectation of it being a stable point release.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          6 days ago

          It’s a shame, I wanted to like KBin because it’s PHP and I specialize in PHP (also JS and Java), but the maintainer just made sure that it wasn’t sustainable.

      • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 days ago

        Bluesky wins out.

        Sorry, but there’s companies and interest groups at play here. No one is championing Mastodon but us fossy poors.

        Would kinda be nice if I dunno… Harvard or, Brown maybe would take an interest in privacy focused social media and start lobbying for and spreading it.

        We have companies spending billions on bullshit, with nobody spending a cent on truth.

  • ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    6 days ago

    The name “Mastodon” sucks as much as “X”. I’ve never had a Twitter account nor do I want to open an account in any of the services, but Mastodon does not sound catchy to who they need to attract.

    • Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      6 days ago

      As someone who uses both. I think Mastodon also just doesn’t have the users, it is not as easy to setup and I think understanding instances and its UI are less user friendly.

      • micka190@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 days ago

        Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.

        It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          Awful user experience can be anything from side-effects of decentralisation (no, you can’t search the entire Fediverse for something; no, you can’t even search all of Mastodon for something) to Mastodon’s official app being crap and people being unwilling/unable to use an app that isn’t named “Mastodon” to Mastodon refusing to catch up with the rest of the Fediverse in features to Mastodon refusing to finally become the 1:1 Twitter clone expect it to be. Mind you, the latter two contradict each other.

        • Kichae@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          6 days ago

          There’s a lot of that. A ton of FOSS software is somewhat exclusionary because it’s made for the people who make it.

          But a lot of the UX issues on Mastodon have nothing to do with the tech, nor the UI. They’re social in nature.The existing userbase skews technical, which affects what people discuss, and people looking for help are met with a deluge of tech savy people giving tech savy advice.

          Oh, and there’s the mass of very vocal users on niche sites that have strong feelings about having their niche safe space invaded by “normies”, and who let it be known that new users should learn and adhere to “the rules” and respect the unlisted, unagreed upon nettiquite of social outcast “progressive” fedi or GTFO.

          And then, on top of the social, there’s just the fact that most Internet users don’t really grok the Internet these days. Twitter or BlueSky aren’t websites to them/ they’re “apps”. The very nature of federation on the Fediverse runs counter to how they understand how thir “apps” work.

          They don’t want to have to know about it, but they can’t avoid people talking about it, making judgements around it, and having to confront it when edge cases crop up or when admins decide they don’t like or trust the new crop of fedi websites that have sprung up this month or last.

          On Twiiter or BlueSky, they don’t have to think about any of it.

          ETA: Things might be different if people stopped treating “Mastodon” as a place that exists on the Internet, but even the Mastodon developer treats it that way, when it’s convenient to him. He’s created a little functional monopoly, and seems to care moee about that than anything.

          Mastodon servers are Mastodon branded, and that is a mistake, in the long run. We need to communicate to people that they can sign up for MyInterest.social, that is MyInterest branded, while also getting to follow people elsewhere. That overcomes the biggest hurdle.

          But that doesn’t satisfy the egos of people in positions to right the ship.

  • mosscap@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    6 days ago

    Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.

      • mosscap@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 days ago

        Threads is implementing it in phased rollouts and I think they saw the writing on the wall with X that Bluesky was the next “big thing” and wanted to jump on a competitor protocol that had already been developed and already had an active base of both users and developers.l, whereas Bluesky is building everything in house from the ground up with the AT protocol.

        WordPress has a plugin that is developed by Automattic (as close to core WP as you can without actually being core WP) which essentially turns every WordPress site into an ActivityPub feed. Its really cool and an incredibly powerful tool for publishers.

        Flipboard is also implementing ActivityPub as we speak, and it seems like they are quite bought in on the concept. Their CEO hosts a podcast about the Fediverse.

        Ghost is a publishing platform similar to Substack that is also working to implement ActivityPub and is doing a lot of the heavy work in terms of trying to figure out what longer-form publishing could look like within the fediverse, as opposed to being a network of different Twitter clones.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        5 days ago

        There’s this weird one I’ve heard some crazy people use called Lemmy or something. I don’t know. They’re too niche for me to consider thinking about.

        • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          5 days ago

          I’m not sure if people looking for something laid out like Twitter or other microblogging sites would necessarily move to Lemmy, which is more like a forum. The activities on any social media may be largely the same, but presentation matters a lot.

          To me, Lemmy and other forum style SM is like going to a bar and finding people to have a conversation, where as Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon/etc are like standing on a street corner and just yelling random thoughts.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            5 days ago

            Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to imply it would. Just another activitypub platform.

  • ohlaph@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    7 days ago

    Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.

  • x_pikl_x@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    6 days ago

    The advertising industry used to call this an Advertorial, now it’s known as native marketing. All the same, it’s an ad disguised as news. You pay the journalist to make it look like there’s some crazy spike in traffic and the piper plays his pipe as the mice fall in line behind him to see what the hype is.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    7 days ago

    I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.

    • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      6 days ago

      “Leave that algorithm riddled platform and come to this new and shiny algorithm riddled platform” 🤦

  • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    where pleroma

    where akkoma

    where misskey

    where firefish

    where iceshrimp

    where sharkey

    where cherrypick

    where catodon

    where mitra

  • WarshipJesus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    6 days ago

    Bluesky is weird to me. I tried to use it for all of 15 minutes. One of the recommended feeds was called “Blacksky”, which is a feed specifically tailored for black users of Bluesky. I’m perfectly fine with that. I was, completely innocently, asking if there were other feeds based on race, similar to blacksky. I was threatened with a ban for racism. My question was very literally phrased “I see that blacksky exists, does the platform also have other race-specific feeds for users? Or only this one? It’s the only one that was recommended to me which seems strange for a new user.”

    • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      5 days ago

      There’s been a large-ish influx of maga users, looking for people to harass in the last week as the other normies have left Twitter too because they are sad and lonely people, so people’s ban fingers especially those with large accounts, are a bit heavy right now. So yeah, it probably completely came off wrong (like someone asking when white history month is) vs asking if there was a specific other ethnic starter pack that drew your interest. Sorry that was your experience.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      6 days ago

      Being threatened with a ban goes way too far, but your question(s) as phrased does seem very much like sealioning even if that wasn’t the intention, so I can see why a moderator might think it was. Obviously, they should have clarified first.

  • drcabbage@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 days ago

    Mastodon is better than Bluesky, but unfortunately everyone is flocking to Bluesky. You have to go where the people are

  • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    170
    arrow-down
    11
    ·
    8 days ago

    As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.

    • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 days ago

      It actually doesn’t.

      Install the official Mastodon app on your phone, launch it, scroll past the instance selection box that railroads you to mastodon.social anyway, and it’s no more complicated than Twitter. It’s just that nobody knows that.

      Fun fact: The official Bluesky app has a selection box for a PDS, too. It’s no more and no less complicated than the official Mastodon app. Nobody knows that either.

      Granted, of course, if you let yourself be railroaded, the place where you land in the Fediverse won’t be the bee’s knees, and you won’t know that there are not only better Mastodon instances (or more Mastodon instances in the first place), but also better server applications than Mastodon (or anything else than Mastodon in the Fediverse in the first place). But hey, it’s easy-peasy.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      7 days ago

      joinmastodon.org (the ‘official’ way to get join mastodon), has a default server for its join button. To me this looks very similar to the default server that appears when you try to create a bluesky account. So… I guess that’s not a barrier after all.

      • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        Yeah, they’ve implemented this a while ago, this year IIRC. People are on old information bashing Mastodon.

    • Kichae@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 days ago

      I mean, it’s a network of indeoendent websites. I’m not sure what kind of solution to this people want.

      People seem to be able to choose which wrbsite they’re signing up for when looking at Twitter, BlueSky, and Threads. It’s not like it’t that weird of an idea.

      They even grok the idea that different Wordpress-based websites are different from each other!

      Maybe if we stopped treating “Mastodon” as a space, and talked about it like the webhost software it is, people would understand.

    • madjo@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      6 days ago

      As long as email has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      53
      ·
      8 days ago

      Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

      When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

      • Gregor@gregtech.eu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 days ago

        If they have the same people running all of them, how is that different from running a single mastodon server in kubernetes, so that it doesn’t get overloaded?

          • Gregor@gregtech.eu
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            7 days ago

            This is quite unnecessary, it would be simpler if we have a list of the long-running and most stable instances and have the users pick one.

            • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              7 days ago

              That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

      • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        ·
        edit-2
        8 days ago

        Honestly that’s probably the best sort of solution. A group that has some minimum standards of moderation and maintenance/upgrade management plan and just evenly distribute the load as people arrive.

        Then as a second phase make it easy to transfer, that way at the point the user gets comfortable they can easily swap to a better* “home” for those that care, for those that don’t, make the server choice be virtually invisible.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      36
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      8 days ago

      Yeah, things requiring choosing a instance like, say, email, are doomed to fail

      • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        8 days ago

        I’m guessing you meant this sarcastically, but you may have been right for the wrong reasons. Look at this graph, by the metric of the way the fediverse works that is a failure. Apple and Google are massively dominant because people don’t want to think about it and most just go with their phone os maker who makes them create one when setting it up, and there is no fediverse server equivalent to that.

        a graph of email users by domain. apple and gmail dominate.

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          Still, this chart looks like it’s actually counting phone apps rather than providers. Google doesn’t have two separate e-mail services AFAIK.

          • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            4 days ago

            Nobody really actively chooses Apple Mail.

            It’s just that they buy iPhones, and they want a total no-brainer, like, a phone that’s fully set up and ready to use without them having to do anything because it, like, totally confuzzles them 'n stuff. So whichever friendly salesperson sells them their phone also sets everything up for them. Including an e-mail account because they need one for their Apple account, but they don’t know if they’ve got one.

            If they buy an Android phone, it’s the same, only that they get a Gmail account if they don’t happen to already have one.

        • Zak@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          28
          ·
          7 days ago

          This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

        • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          8 days ago

          Nevertheless email stays the defacto standard for business communication and has stayed intercompatible with a wide range of clients, servers and plugins. So this graph could be better but is apparently not a big issue as long as companies and unis keep running their own servers, forcing big tech to stay with the standards.

          • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            edit-2
            7 days ago

            That works when the decentralized protocol is the 800 lb gorilla first. You can’t get there with the fediverse in this internet era, sadly.

            Email also doesn’t have a moderation factor that requires emotional work.

            • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              7 days ago

              The matrix protocol is a good example to prove you wrong. It has been popularized in the past 5-6 years (i.e. this era of the internet) it has well over 100 million users and growing, is being used in hundreds of universities and wont stop growing, is being used by government bodies all over the world and has unified most of the software dev landscape into one protocol. Its hard fucking work and you have to start with exactly those groups which are easier to convince and then you can move on to the average consumer. Thats how email did it and thats how matrix will do it.

          • hobovision@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            7 days ago

            I’m pretty sure “apple mail” refers to the Mail app on iPhones and Macs, not the email address. There’s probably tons of people using Gmail addresses with the Apple Mail app.

        • illi@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          7 days ago

          So you are saying Mastodon won’t take off because people need to choose a server but also because having a “default” where majority will ptobably end up is bad - but this is literally the solution to the problem you mentioned

          • med@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            7 days ago

            It’s the solution on the user experience side, but not the backend/server side. For both infrastructure and idealogical reasons. These two things don’t have to be the same.

            Disney parks wants park visitors to feel like their exploring, but design in such a way that thepy don’t actually stray that far from the preferred paths. Also they have clear sign posting.

            There’s no reason the fediverse can’t design the opposite. Helping users into feeling like there’s a set path, and that they’re doing the right thing, while subtly encouraging exploration.

            It’s just the opposite of where all talent and techniques of internet software design are right now, so it’s going to take some work.

            Edit: Most people don’t jump into a hedge to get off the main road, they find a small, unplanned trail or desire path, then learn to navigate the jungle when that path ends.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 days ago

        I mean, I hear you (we’re both here after all), but honestly, I think this is a bad take and approach (if getting more users is a goal.

        It’s not the 90s anymore. And even email services are given to you by your employer or selected from the closest big brand provider (Google etc).

        All of which is a far cry from “nerdygardeners.io” administered by some rando anonymous account you’ve never heard of before.

        For mainstream success, the instances thing was dead on arrival. Just was and is. Which is fine, the Fedi can be and arguably should be something else.

        IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          IMO the success of BlueSky is good for the Fedi. It can take the “let’s be the next mainstream thing” monkey off of its back and just be itself.

          Plus, it keeps the obnoxious “But muh follower count” fame whores and the majority of the “Why can’t this be exactly like Twitter, I want a total Twitter clone” dumb-dumbs out. They’d ruin Fediverse culture even more than the second migration wave two years ago which was so massive that those who fled back then only encountered each other on Mastodon and hardly anyone who had been in the Fediverse before then.

      • unalivejoy@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        7 days ago

        At least in the early days of email before gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, you would get assigned an email from your work, university, or ISP.

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          Exactly why most Germans only had a @t-online.de address back in the day. The only exceptions were those who needed an e-mail account before they had their own home and their own landline connection.

      • edric@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        7 days ago

        Not really. I mean, sure it’s the same concept, but email has been getting semi-centralized between the big players now, with gmail and maybe icloud getting the largest chunk of users. That would be similar to letting users choose between .world or .ml to sign up with, which is against the fediverse principle to spread the load as wide as possible.

        When you present the lowest common denominator internet user with hundreds of instances to choose from and requiring them to think further than clicking through a sign-up page, you lose user interest pretty quickly.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          7 days ago

          I’m actually okay with semi-centralized. Most people need that to trust a platform, but it still gives you the option to self host if you really care.

    • SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 days ago

      Yeah, most people wants an easy migration. If the interface was nearly identical to Twitter, there’d be a flood.

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        6 days ago

        Misskey has a more similar UI to Twitter, and it can’t even get noticed by fediverse users.

        • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          4 days ago

          But hardly anyone in the Fediverse, next to no-one on Mastodon and literally no-one outside the Fediverse knows that Misskey exists. Not outside of Japan anyway. Or any of the Forkeys, for that matter (if you’re a Westerner and neither an otaku nor a weeb, Iceshrimp or Sharkey may suit you better).

          For more Mastodon users than not, the Fediverse = Mastodon. And outside the Fediverse, hardly anyone has even heard of the Fediverse.

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 days ago

        In what regards what normies would use of the featureset, they are identical tho - pretty much everything is identical these days. Log in, go to your timeline / flood / jeep / whatever, click “post new”, copy-paste a meme, hit toot / blarg / weep / whatever. There. Done.

        99% of people use the exact same 1% of the features of a service.

    • Jake Farm@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      8 days ago

      So what, should we have a website where you push a button and it sends you to a random instance to sign up?

      • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        8 days ago

        Just imagine the surprise when a new user is placed in hexbear or one of the porn servers.

      • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        8 days ago

        The idea would be the servers would have shared ban/block lists and similar rules so that they can share the load of having open sign ups.

        Basically a coop of instances to improve on-boarding. If you join the coop then you get added to the pool of instances that get assigned normies at random.

        If the authentication was federated it’d be ideal as well but I assume this would be outside the scope of AP and would cause issues if you tried to post from your mastodon.social account from mastodon.world’s server for instance.

        • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          6 days ago

          The authentication could be another service, split from Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, … that only gave that service. The instance asks the auth server about “user@instance: password” and the server just says “OK/fail”. That or sending the user to the auth server to get a session cookie.

      • JaymesRS@literature.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        8 days ago

        See my reply to u/Rentlar, but for most users, yes, the easier the onboarding, the more accessible it is; the more people won’t immediately run away because they’re afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        7 days ago

        Or you make it like a traditional website with an API used by people making frontends, but the backend (the database) is decentralized, just like regular websites but instead of having a bunch of servers owned by AWS it’s just a bunch of people providing storage space on their servers.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            7 days ago

            What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?

            What is the incentive for people to share files via peer to peer networks?

            What is the incentive for people to host Minecraft servers?

            Need me to go on?

            If in your mind the only incentive that people have to host instances is to have power over it and its users then they’re exactly the kind of people you don’t want to see hosting instances.

            • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              7 days ago

              What is the incentive for people to host an instance at the moment?

              I liked the community that had built up and wanted to help that continue.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                7 days ago

                Well, in a system like I’m talking about, adding your server and storage space in the mix would make the whole thing more reliable and add to the storage capacity so more content can be hosted/backed up, just like paying for a second server to host a website allows to store more stuff and to start creating backups. You would still help build the community (the website), you just wouldn’t have an administrative role outside of the communities you would want to moderate.

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        20
        ·
        edit-2
        7 days ago

        Email was invented in 1983.

        It was revolutionary, the utter example of a “killer app” that had people and businesses running out to buy computers just to replace paper memos. You setup your mail server to hook into that brand new, stunning ecosystem of near instant communication from across the world.

        Now there are 6,000,000,000 “killer” apps you can install in seconds from your pocket computer. I can hit “install” and be talking face to face with a stranger in Singapore in 30 seconds, all from easy, low effort walled gardens.

        Federation was and is a reasonable way to host things, but comparing current systems to email is a misnomer. People dealt with federation because they had to. If gmail has existed in 1983, no one would have had their own federated email servers. Hell, AOL tried to choke the internet itself to death and almost succeeded in the early 90s because it was an “all in one” solution. They had aol only webpages and everything, including email. Its a twist of fate that they failed, mainly due to the onset of always on broadband, not because people didn’t want things easy.

        Make things easy, people will use it. They will only do hard if they have to.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      7 days ago

      Just log onto mastodon.social and be done with it. That’s the one that will still be running until the they turn out the lights on the service, I figure. And then go kick in a buck or two a month on Patreon to help defray development and server costs. (Not being the product is worth a donation by itself, I figure.)

    • Ghostface@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      7 days ago

      Why can’t mastodon influencers create content on how easy it is to pick a server.

      Ah make it like a food hall and anthropo the servers as food.

  • timconspicuous@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    87
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.

    lol

  • audaxdreik@pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    67
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    8 days ago

    All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.

    If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

    • Jackthelad@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      37
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      7 days ago

      I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with “it’s easy, maybe you’re just dense?”.

      Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn’t have the kind of people I’d want to interact with on it.

      • marx2k@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        7 days ago

        Unironically, this makes me pine for the old days where usenet discussions were lively.

        • Two9A@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          7 days ago

          Mm, reminds me of the old world of IRC. I still remember fondly when I asked for help installing FreeBSD, and got banned with a message of “try linux”.

          So I did, never looked back. (Until I got a Mac at least, which counts as a BSD.)

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        7 days ago

        I’ve never see anyone respond with hostility to any ‘how to’ question on mastodon. What you’ve described sounds totally unlike anything I’ve seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I’d be interested in seeing how that happened.

    • Bilb!@lem.monster
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      7 days ago

      I think that if you want BlueSky like growth for activity pub… You federate with Threads. Or another hypothetical flagship where everyone is sent. Stop worrying spreading users around so much. People who join that network on the flagship can learn about federation and instance switching later.

      I’m sure many people on activitypub would prefer that it grows more like it has though.