What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?
After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and … whatever they use.
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- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago
Who are these people who actually FIND users go follow on either service???
I have Bluesky. I have Mastodon. I log into each every few months, realize nothing has changed, and there is nobody to follow.
Then I don’t use either, until I wonder a few months later “heeeey, I wonder if people are on these services yet…”
Still no.
Mastodon revolves around following topics and hashtags, not individuals. I learned that early on, and am having a much better experience.
Well then it will never be useful for me. I want to follow PEOPLE. I want people to follow me for the random shit I say.
Then they retweet the random shit, and now a whole NEW group of people can wonder what’s wrong with me.
there’s plenty of that going on, too, just not on as large a scale.
Sounds like a worse lemmy 😅
Use lists on bsky to find people.
And just gained a million people, biggest spike yet. So should be a bit more active.
Yeah, but won’t those 1 million all be speaking spanish?
*Portuguese
Potato/Tomato.
Nope, portuguese
It’s 2m now.
And plenty of them pick up English online
There’s algorithms you can subscribe to and use to discover people based on your interests. Theres also algorithms that show you posts based on who you follow and what posts you like. You can also enable your normal Following feed to show you some algorithm posts
I’m following like 3 people. One is a bot that reposts things from twitter. One is a bot that posts local weather. And one is what I THOUGHT was Nintendo, but turns out it’s just [email protected].
like Twitter 12 years ago
So don’t use it then. Gotcha.
I’m not on any of the services currently, but I have tried Mastodon in the past and point 4. was what made me bounce off it. I know Mastodon flaunts its algorithm-free feed as almost a point of pride, but as a user it just doesn’t do it for me. I could not get it to serve me the type of content I wanted the way I wanted, and it just felt like way too much work for what I was looking for.
Marketing, sure, but the onboarding from Instagram was a massive factor for Threads growth.
If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.
All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.
If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.
#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.
#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.
So… let’s get going y’all! :)
They have marketing budgets.
Does Bluesky? Have they been running marketing? Much of what I’ve seen/heard of it has been more a result of Twitter imploding and people bringing up alternatives than any concerted marketing pushes.
edited for clarity, realized I’d overlooked Threads mention
- There are more people there.
- Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
- Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.
I’ll speak about my experience. Bluesky feels like an upgrade to Twitter. There are many algorithmic feeds to choose from, and it’s easy to discover people to follow. Mastodon, on the other hand, is a straight downgrade from Bluesky because it is lacking in those features.
I imagine a lot of people leaving Twitter feel similarly. They don’t care much about privacy or federation. Bluesky just works, and that’s what matters to them.
What do you mean by privacy? Mastodon doesnt have privacy or encryption
Valid question, but Americans in particular are easily swayed by the fact that the corporate ownership is listed as a “Public Benefit Corporation.” Bluesky is a PBC and for most people that’s enough “proof” that they will “be for the public good.”
In that it is set up to “benefit the public good” people just… buy into that, even if the company isn’t actually benefitting the public good.
Look at how long it took for people to wise up that the Susan G. Komen foundation was spending most of its money on their CEOs and ads and very little on actually helping people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Pinkwashing
For the general public, Open Source generally means “difficult to set up and use with bad user interface.”
And yes, the whole self-hosting thing with numerous servers is confusing to people who have never had to step outside of the corporate-dominated internet.
All that is self-evident based on the original reddit exodus to here on Lemmy. The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light. They’re just far too used to private company doing all that “for free” (*cough for all your private data cough) and struggle to understand how the different way it is set up means you don’t get all the fancy features from the get-go.
So people saw an option with corporate sponsorship and money behind it, and they leap to that. Also I’m sure Bluesky is investing in advertising their product, which is competing with zero advertising dollars spend on the no-corporate fediverse.
I don’t disagree with your points but I think they apply to pretty specific groups. I doubt that the average person knows or cares that Bluesky is a PBC. The reaction of the average person to ‘open source’ is probably, “I have no idea what that is and please for the love of god don’t explain it to me.”
The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light.
Dude…I have zero clue how to use linux. Which I assume is easier than writting code. You think I’m going to write a program in C++ or whatever language?
Saying the users aren’t developing the program is like saying the hospital patients aren’t willing to be their own doctor.
Users will ALWAYS bring up issues, and if the developers want the platform to grow, they’ll implement upgrades to fix those issues.
Otherwise, you just have a userbase that rejects your platform, goes somewhere else, and a small group on the platform wondering why it’s not growing.
Which is basically the core of this post.
To be fair, people having ideas for features is a valuable contribution in its own right.
Entitlement to them, not so much. But feature suggestions have value even if many of them aren’t practical and many more never get added.
Agreed, but during the exodus it was less “this is a positive feature that we need and I’m willing to be patient” it was more like:
“This feature not existing is why no one will ever use this product! I’m sick of this and going back to reddit!” after being on Lemmy for 10 fucking minutes.
Initially I heard about mastodon as a Reddit alternative, it was not. I have never been a Twitter user. I did create a Twitter account at some point, I only ever used it to post images from when I was at occupy Wall Street, and then later to follow a couple accounts for updates (Sean Murray of Hello Games). When I opened my own business I created a Twitter account for that specifically and used it to send out coupon codes and stuff like that.
Once musk bought Twitter I deleted both of my accounts. I had totally forgotten about mastodon, so I got on the list for a Bluesky code. Around the time I got my Bluesky code I heard about Lemmy, and then heard about mastodon again. Had my Bluesky code not arrived when it did, I would have created a mastodon account for my business instead of Bluesky. Since I never use either it is a moot point for me.
Moved here and never looked back.
Threads has close ties with Instagram
(Threads uses opt-out ActivityPub.)
Threads uses opt-out ActivityPub.
That’s not true. I can neither opt my test account in nor out of ActivityPub. It’s simply not available to Mastodon.
If Brazilian fediverse is anything like English fediverse, its community was probably tied up in discussions who to deferderate from next and vegan cat food instead of promoting Mastodon.
deleted by creator
Mastodon and the fediverse in general are weirdly user-unfriendly, and then some fucking programmer pops in to say,
“Oh! You can fix that! All you have to do is hop over to their github page and…”
Lol
If they can make the user experience good, we might get the basis for a new internet, but they’d have to build it first.
because mastodon because dismissed twitter users concerns and thoughts the first exodus and bluesky implemented them in a way that’s closer to twitter.
… what
Bsky is more twitter like and less confusing than mastodon.
Bsky is federated too.
Just bridge them all together. Threads and nostr too. Then everyone can use what they want.
