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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Tech “journalists” have no idea how to speak about Mastodon or the fediverse.
They seem to think that unless something has billions of users, it’s dead. They can’t even comprehend how people could prefer a smaller more selective userbase
Yeah tech journalist don’t seem to have any critical thinking skills. They praise any technology coming from a big tech company. I have only seen one wired article mentioning the fedivere
They’ve just tied their careers to the profits of tech and have lost all passion they have for the nerdy hobby of their youth
I think most people just want to follow famous people for celeb stuff and corporations for news etc. Mastodon is not there yet.
Personally, I just want to read tech news like an RSS feed. All my sources I followed on Twitter are not on mastodon. So far it's a no go for me and most people. I wish it was.
I think the issue with mainstream mastodon discussion and adoption is several fold.
The first is that for a large chunk of the population the appeal of twitter is that it's full of famous people, big name professionals, industry insiders, journalists, local governments, and etc. Mastodon users will often brush this off as not why they enjoy microblogging, but a lot of mainstream users care a lot about this. Twitter is a service where you follow individuals not communities and topics and so if the people you follow arent on the replacement service it matters.
The second is that mastodon is over protective about pulling in posts and messages if nobody in that instance follows them which makes using mastodon a pain. The instance I subscribed to for example is federated with mastodon.social and many other major feeds but for some topics like say wrestling I have to open up another tab, and search on mastodon.social and then copy and paste stuff into the other tab. Its not necessarily unintuitive,but if we're already federated why arent I seeing these posts? Of course then I can fix this by following these people, but of course that doesnt pull over the old posts either so I still cant see their stuff on my instance unless they post something new.
Finally the community comes off as super defensive about the way things are. People get suggested this product(by mastodon users) as a twitter replacement and when they bring up potential usability and connection issues the community treats these people like theyre absolute morons. This might be more of a reddit issue, since I've googled some questions and complaints I had with mastodon and it took me there. The github is more civil but there doesnt seem to be appetite to make changes that would make it easier to follow or find people that are several instances removed from you. I know someone put it like "you dont have to be a part of every conversation" which works for message boards, and communities like reddit, lemmy, and such, but on a service that built to follow specific people it's a problem.
you are missing a couple things here, both twitter and mastodon allow following "topics" in that you can follow hashtags.
additionally you can federate more content from other instances that no one follows by connecting to a relay.
not saying this entirely fixes the problems you bring up just that there are ways to somewhat address them.
Many "tech journalists" are about as old as Facebook.
When they started using devices, the iPhone had been around for years, and the only discussion platforms they ever knew where centralized platforms with millions and millions of users run by mega corporations. In their personal life experience, Reddit has always just existed, they've never known a world without YouTube, Snapchat is what they used when they were little kids, TikTok had been around long enough that's it's considered an established media outlet.
They've never seen a Usenet group, they've never had accounts on phpbb forums. Choosing a smaller platform with a more selective userbase just doesn't exist in their reality.
@Kleinbonum @bear_delune Maybe they are just too young? I still remember the old times where I paid my internet data volume by the *kilobyte*.