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Bluesky continues to soar
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Fediverse
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Mastodon.social just went over the 2 million user mark. The switch to fediverse and fediverse adjacent is going pretty quick.
I've been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn't there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They've had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don't think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you're looking at something like Twitter.
Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y'know enjoying a community?
That can be difficult if your livelihood depends on it. Artists for example.
You can not have one without the other. Influencers look for audiences. If the community has no influencer, it means that the audience is irrelevant or inexistent.
I preferred the Internet that isn't driven by non-genuine posts by profit driven influencers. I am glad that those people don't like mastodon so they don't ruin another platform.
You are missing the point. The point is that there is nothing to ruin here.
The Fediverse is by and large composed of antsy, narcissistic tweenagers who never created anything and use this space as some form of support network. They think that just because they are outcasts they are part of some counterculture movement (like the punks or the OG hackers from the early internet), but they miss the very important part that these movements need to create something meaningful.
All they can do is ridicule (parts of) the status quo and resort to shoot down anything and anyone who is willing to take any risks to effect any type of change. And for all the talk about diversity and inclusivity, one can read any news headline or article here and know exactly what is going to be the reaction from the people
The only way to break away from this unbearably boring monoculture is by bringing more people. We need to get of our comfort zones, dealing with differences and learning that (some) conflict is important. The alternative is stagnation, and culture-wise stagnation is the same as death.
Is anyone here opposed to bringing more people? I'm upset that people are going to an unfederated platform like BlueSky. I wish more people to join, no matter who they are.
I haven't been on mastodon much, but lemmy is quite diverse.
Apart from a bunch of thriving specialist techie communities, what I see there is mostly tiny spaces dominated by intolerant groupthink and tyrannical moderators.
Indeed I just had a very bad experience in one of those that left me (almost) regretting the R-site.
What are you interested in? !newcommunities@lemmy.world promotes a lot of different communities, which usually have less moderation debates than the largest ones
Intriguing, thanks.
How do you bring more people? I don't think people would disagree with that, the hesitancy is from for profits and EEE. People want the fediverse to grow.
The profit-motive and capitalism is not the problem. Corporatism is.
Mastodon and Lemmy are doomed to stay irrelevant for as long as their leaders believe that "the Community" will support them.
You can not EEE an open standard. XMPP didn't die when Facebook and Google dropped it.
We need to assess the power imbalances and strategize accordingly. This whole "boycott Threads" reaction, for example, works in their favor. They already have hundreds of millions of users. Because of the whole "FediPact", now we have lots of people migrating away from Mastodon because their instance does not let them follow some celebrity or NBA player, or sports journalist. Instead of blocking Threads, we should have worked to let people away from Twitter and into Threads so that they could learn and understand how federation works.
After this would be the time to go after the popular YouTubers and say "hey, why don't you setup your instance instead of using Threads? You won't lose your audience, and you have more control over your brand and online presence!"
This is what any sane person with minimal understanding of marketing would think. But instead of that, we got some reactionary crybabies that want to have the Fediverse only to themselves.
The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn't have celibrities and NBA players. It's (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it's not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it'd get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. ...eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it's about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. ...destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it's value is gone.
I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don't need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is 'linking' with any for profit entity.
Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I'd argue Lemmy isn't the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it's going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.
I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.
If you are starting with something that is completely subjective, how do you expect to get any meaningful discussion? You might not care about these things. It doesn't mean that this is not important to others.
Also, it's not just about the celebrities and NBA players. It's about the conversation surrounding these different interests.
It happened on Reddit many years ago, and because of the long tail it simply didn't matter. Just stay from the (relative) popular subs and things work quite well, as long as they are some minimal critical mass. If you are the type that insists in participating in tiring and pointless discussions about politics, then yeah you are going to have a bad time.
Conjecture, that's not a certainty. In an open network, it's a lot easier to design and implement systems where you can actually verify who is behind an account. Or to implement a system that filters content from anyone who is not part of your web of trust. Or to do like spam filters that run content analysis before even hitting your inbox. You can not implement these things on closed networks because it would destroy their KPIs, but we don't care about that here.
Of course it isn't, but it's the best we have at the moment. If we keep waiting for some ideal solution before working to get people out of the closed systems, it will never happen. Worse still, if we don't get more people, we will hit a local maxima and never innovate. This is already happening on Mastodon.
Here we agree, 100%.
thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.
I don't really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it's too unimportant and tiny right now ;)
Thanks!
Maybe I wasn't too clear on the post about one thing, though. There is no need to fork the browser. I believe this could be implemented as a simple browser extension or even as Progressive Web App, like Voyager or Elk. The idea that I'm working with is actually to fork either one of these applications and just change its internal libraries to make it "speak" ActivityPub directly, instead of using Mastodon's or Lemmy's APIs.
Specifically about this approach, no. But https://matrix.to/#/#fediverse:pixie.town is a good room for people working in Fediverse/Social Web.
I genuinely don't care about influencers. Like, at all.
It's okay, they don't care about you either...
Strangely comforting for something I'm sure you thought was a snappy comeback,
Not a comeback. My point is that no one cares about this space at all. We had for the past two years everything in our favor to dismantle corporate-controlled social media, but the people that are here have ridiculously small ambitions and seem to keep the Fediverse completely irrelevant.
How else can I put it? Imagine that you live in corner of the woods of Bumfuck Alabama and you say, "I'm so glad we don't have McDonalds around here", like it was some reason to be proud. It's not, it just means that you live in a place so desolate that not even McDonalds thinks it's worth it to open a shop there.
You're using words like 'ambition' and 'irrelevant' like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It's not - that's a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don't care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.
There's no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D's. Not having one doesn't make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.
Do you see what I'm saying? This isn't the same place as that - it's quite nice to have a place online that still isn't. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.
That's faulty logic. The presence or absence of a fast-food chain does not indicate that people eat better or worse than a place without. If you live in the US (and maybe the UK) I can bet a $100 with you right now that the average person in your town is heavier and more prone to metabolic diseases than the average person where I live (Berlin, Germany). Even if I am surrounded by probably a dozen Döner shops from my building, I am not forced to eat there. On the other hand, on average we eat less processed food, the restaurants are not serving those ridiculous oversized meals, the European lifestyle requires more physical activity, etc.
Likewise to the social networks. You are just saying "I don't want Andrew Tate". A big network is not just made up of assholes. The presence of some assholes does not imply that the average user is an asshole, and it also does not mean that you need to deal with them. But a small social network does unfortunately implies that there will be less of the good people.
Instead of saying who you don't want, have you actually tried reaching out to the people that you do want to see here? Can you honestly say that you can find a diverse range of people that talk or work with things that are of your interests? Because I surely can not, and I am not one to have an extremely long list of interests and hobbies...
No, that's absolutely the problem. I don't want to go to Reddit, because of Reddit management. My problem with Reddit is not the "average redditor", or "power-tripping moderators of popular subs" because I never went to Reddit to talk with the "average redditor" and I don't care about "popular subs".
Personally, even the API changes wouldn't affect me. I used old.reddit to browse on desktop and I was never a big user on mobile. But the reason that I decided to leave was because Reddit decided to complete turn against its users to pursue relentless growth.
By "going to Reddit when I want", I am still enabling Reddit and I am complacent with the status quo. I can only solve "my" problem by having people out of Reddit and into an open alternative that is more resistant to enshittification.
Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn't do so don't Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I'm saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.
I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and 'hobby' based interests I have.
But here's the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don't miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more 'suggestions' of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.
Who here is talking that the way to grow the network is by applying the techniques from Big Tech? It seems like you've created this giant strawman in your head.
All I am asking is for us to be more welcoming to people here, even if they are not exactly like what you wish. Or to help your friends to try it and see if they can help enough people/content for them to remain invested. Or even (possibly?) reaching out to someone on Twitter/YouTube and say "hey, I want to keep following you, but I don't want to stay here. Would you consider creating an account on Mastodon/Peertube?", etc.
I'm tired of people arguing that the sum of the people in the platform does not equal its culture. Facebook and other social networks clearly benefit from having influencers in their platform, and they make the platform orbit around it.
People who use facebook are not responsible for old people posting what they want. But also, Facebook earns profit from that kind of behavior, so it makes its algorithms circle around it.
It's like saying Instagram isn't responsible for all the influencers and the 'vibe' it has. It is responsible for it and you don't make the platform your own, especially not with the Big players.
Even Mastodon, where you can set up your own instance, has its culture, even if it is richer (culturally) than Instagram or Facebook.
No, each person does not make the platform their own or make out of it what they will. Only a masochist would stay on Facebook preaching their own culture while they have other options that fit better.
Your argument fails.
Also, on another note, I'm tired of Carl Sagan's atheists using Darwinism as basis for lack of a God, and I'm not a christian or muslim. That's just reason to silence people who don't want to take "scientific" argument at face value. True science is debatable and built upon healthy discussion. Not something you toss at other people to make them seem dumb or preach like a religion.
There is a crucial difference. The cool thing of the Fediverse is that there is no central authority. There is no CEO pushing things in one direction or another to try to maximize revenue. We have here the potential for real diversity of groups and interests, but (so far) all we seem to be getting is a very tiny vocal minority that wants to complain about anything that resembles the mainstream but is unable to build an alternative.
You are reading too much into the quote. I just pointed out that faulty logic. Nassim Taleb also talks a lot about this
This was genuinely funny. Thanks.
To each its own, I like it here.
What would you suppose it is ambition, to feed off influencers? What good would that bring to the platform?
If the people who used it would benefit at least. But then again, that's cryptocurrency culture, so I don't know if both complete each other.
I think we could and should work to make the Fediverse an universal alternative. If not make it something that appeals equally to everyone, but to have a real diverse set of people and users. My litmus test is simple: my wife is still on Facebook because of different groups: parenting groups, events around town, some arts and crafts showcases... If I ask my wife her to take a look at Lemmy, will she find something that interests her?
So far, the answer is no. The range of interests around here is very small: sophomoric discussion of US politics, outrage-bait pieces whenever Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos does something stupid, a handful of otakus, a somewhat-larger-but-still-small group of Linux nerds... that's about it. Everything else is represented by at most one or two people who had a sizeable community on reddit, but failed to bring them over.