Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it's sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don't like twitter (because it's too "toxic"). This means that you can't really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that's largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.

I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don't imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it's own kind of different thing.

It's gonna go public eventually, this is like a closed beta kind of thing. The purpose seems to be more to get people curious about it and foster a certain culture which I must say that they've been pretty effective at. They strategically handed out invites to a lot of black twitter users for example, which is smart since black twitter has historically been an important cultural force on the internet

They've been invite only since before that, it's unrelated

Depends on in what way you're looking for a youtube alternative!

I think peertube might be fine if you're looking for a way to host your own videos, but it's propably not a good place to just browse for video content the way you might with youtube. I think the most solid alternative for that is Nebula. It costs like a dollar a month IIRC and has a couple big name video easayist kind of types. It doesn't really have anything to do with the fediverse or anything, but a majority of it is owned by the creators and from what I understand it is more generous per view than youtube, plus it has a buissiness model that doesn't rely on serving you adds and selling your data.

It's from Mass Effect, this is the character Mordin Solus catchphrase. CosmicApe is almost certainly refering to a (very good) cutsceen from one of the possible endings to the Tuchanka chain of missions in ME3.

I don't think reddit has taken a very large hit by many messurable metrics as of now. The damage that is done is more cultural and will have downsides for the website more long term.

Hey, glad to hear that we're mostly on the same page!

I should clarify that I'm just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they're both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it's not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.

I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.

Hey, I think that was my comment!

What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn't otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).

I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn't come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can't expect everyone to share my connotations.

What I think is important isn't the exact wording (if I hadn't written "normie" I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn't otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn't contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don't have those associations with that word so that doesn't ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.

I feel like instagram is one one of those apps - at least the way I use it - that relies on a lot of your irl friends having it as well. I would love for them to be open to signing up to some fediverse platform but we're not there right now sadly.

Lemmy is the most reddit like experience if that's what you're after, but I'd reccomend getting a couple different accounts, browsing around and seeing what works and then settling on what's most fun

Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.

I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.

neomut, because I have linux brain damage