Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand.
@gruber Maybe the answer could be "Twitodon", a dedicated instance that tries to bridge the gap between the #Fediverse and what people liked about #Twitter.
What does this mean?
Well, if there would be a landing page, that looks just like the landing page Twitter provides, that lets you generate an account without even thinking about instances and that provides you with curated Toots, proposals which accounts to follow, etc., it could provide exactly what Twitter refugees want.
I absolutely understand the critical need for alt text and captions, but with all of the advanced technology available to us, there surely must be a way to avoid this “walls of text covering up images” mess on mobile devices 🙃
Is there a way in the #fediverse to disable #alttext, but only for myself? I still want to add them to my own images, but when I tap into an image to read what it says, I don’t want the alt text to cover it all up.
But it's also not entirely @gruber's fault because the media doesn't really talk about the Fediverse, and when they do, it's as a synonym for "Mastodon".
How would @gruber know about the massive development efforts to build more user-friendly alternatives to Mastodon?
No one in the media talks about the growth of *key apps, and how they're now the #2 most used Fediverse platform.
Not only this, #Mastodon ‘s poor UI design and user experience has done damages to the adoption of #Fediverse when hundreds of people wanted a viable option for social media beyond Facebook and twitter. The surge in the registration of #Calckey social so much that this is breaking your server should tell you a story, speculative as it may be, if people had the choice of #Calckey and mastodon a year ago, that choice would bode well for #Fediverse.
Let’s face it: #Bluesky will be popular. Because as far as I can tell, it looks and works almost exactly like Twitter, and Twitter was immensely popular.
Does that mean the doom of the #Fediverse? Of course not. At 10 million users, the Fediverse has reached critical mass. Just like (I’m gonna say it…) Linux on the desktop has reached critical mass even though Windows and macOS dominate popular use.
The parallels between the #mastodon and desktop Linux is almost too painfully obvious: both are opinionated, nerd-focused tech products that express deeply-held ideologies…and hence unfriendly and unwelcoming to huge swaths of non-technical humanity who simply want to use the product.
The #Fediverse won’t disappear; but it might become niche, non-inclusive, and powerless to save most humans from the allure of yet another techbro-driven profit-hungry corporate monolith.
It’s almost too basic to even bring up but I’ll say it anyway: Fediverse products must focus its development on serving its users, and not its ideologies. It must compete based on what it is, and not on what it is not: not twitter, not Facebook, not #Bluesky, not corporate.
To do that, it has to fix the major flaws that users have complained about: ease of onboarding (what the hell are instances?), ease of finding and following friends, ease of searching. It needs to fix the numerous problems with DMs (unsolicited messages, getting dragged into unwanted conversations, no privacy). It needs to establish one dominant network of instances which is concerted in its efforts to eradicate bigotry, abuse, and spam, and it needs to funnel users there by default.
In other words, #Fediverse platforms must adopt product thinking. You are not launching a religion; you are offering a product that needs to compete—yes, you are in a competition—for users who don’t care about your philosophy.
You may think you can convince people to join you because you’re going to save their souls from the corporate machine, but the best way to get there is actually to create a system in which THE SIMPLEST AND MOST REWARDING THING THAT MOST USERS DO WILL TURN OUT TO BE THE BEST CHOICE FOR THEM IN THE END.
The #Fediverse must compete on the open market as another icon on the user’s screen, right next to Facebook, twitter, and Bluesky. Give the users a reason to tap your icon instead of the others every time, and you win the game.
Any #MastoAdmin have ideas how mastodon.social plans to scale? With the sign up focus on them for ease of onboarding - if it works - could see their numbers grow rapidly. I hope it forces them to find ways to optimize. Otherwise all their donation $$ will go to cloud costs and mobile development while I wish it was all focused on Mastodon development.
@thedarktangent sure. It depends how the software scales out right now, but I imagine it's still fairly naïve. My theory is that the actual behind-the-scenes work pulling data from all other federated instances takes quite a bit of processing power and bandwidth. It would be wise to break this out to a separate vertically scaled service while the day-to-day handling of user requests is scaled out horizontally.
All these tools are critical to the future of the Fediverse.
In particular, #Pixelfed will be released on iOS and Android by the end of the month -- which will give people who use #Instagram an easy way to migrate to the Fediverse.
Dan does a lot! Let's show him appreciation and love!
Tonight I introduced my roomie to "The Core," a movie that tends to get lambasted for its awful science (which, I mean, fair,) but is - in my opinion - a legitimately half-decent disaster flick, with some really good character writing and a FAR better cast than it had any right to have.
Aaron Eckhart? Stanley Tucci? Come on!
And it's free to watch on YouTube, which is awesome.
What are some "bad" movies you #fediverse folks love despite their reps, and why?
The W3C Social Web Community Interest Group -- the home of #ActivityPub -- has a new chair, Dmitri Zagidulin aka @dmitri! This is excellent news for the future of ActivityPub and the broader #fediverse.
Dmitri has long, broad, relevant experience both technically and organizationally in the W3C and outside, and I'm very happy he stepped up to take on this rather challenging task.
At speed. He's already organizing the first meeting! Let's all help him get the group to accomplish much!
Feature request - has any #Fediverse software considered making it easy to add a license to any original works you publish here?
Ie like Flickr years ago once allowed you to automate added a specific CC license to the works you uploaded.
For example of how I want to use this - a few days ago I posted a photo I took of @annaleen and @pluralistic at the SFPL - I’d love to be able to attach a CC license to that photo to make it clear I’m happy with reuse of it
I've noticed that almost every time I share a link from one of my #Wordpress blogs here, my blog crashes for a dozen seconds to a minute or two. Has anyone else encountered that?
Is it a WordPress problem, not playing well with #ActivityPub?
Is it my host? Plugins (that's going to be fun to troubleshoot 😒)?
If anyone knows, I'm all ears.
(Adding #Mastodon and #Fediverse hashtags, I know people who follow them know about these kinds of things 😉)
The notion that federated social media depends existentially on scalable moderation is obviously getting momentum. Here are two efforts I've run across that are focusing on this. One is a non-profit, the other smells like a startup company:
I am happy to see the idea of human moderator coops for #OnlineCommunities like https://about.iftas.org/ springing up. I had a 20-person consultancy a quarter century ago: http://rheingold.com/Associates .
Automated moderation tools can help filter out the bad stuff, but humans are required for healthy online cultures to grow.
#fediverse#spam
Thoughts on today's rapid-account-mutator crypto spammer.
This is the 'easy setting' version of this particular attack.
They are generating new accounts on mastodon.social as fast as they can, blasting the spam out, and essentially DOSing account moderation as the reports for the spam accounts bury the reporting system.
Because they are creating new accounts at lightning speed, by the time the moderations can terminate a given account, multiple new accounts are already spewing.
It will get worse.
The next generation of rapid-mutator will probably not attack ONE large instance (which can be temporarily blocked or limited) but as many different instances as they can find with open signups.
And all of a sudden to block it you will have to block/limit a large fraction of the entire fediverse.
Mastodon has to get MUCH, MUCH better at the automatic screening of new accounts and quickly.