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.
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.
If all of the #fediverse were to fade away and we were left with just #mastodon as a non-profit and it's app and mastodon.social as a big centralised twitter clone ... it wouldn't be the absolute worst thing in the world. In fact it'd be kinda nice, especially given that the software is OSS and people could be putting up small community focused servers for whatever reasons.
Well, that’s exactly happened. So server admins started installing mastodon, and the network grew. Perhaps at the expense of others (oh well) #Fediverse
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.
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.
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.
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.
The #fediverse is an “accidental” #openweb reboot by the #fashernistas, so it’s herding cats to get anything done, not a bad thing, not a good thing It’s what it is.
One way to move away from this mess is #OGB grassroots #DIY producer governance.
Otherwise, live (and die) with the mess, and try to stop people bowing down and praying to the #deathcult is a step to keep the #openweb in place.
Jetzt endlich doch! #Mozilla hat am Donnerstag die Private-Beta-Phase für eine eigene Instanz bei der Twitter-Alternative #Mastodon gestartet. Der Schritt ist bedeutend, weil Mozilla bei Browsern in Deutschland knapp 19 Prozent und weltweit etwa sechs Prozent Marktanteil hat und somit ein weiterer großer Player aktiv ins dezentrale #Fediverse einsteigt. Das macht den großen zentralisierten Social-Media-Konzernen zunehmend Konkurrenz, berichtet @markusreuter#Netzpolitikhttps://netzpolitik.org/2023/fediverse-browser-riese-mozilla-startet-bei-mastodon-durch/
Funny how all the Journalists claiming BlueSky is amazing, despite missing most of the promised features, are the same journalists who criticised Fediverse for missing much less of those features, and also never acknowledged existence of platforms with those "missing" features like #calckey. The ones who condensed #Fediverse to only #Mastodon.
Also the same bunch of journalists who erroneously claimed Fediverse use was falling off when it's growing massively. One of them took two daily registration data points, highest day in November vs lowest day for registrations in Jan to fake a slump. If he'd chosen a data point in Oct not Jan it would be opposite story. Ridiculous editing of all the other day points out selectively.
Tech coverage can be as irritatingly bended knee to their patrons as political sometimes.
Not all journalists are like that of course. Some recent coverage put me in mind of the facts over spin exceptions like this article from @mmasnick in Feb.
Have you ever wanted to find the news and stories that the Fediverse is talking about? This is what we built Top Stories Daily for: https://masto.murmel.social/top
Nach Redaktionsschluss – Der Medienpodcast - Deutschlandfunk: Elon, es reicht! - Sollten Medien #Twitter verlassen?
Beleidigungen und Anti-Medien-Hetze: Muss man sich alles von #ElonMusk gefallen lassen? Das diskutieren die Online-Multimediachefin des Dlf Nicola Balkenhol (@nicy1) ARD-Digitalexperte Dennis Horn (@dennishorn) und Brigitte Baetz (@brigittebaetz) von "@mediasres".
Von Brigitte Baetz | Produktion: Anh Tran
U.a. geht es zwischendurch auch um #Mastodon und die Frage, ob und inwiefern das eine Alternative zur #Vogelseite sein kann. Tenor von Dennis Horn: Für dendie einfache, nicht-technikaffine Userin ist Mastodon (bzw. das #Fediverse) aufgrund der verschiedenen Instanzen und Dienste zu kompliziert. Hier wiederhole sich die Diskussion, die schon seit Jahren/Jahrzehnten um #Linux als Alternative zu #Windows geführt werde.