All those reasons boil down to "I don't feel like learning anything new at this point in my life. If it isn't easy enough for a toddler I don't want it."
The author is basically going like “I registered an E-Mail address and used my usual username. I don’t know which provider I picked, I just picked one in the middle of a list. People can’t seem to find me with just my username! It’s too complicated!”
That's not really true. When it first came out, before the ads, before the algorithm, when they embraced 3rd party apps with an open api, it was really great. It was full of techy personalities and interesting folks. Hashtags were fun to follow, live events were amazing in real time, so much more. That was before it got inundated with politics and celebrities though. I think that honeymoon phase only lasted a tiny while, then it all went downhill into the outrage machine pretty quickly. But for a quick minute there, it was glorious.
Twitter was also an important tool for journalists and researchers worldwide. Military targets have come from Twitter posts. It is a reflection of a huge chunk of society. You may as well call all of internet technology "just a porn box" for how wildly over generalized that statement is. The reality is your generalization comes from arrogance. "I never engaged in such frivolous behavior". You're here now. Yes you have and yes you do.
Even your comment is the first cousin of outrage, it's pure disdain. Nothing more or less, and exactly as valuable as outrage.
The interesting thing about Twitter is how it shows how a significant part of our society works. It is kind of about amplifying fame and suggesting that we should all cares about meaningless 240 character posts or what these guys think.
That news media types love Twitter is kind of an indictment of how news works.
Yeah this isn't great to hear. If they're keen on taking pushing content outwards to kbin but not accepting incoming content, that's not really good enough.
If they're doing something shifty like that, how do we even know kbin users comments are even being recorded (and seen on that Lemmy instance)
What's the overarching issue here? Those admins are just being dicks?
I invested lots of time into Google+ and built up a following of 26,000 there. Then it closed down days before I started my Patreon campaign. Yes, I am still bitter about that.
Then I shifted my attention to Twitter. And then, last year, Elon Musk took it over.
I am done investing effort in corporate-owned social media sites that must inevitably follow the #Enshittification principle. No, Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) did not absorb as many Twitter users as we hoped. Still, I think in the long run the Fediverse will grow, as corporate social media proves again and again that they cannot be trusted.
I don't think Mastodon is as resistant to enshittification as everyone seems to think. Or rather, I think the drivers towards enshittification still exist - primarily, economic pressures relating to operational costs, and the human cost of managing communities - but because there is no actual revenue stream that can even potentially be gained from enshittification and the users won't tolerate anything that might amount to it, what winds up instead happening is that instances just close when their admins either run out of money or burn out. The service on instance X doesn't get "enshittified", it just ends.
This is a nice outcome though, since users can move to another server, bringing their followers and network with them. It also prevents long drawn out migrations like we see with twitter, because either you move on or you have nothing.
I mostly agree, it's not perfect, we're nowhere near the endgame yet. However even the situation you described would be better than now, where I can't bring my twitter followers anywhere with me.
It really is. @ernest has done so much by himself in so little time. I'm hoping people who have the know how will step up and contribute code-wise to the project!
“But at the very least, if a server goes down, it should not be catastrophic to you.” Your social world shouldn’t live inside an app, she says, or depend on a company staying solvent. It should, and could, be much bigger than that.
I'm not sure it failed.
I joined Mastodon in Apr 03, 2017 - but was never really very active because - well, there wasn't really much to be active with. It was ghost town. But it grew slowly and organically. Which was OK.
Then the big Twitter meltdown happened in Nov 22 and all of a sudden we got couple of million new users. There was a lot of adjustment, from new people and the old inhabitants. It wasn't very pretty (the whole CW debacle).
Many of those millions left and (presumably) went back to Twitter. But many stayed. The twitter InfoSec community is (mostly) on Mastodon now. Quite a lot of science-twitter is as well. We're far bigger place now than we were before 22.
Twitter didn't crash and burn (yet). People went back. But I don't think the migration failed. Some stayed and we're richer place for it.
But I agree with lot of the things in the post. Dealing with federation, quirky UI's, prototype services (hi kbin!) and other linuxesque peculiarities isn't what mainstream is looking for. The whole "just spin up your own fedi-server" might not be very sustainable/environmentally friendly compared to centralized well maintained datacenter. There are lot of problems to solve before fediverse is "mainstream ready".
But to be quite honest. I'm not sure it needs to be. Yes, I get that it's hard to "build following" without mainstream, but to be honest, I actually prefer more signal and less noise. And lot of the "mainstream" is just noise who follow popular accounts because they're popular.
I still don't get why people wanna stay, all the toxic users get now top priority (a.k.a. people who pay for Twitter Blue) and they promote toxic tweets
Not for long. Some started to go to Mastodon, and I'm begging my favorite indie VTubers to make accounts on Mastodon even if they will still use Twitter.
I was just telling my wife this over coffee this morning. She had seen an article about reddit on BBC news and asked what the difference was between this move and twitter. And my response was exactly this.
I think a lot of it too is people don't want to lean a new system. I've seen multiple big influencers on Twitter basically day they had no interest in using Mastodon because they didn't want to learn a new platform and so instead the begrudgingly keep using Twitter. People don't like change and will sometimes torture themselves to avoid it
To an extent, influencers wouldn't get on with Mastodon anyway.
Looking at it charitably from their point of view, the discovery is so poor that actually building a following there is a huge amount of work they probably won't see a return on. It's a much smaller audience that in no small part resents even the idea of an "influencer" - someone who has that as their line of work is going to struggle and consider it not worth their time.
Looking at it less charitably, Mastodon does not reward activity on its own but instead things only get attention if they're actually worth attention, so carpet-bombing fedi with posts most people don't actually value is a waste of their time, and it's a lot more effort than such people would typically be willing to expend.
That's understandable but I was more referring to influencers whose main profitability is elsewhere such as YouTube and they are using Twitter as a means of communicating with their audience/just post random life updates.
That being said are there influencers that actually make money from Twitter? I feel like Twitter has always been more of an engagement platform for influencers rather than a platform they actually make money off of
I can say why I didn’t stay: I was never a twitter user to begin with, and I tried to use mastodon when everyone tried to shift and I just didn’t like the format. Felt like work.
Indeed - I think people seem to have this ill-conceived notion that Twitter has to fail for Mastodon to succeed.
From my perspective, both are doing just fine. Mastodon has developed a community with, in my opinion, much higher quality discussion, and well, Twitter can keep being twitter.
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
Kbin is technically federated and Kbin.social is technically just an instance on a federated network, the federation is just broken right now. But the simple fact of that not being a consideration, and everyone signing up on Kbin.social, has led to comments like this where "it's so much easier".
It rather proves my point; putting decentralised whatever front and centre makes things pointlessly complex and offputting to end users. They don't want to think about this shit, they just want to read stuff and post. The less they have to think about this shit, and/or the less this shit has an impact on their experience, the better for them.
When the explosion of new users happened, kbin.social was the only instance and it wasn’t ready for the growth. It was completely offline or disfuncional frequently and Ernest had to both disable federation and put up a CloudFlare captcha to slow down traffic to the site. So after all that lemmy.ml had to also temporarily block kbin.social because bei g unresponsive to lemmy.ml trying to federate was slowing down lemmy.ml. so people who were looking at both went to Lemmy.
Cloudflare protection also completely messed up federation, so in those days kbin was more or less completely cut off from Lemmy. And back then there weren't really alternative kbin instances to choose from.
Kbin is still much more bleeding edge - kbin had just recently reached a level of basic usability at the time of the first wave of Reddit migrants, whereas Lemmy has been around for years with a development team of twice the size (two people).
Where kbin is lagging behind the most is probably in how easy it is to set up an instance, and administer it once it's out there. This means that niche sites are more likely to use Lemmy at the moment. Then there's also, of course, still no API/apps (could change any moment now).
That said, I am incredibly happy with kbin myself, and I also don't mind at all most of the people out there being on Lemmy. As far as I'm concerned having two strong platforms from the beginning makes the Threadiverse stronger.
Having multiple clients is a great way to ensure that the underlying protocol remains open, nobody can "get away" with extending it simply because they happen to have the only actual implementation of it.
I have no idea how easy it'd be, but maybe having a way to convert a Lemmy instance into a kbin instance would be a good idea.
(public beta requires you to sign up for https://artemis.camp and access the app via this instance, as soon as the kbin API is fully released as opposed to dev branch only, all instances will be supported!)
I was about to say "how did I miss that?"... lol
Unfortunately the thumbnails in compact mode are microscopic. Probably the worst size I've yet to see, and most apps are already pretty bad at using the available space for that.
(public beta requires you to sign up for https://artemis.camp and access the app via this instance
*if you want to use it for more than lurking at this point.
Unfortunately the thumbnails in compact mode are microscopic. Probably the worst size I've yet to see, and most apps are already pretty bad at using the available space for that.
I've made a ticket about this. Just because it's low priority doesn't mean it won't happen - it just means Hariette goes through tickets FAST and there's a bunch of higher-prio things to do~
Feel free to add a comment if you have anything additional to add, or to upvote it to show your support
*if you want to use it for more than lurking at this point.
Ah good clarification! You can view it logged out without any new account,
I can see that opinion, but as the person who is currently prioritizing tickets for Artemis, I can tell you that the issue tracker is being paid attention to haha
Kbin is about 3 months old whereas Lemmy is about 3 years old. Kbin simply wasn't ready for growth, and still has a few major feature shortfalls. Lack of API access is a big one.
Because Lemmy is older and already has a lot of established communities. Kbin saw the larger growth rates though (in the context of the recent Reddit drama). Kbin also currently lacks native mobile apps, and a lot of people browse this type of media form their phones.
And those who were stubborn enough to keep looking at all options despite what could easily feel overwhelming to a non-tech user.
I am not very tech-inclined, so trying to understand the fediverse as a whole felt like very deep water, and lemmy really didn't do any job at all at explaining what it was I was committing to by choosing an instance when I didn't even know what instances were and had trouble finding out.
Since Lemmy was and is by far the most mentioned alternative and I found it too anxiety-inducing, it's mostly stubborn desperation that brought me to kbin. Which says nothing to how much I'm genuinely enjoying it here, to be clear, I was just relieved to have a simple option at that point.
Being made anxious by a new platform isn't great and I would guess that most people who didn't like the experience they had with Lemmy didn't bother clicking other links that would take them to the same fediverse. They're likely to assume they won't enjoy that one either, and resign themselves elsewhere.
So kbin naturally got fewer users just by word of mouth, and then the necessary brief isolation didn't help either when people were still getting comfortable and testing out different accounts. I don't particularly mind it other than those rare times I'm accidentally excluded, either by a question addressed only to Lemmy or their recent version of r/place disappointingly being incompatible with kbin.
I was initially put off by the UI of Lemmy that I encountered when I first went to the Lemmy site. I was a little confused as to which instance to join. That's when I stumbled upon kbin.social and that's where I landed my new account. Overall I am most comfortable here.
Since joining, I've encountered Lemmy posts that take me to their instances proper, and the formatting looked different, more like here just with a different colored background. Overall, Lemmy instances seem okay, I just like it here better.
Maybe it's the overall familiarity with the instance, calling main topic pages "magazines," the microblogging option, etc. Lemmy's resemblance is a little closer to Reddit, so that might account for why people decided to go there instead of a kbin instance.
Regarding the articles: tech journalists all use microblogging sites like Mastodon, so for them Kbin’s microblogging integration is a major advantage. Also, IIRC Kbin made it easier to follow certain people, like industry leaders, while Lemmy is more focused on communities.
Personally, I really dislike microblogging, so for me it was a major reason not to use Kbin. I think there may be a large silent group that feels the same way, but I haven’t seen any statistics on this.
My English is not the best so maybe there was also something lost in the translation. But what I thought about was that probably all this open source and free internet loving people from Wikipedia has to use twitter as an communication channel for so long and that it is probably pretty cool to see for them that the open source universe is expanding further more.
Putting the blame on Microsoft or IWF is meaningfully missing the point.
People were responsible for moderating what showed up on their forums or servers for years prior to these tools' existence, people have been doing the same since those tools existed. Neither the tool nor it's absence are responsible for child porn getting posted to Fediverse instances. If those shards won't take action against CSAM materials now - what good will the tool do? We can't run it here and have the tool go delete content from someone elses' box.
While those tools would make some enforcement significantly easier, the fact that enforcement isn't meaningfully occurring on all instances isn't something we can point at Microsoft and claim is their fault somehow.
It’s literally every scrap of data on your phone. If anyone can tell me something that’s on your phone that’s NOT on this list, I’d like to hear what it is
No but for real, Federation is about being open in my opinion. We have modlogs, everything. Then please provide information about why you exclude x from doing y.
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