Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
I was never much of a social media person, never had a facebook or twit account but was a bit interested.
I think when twitter was crashing in 2022 I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I came across Mastodon and liked what I read about it so I opened an account.
Now I am a regular reader and post almost everyday. Most of the people I meet here are really cool and the trolls are blocked with one easy click.
Mast got me reading, writing and thinking again, I'm grateful for that.
I'd argue that we're stuck cause we're buying into their framing. decentralized social media is a technology, not a corporate platform. email is the best comparison. if you could only email with other Gmail accounts but Gmail was huge with lots of nice features, many would be happy with that. Same with Outlook. But when we explain it obviously shouldn't work that way, they'd have no argument. We're clunky like email was at first, but we'll obviously get better with more user adoption.
@rolle But if you run your own server, you're basically exposed to the vacuum of space. You see everything unmoderated. And still you experience this as a healthy environment. Hmm. I, on a well moderated instance, take note.
@martinvermeer Sure, but my server is not completely unmoderated. I've fediblocked the most harassive servers and couple of times a week I have some reports to process.
@rolle Yes, but you have to look at those reports. It is like being an ordinary user on a non-moderated server and the only instruments you have is blocking of instances or accounts.
@martinvermeer But isn't that just moderation by definition? It's just a smaller scope. I use social media pretty heavily and also moderate content on my own. It's true that on Mastodon you rarely see the content that should not be there.
@rolle Well yes, it is moderation: self moderation. My point is that what you see is different, and worse, than what people see that have moderation done for them.
@martinvermeer I'm here to serve my users as well. So your point is more like a moderation team versus a server with one person moderating content? I don't see any difference other than scope. Also on Mastodon users moderate the content by themselves because owners actually will take action more swiftly.
@agasramirez@rolle I think it’s the lack of an algorithm like on that bird site where the amplification skewed negative. This seems to encourage healthier conversation. That’s been my experience at least, as a rando replying to this because someone boosted it, :)
@coffeepine@rolle …I think maybe people who want an algorithmic timeline are looking for something they can game? (I have a fairly pessimistic view of “influencers”.)
🤷🏻
@RnDanger@rolle They're coming, they're implemented in the protocol and some third party apps, but the team was too busy so far to finish adding them to the UI and search yet... But they're not as essential there as on Mastodon, because:
there is a working global full-text search,
the custom feeds partially fill that role - feeds can filter by anything they want, so a lot of them filter posts by some keyword, hashtag (even though they're not clickable) or even emoji
@RnDanger@rolle It's more like Twitter in that it visually looks much more like it (in a very obvious way), and it has 300 character length limit and quote posts. And also like counts are used as input in a lot of feed algorithms.
@rolle I've been trying out all the micro-blogging services too and so far Mastodon is my favorite. I will say though I'm getting more and more impressed with Bluesky the more I have been using it as it evolves. One other platform you may want to consider is Spoutible as it's probably the least hostile of all platforms out there.
In the end, I think ActivityPub wins helping bridge services like WordPress, Mastodon, and even Threads all together in the fediverse.
@bryanruby Spoutible is not a part of any comparison for me because it's practically a one man hobby project. The stack is unstable, cheap and it just feels all too sketchy. No proper apps or ANY decentralized nature either. Can't trust a platform that is built cheap CodeCanyon base.
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