I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
@me Yeah, lots of the people I knew from Twitter who joined Mastodon fell away from it quickly, saying they just didn't 'get it'. I think they're now all on BlueSky. I blame the latter years of Twitter where everyone just passively absorbed everything.
It took me a while to find my feet here but I did it by actively boosting, liking and replying to posts, finding and following hashtags, then people. And now I have a really nice feed and lots of interesting people and photos and conversations!
@Funktious Your experience sounds like mine. It's not immediate, you have to interact or follow people. But when your circle is ready, it's one of the best social experiences I've ever had
@Funktious@me that's interesting - I found the move from Twitter surprisingly easy once I'd got over the initial shock - "what's an instance? Where should I join?!"
But I still miss many of the people from there, and the ability to communicate with politicians, writers and other "public figures". I must admit I'd have thought this place might have attracted more.
@patrickhadfield@me I think a lot of people really loved the lively feed, the 'main character' of the day, the dunking, the news cycle comedy and I get that - I remember some really fun days when major political stuff happened (D Cameron and the pig for example…)
But I’m also happy to get away from that, tbh, it was exhausting yet oddly passive and bad for the blood pressure. Now I have book reccs and beautiful landscape photos and just daily life from across the world. Better for me mentally.
@Funktious@patrickhadfield@me I'm on Bluesky because that's where a lot of writers have ended up. It's one massive audience, and as a result it feels a lot like standing on a mountain shouting at clouds. The conversations here are much better, IME.
@ravenbait@patrickhadfield@me good to know - this is the impression I got of it and I chose not to go there so as not to split my attention and focus on one place (I don’t need this for work, it’s purely social for me!) Just sounds like lots of people fighting to get clout and clicks and attention.
@Funktious@patrickhadfield@me Maybe I'm just really, really boring, but I get almost no response when I post over there. No reskeets, nothing. I like the culture of engagement and mutual support here.
@ravenbait@patrickhadfield@me it sounds like the passivity of Twitter just moved there - my last couple of years on Twitter I got so little engagement, even from people I knew IRL, that it was refreshing to come here and actually get replies and likes from friendly strangers! It feels like a proper community is slowly growing here and I love that.
@Funktious@patrickhadfield@me I feel like you need to know people already to get any response. It wasn't like that to start -- Nigel Slater followed me! But yeah, now it's... meh. I will persevere, because I'm a writer, and it's the place to be, but I much prefer it here.
@ravenbait@Funktious@me I've not bothered with Bluesky, because when I moved here I wanted to make sure I gave it a chance. And after that it provided most of what I wanted!
Same experience for me. For people that are used to deep algorithmic feeds, it is a kind of a withdrawal feeling when you come to Mastodon and you have to actually engage with others.
@gvenema@me exactly this - people would say ‘it’s so quiet here' and they’d only be following 20 people. It took work to build what I have now but I’m glad I did. I do miss the people who didn’t stay though. I’m still angry at Musk for fracturing our communities like this.
At first I was angry at Musk too. But I have come to realize, he is just an attention seeking moron, who can't help being an attention seeking moron anymore, even for one minute. So, the people I am angry with are the enablers. People and states with deep pockets that essentially gave him money to burn, the old management of Twitter that just took the money and went on their merry way, the lax regulatory agencies that talk a big talk about regulating, but don't do diddly squat.
@Funktious@me Yeah, I wonder if it's similar here to how things were on a small-ish community blogging site I was on years ago (blog.co.uk).
No "algorithm". We'd basically form our own little circle of friends by writing articles, finding other people's blogs in the directory, commenting on each other's articles, joining groups.
Maybe the people who didn't get Mastodon never really had that kind of experience?
@miblo@Funktious@me
I have been wondering the same. I guess some of us are old enough to remember the way of engaging you are describing. Presumably a lot of people started on social media when it already was a much less "social" matter than at its beginnings.
Also, presumably, us : 🧓 👴 👵 😅
@Marie_Ranquet@miblo@me It's really interesting, and I'm looking forward to someone writing a social history of all this! I've been online since the late 90s, but I was a teen then, and a shy, nervous one at that so I was very much a lurker and still tend to be. As social media grew I grew more confident posting, but I still tend to hold back more than I post. And a lot of my friends from twitter were from the same generation as me.
@Funktious@Marie_Ranquet@me We're probably basically the same age. Now you mention it, back on BCUK my circle of friends was actually mostly older than me. And here, there was a poll about this just the other day (that I now can't find), most people are from older generations.
@Funktious@me People like to be served and passively consume. Here you have to be actively engaged or your timeline will be crickets and tumble weed. 🤷🏻♀️
@me Pretty much had the same problem, some people I've told about it have tried it and given up saying there's too much crap to figure out, what's an instance, how do I pick one, how do I find people to follow etc. I started the process of learning Mastodon in case any of my students wanted to try it, ended up liking it pretty well myself though agree I do miss following writers and companies and so on who aren't on here.
@me ″Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices″ ... and unfortunately it is going to get increasingly worse.
@rrapio@me Don't get me started on this. As a Senior I try to warn my senior friends. About the filter bubble, and basic privacy / security settings. Well, for most seniors I know, forget it. When corresponding digitally with seniors, just protect yourself.
@reginaryerson@me I have the impression this is true regardless of the seniority, I'm afraid. I discuss these issues with friends from 30 to 50 and they seem unaware or, at best, unconcerned about this fact.
I think the best we can do is to equip the next generation. I try to address this issue with my 7yo, for example. This should definitively be a topic for educators and tutors.
@me This isn't just about algorithms, but also about starting from zero, being proactive by writing responses and growing a follow or follower list. It needs "work" and time.
@me
One cool thing I've seen some people do to help friends find their feet in the Fediverse is to provide them with an importable list of accounts to follow.
You can export a list of the accounts you follow as a CSV file. If you take out all the accounts that are very particular to your interests, you'll probably be left with a couple to a few dozen accounts that would be of interest to most people with interests that are broadly similar to your own. People like your friends, most likely.
If they import that list of accounts to follow, they can skip the depressing "looking at an empty feed" stage of being on Mastodon without having to figure out the most practical ways of discovering new accounts to follow.
@FediFollows should probably be on any such list, by the way. And FediFollows might want to consider an option to download a CSV file of all the accounts in any given category, as an easy way to get started with a topic.
@me Fediverse shouldn't have to be exclusive with algorithmic feeds - it should just mean you control the algorithm. The non-existence of algorithmic feeds is a real pain point of the Fediverse, especially if you are using a small or single-user instance, which otherwise has nothing to populate it except for the people you follow. At the very least it would be useful to follow the public feeds of certain other instances.
@immibis I'm not against algorithms. I'd be perfectly fine with an algo that will study my preferences and propose interesting contents. But this should be living in my instance, so my data and preferences will stay on my instance.
@me The difference is that on mastodon there's only a 'following' feed. That also exists on twitter, bluesky, etc, but it's not the default. For the longest time I wasn't even aware it existed on twitter, because it's just not available on the macOS app. So, I'm sure 99% default on the 'for you' timeline and think that's what it's supposed to look like.
Moving then to mastodon can feel like tall order. I can see that.
@me
“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
@me there are people from Xitter I miss but on the other hand I haven’t been threatened with physical violence here.
I love the conversations and the variety of interests and ideas as opposed to the toxic echo chamber.
@me Indeed, artists get the same support here with a tenth of their audience on Instagram because we choose the people we follow, we're responsible for this, so of course we're more committed as a support network – at least for artists, and maybe even more broadly.
@me And there's this slight difference that even though Mastodon does optimize for engagement (it's called “biopower” btw), it doesn't prevent its users from clicking on external links as much as capitalistic “social” media do, so we tend to connect at least slightly more directly to their online shops, they can add external links to posts anyway without having them being hidden by the algorithm.
I'm going out on a limb and say that the difference here is that significantly more people in proportion can click on external links without fearing to waste their time.
@me unfortunately people are confortable in those environments because of the company they feel. If they have spent considerable time in there, the less likely they would start over from scratch in other social media.
I came here like a year ago hoping for this to be Twitter 2.0. But this isn't, and it shouldn't be, and that is the beauty of it.
The problem with social media is always the same... people don't actually engage they 'trust' an algorithm to show them content and in return show theirs to others.
On masto, you have to engage with others and let's be honest... most people are to lazy to do that. All they want to do is shitpost links for likes and expect everyone else to do their work for them by sharing it.
That's why they don't get it... and you can't cure that sort of laziness overnight.
@me I'm glad I moved here in Mastodon. While I couldn't exactly get out from the algorithms, seeing X/Twitter getting shittier everyday and being here is an idea that comforts me.
@me Trouble is Fediverse is currently also a huge echo room. You also only see thinks you are currently agree and want to see. No new opinion or idea. Only people you already have on a closed circle.
@me
There is a huge difference between not seeing content you explicitly don't want and not seeing content you don't explicitly search for.
Currently the Fediverse create an echo room because the second with the excuse of protecting people with the first.
A bit out there: but you could create an account with permission, for someone you think would particularly enjoy being here. Do a bunch of set up work, following things, people etc and then hand them the keys.
@me I have gotten a LOT of pushback from friends on BlueSky about using Mastodon. They call it an unfriendly, judgey place with a lot of unwritten rules that crossing any makes you a pariah.
@Tipa The only unwritten rule is: do no harm to others. Then, of course, there are extremists here too, as in all contexts. People who are not used to using alt-text should be guided, not attacked, and unfortunately, this sometimes happens in the Fediverse. In polarizing social platforms, there is a tendency towards aggressiveness and partisanship. Here, I see that many people seek positivity and constructiveness, acceptance, and participation.
@me I tried a few Mastodon hosts before I got to my current one. My first one had every bad thing people say about Mastodon -- I was informed of the rules I was breaking frequently. So I left, eventually ended up here. Lots of people have a bad experience and just leave forever.
@shalien@me@Tipa My biggest complaint about the Fediverse, but more specifically Mastodon, is the inability to own your data. It is bizarre to me that there still isn’t already robust support for migrating posts between accounts/servers.
I feel like I can’t recommend Mastodon to my friends because while they can probably trust that Facebook or Twitter/X won’t disappear overnight, Mastodon/Fediverse instances shut down All. The. Time. I don’t want to have my friends lose their data because of some false narrative of owning it here. Even on my own instance…
While I don’t use it or agree with all of it, one thing that Bluesky/AT was trying to solve was disentangling user data with the home server. While I don’t think their implementation is necessarily accessible to most users, it shocks me that there is not an equivalent for Fediverse/Mastodon migrations.
@fooderick@shalien@me I was big into Google Plus for years. Say what you will, but i owned my data. When it closed down, I merged all my G+ posts into my blog, so it's all still around. And I pay for my blog hosting, so I own everything there.
Mastodon's federated implementation is, like you say, a drawback toward having access to your data. I can't just ask for a ZIP of all my Masto posts.
@Tipa@shalien@me You can export your Mastodon posts into a ZIP file. It should at https://<your-instance>/settings/export. It exports into an ActivityPub format which could definitely be translated into other mediums.
My bigger issues is that you cannot transfer your posts between Mastodon instances. If I had to shut down my instance, all of my user’s posts would die along with it. They could export their data, but they would have to set up their own blog, import data, etc… They could also throw it on The Internet Archive, but that’s not a good solution either.
What I would like is when you migrate your account to another instance, it would also migrates your posts in addition to your followers/following. There is a GitHub issue somewhere that explains why such an implementation is infeasible in Mastodon, but I don’t have time right now to find it. I believe it had to do with UUIDs, which seems a bit silly to me.
@Tipa@shalien@me I lied. I found the GitHub issue. But I don’t have time to read it right now. It seems like it was last commented on October 2023, so it seems like there is some movement. But personally I think that this is a truly necessary change for Mastodon/The Fediverse. I frankly don’t think it is viable as it currently stands without this.
I have thoughts on migration, if I may add to your discusssion;
Firefish has post migration, and it is terrible as it spams every post to the timeline as it imports them to the new instance and reposts them. It is not a good implementation from that aspect.
I personally think they should not be migrated anyway. My feeling is that your posts being able to be downloaded and saved is enough, as realistically most will never be looked at again. Most of my accounts auto delete posts after a couple of months, so I don't have cruft hanging around behind me.
The exception is my blog which I spun up on WordPress and it federates as well. Blog posts stay, as that is why they are there.
@n@shalien@me@fooderick I never bothered to get my tweets when I left Twitter. It sounds trite, but I treasure the friends I made there more than any specific tweet. And that's why I would really enjoy it if everyone I liked to chat with THERE, would just come to one place, preferably HERE.
No I think that's exactly as it should be. I see the micro blog platforms like here as somewhat ephemeral and don't put any weight on posts staying around, more so the people and interactions.
There's a lot of weirdness when you use a "pod" (which is literally a personal data silo).
If the instances are just a proxy to access data from pod-type storage, it gets weird when you have 20 people from other instances participating in a thread.
If a silo moves all the relational data breaks and the instances meta-data becomes inaccurate (which post is a reply to what post).
This is a really hard problem and would likely require a rewrite to do effectively
Hmm yes. That is a great point. I believe that I’ve also seen something similar brought up in that GitHub Issue for Mastodon a long time ago, but alas, I just got off work and I haven’t had a chance to update myself. Consistency is /quite/ a tough problem, if not one of the toughest to be able to viably solve.
On the other hand, I think that perhaps a bad implementation might be acceptable if done well. We would never be able to resolve/rewrite external links, nor be able to effectively rewrite history outside of an instance. I think it would be possible to migrate /some/ things, even if it’s not everything. Breaking some things (e.g. ignoring replies) makes even more sense when considering a host instance disappearing entirely.
There are tradeoffs of course, and right now I am severely ignorant anyway. I have no educated solutions to this barrier to entry.
Always sorry to hear that people have bad experiences, but in this case it is the fault of the people, not the platform. The mute/block button (which I wish was more prominent in the interface) takes care of those people (for the most part)
I have seen a very positive uptick in Mastodon over the last month or two. Seems like lots of new actual people and many more organizations coming on board, my timeline gets more interesting every day.
@MylesRyden@me you're absolutely right; it is the people, and Masto is my main social media currently. Many people won't take the time to find their Masto home, though, not when Threads and BlueSky offer more traditional apps.
The #1 thing the Masto community could do would be to partition off the judgy hosts so that a new user would only find them if they were looking for them.
I have to be honest and say, I don't even know what a "judgy host" and how it can matter.
As you can tell, I am actually using a "corporate" host, run by the Vivaldi browser people as I was already using the browser.
I have run into a few judgy people and sometimes they are correct, I should have alt-text on my pictures, but no I am not an expert at it and sadly it is not a super high priority for me to get much better at it. I have totally been dumped on from time to time for expressing unpopular opinions, but that is par for the course.
Oddly, one of the things I have been attacked the most for is when someone complains about Mastodon, and I make the mistake of saying, "You can really make your Mastodon experience anything you want it to be, have you tried (X,Y,Z). I have had people go absolutely ballistic on that.
And here I am saying the same thing again. I'm a slow learner, I guess.
@MylesRyden@me well, that's exactly what I said to my friends on BlueSky. "Try this server, I know the admins, they're cool". They laughed. They won't try Masto again.
I'm not talking about alt text on pictures (though I did get dinged for it, I agreed and corrected). But being told I can't post pictures with animals, or with people's faces, or anything done with AI. I like posting pictures! And guess what, I do use Midjourney and Dall-E and stuff, too.
In that case, I feel bad for you and am glad you found another instance.
Left or right, at some point telling other people what they can and can't do is a bad thing. I would absolutely agree that the data scraping that AI companies do is a bad thing, but I don't see how my joke pictures of #JohnMastodon actually hurts artists enough to ban the practice. Now, an art gallery or magazine, that is another thing. But I digress.
I do think as we get many more larger more "open" instances, like Vivaldi, that kind of experience will become less likely.
On the positive side, I have seen very good evidence of very cool instances -- for example there is an instance for people who like type fonts, more organizations now have their own instances and so on.
I decided to blocka server that I was previously involved with running yesterday.
The twitter migrants made it unbrearable to log in, so a few months back we got new mods from the userbase and stepped away. I recently spun up this instance and saw and replied to a post from a user there, and all I got was smug replies about how they are right and their buddy replying to them belittling me as if i couldnt see his posts... like wtf man. Be an adult. Thats some childish bullshit. So I blocked and moved on. I had futher info and detail but its not worth my time to interact with such arrogance and entitlement.
I am sad that they took over our server and made it something else, but it was funded by users donations, so we decided to give it to the users to use and moved away ourselves.
@n@Tipa@me It's hard to move away from the Twitter ways, I mean all of us are assholes sometimes but here that behavior is not artificially boosted for profit.
Very true. The issue we had was that with an entire community moving all at once, they did not try and fit in with the current server vibe, they just moved in and continued their same way of interacting as all their buddies were there as well. Nothing changed for them except the web address, basically.
I would somewhat compare it to someone moving countries to one with a different culture, and then staying in their own little community and continuing their same ways as back home, with no effort to interact with the existing residents and find out about the local culture and ways of life of the area they inhabit.
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