No, this will get people to leave Mastodon for Threads in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn’t know or care about the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.
Threads is just Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and Facebook ads and tracking, so basically they are pulling people away from decentralized networks and back to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads.
Then Facebook can quietly drop support for Mastodon compatibility. Embrace (is done), Extend (with search, advertising, and tracking), Extinguish, cut compatibility with non-Facebook instances and sink the decentralized network, then finally Enshittification.
No, he’s doing it because otherwise he won’t be compliant with the Digital Market Act, as a “gatekeeper”. That’s why this is happening at the same time as launching in Europe.
I agree, but remember that the last step is to discontinue ActivityPub integration so people will move from mastodon over to threads to keep up with the content they got on mastodon from threads
If you’re already up and running on Mastodon and can interact with people on Threads, there’s literally no reason to swap one for the other.
This is about encouraging new users to join Facebook instead of one of those other Mastodon instances. Realistically, what percentage of people who join Threads will consider joining Mastodon or an independence instance instead when Facebook decides to drop support for Mastodon federation? I would guess that number at 1% or less. In other words, 99% of all Threads users are stuck there for the entire term of their service, never actually joining Mastodon.
The point of Facebook investing all of this money into setting up Threads is to eliminate competition from decentralized services. They are terrified that they are losing all of the control over the Internet that they have slowly acquired over the past 15 years or so, they are trying to take it back and destroy the competing network of federated independent services.
The average user doesn’t know or care about the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.
Threads advertises itself as "interoperable with the Fediverse", which will fuel curiosity in some users. And Mastodon isn't only small-time operated instances. Creators of Vivaldi web browser created their Mastodon instance and bundle it with their browser account. Mozilla is preparing to do the same.Medium and Flipboard are another examples.
Curious users can find the fediverse anyway if there were interested in changing social media platforms. Meta has NO good reasonable use to integrate the fediverse. Compared to Metas cumulative social media user size we are but a tiny hub of users. So here again: there is NO good reason for them to just causally go “oh hi guys, let’s be friends!” The only reason is to extinguish competition before it gets larger. It’s like Starbucks slapping down a store next to your local coffee shop because “wow we both like coffee, let’s be friends so our customers can enjoy coffee together and have a talk!” It’s a deceptive strategy.
Why would they leave if Federation with Threads improves the experience of using Mastodon (you can follow many more peoole)? I hate Facebook as much as anyone, but I don’t get this argument at all.
If people just wanted an app with more recognition they would have never signed up to Mastodon in the first place.
They won't at the start. But they will after they made friends on threads and then threads breaks the federation again. The people in threads will not move to the fediverse because most of the people they interact with are on threads. They might not even notice that the federation broke. But for the people on the fediverse it will feel as if a large part of their social circle just disappeared.
But before that threads will already make things worse for non threads users. They will start extending the protocol in such a way that fediverse servers won't be able to keep up. They will find undefined cases in the protocol and start using them causing other servers to break/degrade. They will start one-sided slowdown of federation causing people to blame the server they are on instead of threads. Etc.
Nonsense. Even those of us who are on the Fedi most of the people we know are on the large platforms. They’re not forming new relationships. The point stands of the person you replied to, they would just continue using Big Social platforms. There’s 1.2 MAU which is nothing compared to all of Meta’s large platforms not even a blip. They’re not trying to steal Mastodon users
Threads is already much much igger than the entire Fediverse, I don’t see what is there to lose?
Currently tge Fediverse is mostly drawing in tech geeks, which are unlikely to leave either way. Federation with Threads might actually pull in “normal” users.
A natural network effect will pull in users in a network. Watering down our decentralized network with Metas network will make all of Fediverses advantages indistinguishable from the users perspective. Decentralization is not something you experience as a user anyway so there will be no obvious reason for someone coming from threads to switch over to the Fediverese. The other way round is more likely. Meta has insane design and market power to push out better Apps, faster CDNs and marketing to give users a better “Fediverse”.
It’s irrelevant to you, but a community doesn’t have to be massive for it to be important to it’s users, it just has to be big enough for people to get something out of it regularly to keep the existing userbase engaged. Lemmy pre-migration is a great example. But if enough people leave in a short timespan it’s really hard to keep the remaining userbase engaged after that drop-off. XMPP is a good example of this actually happening, I had a bunch of friends on there for years. When google pulled the rug, a lot of users lost a lot of their reasons for sticking around. It’s a shell of itself now.
That solely depends on you! There will always be a need for a decentralized open source social media network and as long as there isn’t any other alternative that can achieve that the people who rely on it won’t go anywhere.
Yes, but I advocate for decentralized social media to become the status quo and not the fallback role when corpo controlled media ends it’s life cycle via enshittification again.
To be super clear — I'm 100% not saying it is fraudulent. This could be as simple as “Some work was intended to be done, it wasn't, other work was done instead, and the expense description was not updated”.
You can also look into kbin which supports both the regular article based content (like Reddit with subreddits) and posts (which are like tweets attached to a topic with tags).
Been finding some decent topics to follow recently
Sorry if this is a dumb but I legit never got into Twitter, and I only use Instagram to follow friends and bands I like.
How do I Mastadon? I’m not being sarcastic, not even a little. Like I literally have absolutely no concept of what I’m supposed to do on it or how to engage with it. Same with pixelfed tbh, like I open it, I see a milliong posts that have no comments or likes, I get confused and then I leave.
Like what do you do? How do you use it? Pretend I’m one of the idiot journalists this post is making fun of, happy to jump on that self-accepting sword!
"Searching for a subject matter that interests you" in Mastodon/PixelFed is all about hashtags. If you're interested in science fiction, try #scifi. You would do well to either sign up for an instance relating to your interests (for example a dedicated scifi instance, like what startrek.website is for Lemmy), or a general purpose one (mastodon.social) where you can get a better overview. If you find an instance related to your interests later on, consider moving there.
As you search hashtags, you'll find interesting people. Follow them. You'll see some interesting posts. Boost them. Adding a star to a post serves no practical function, but it'll make the poster happy anyway (it's the same as upvotes here).
Mastodon is based a lot around boosts - if you see someone boosting a lot of content of the type you're interested in seeing, make sure to follow them and your feed will be populated by content curated by humans, not algorithms.
As long as everybody are federated - but they are not. The bigger instances tend to be federated with everyone, but the smaller/more specialized ones might not yet have federated with each other. Of course you can still follow people from anywhere (as long as they're not actively _de_federated), but searching for hashtags might unfortunately be less powerful for discovery from a smaller server. If you're on a smaller instance not specific to your interests, you might do particularly well to start out finding accounts to follow through some third party list.
The greatest advantage of being on a specialized instance is, however, in the feeds: The "local" timeline shows you anything posted by anyone on your instance, while the "federated" timeline shows you anything posted by accounts someone on your server follows. On a large, general server both these feeds will be extremely crowded with all kinds of content. On a specialized instance, it's likely that both timelines will be somewhat interesting, and people might be reading it and discover your posts there as well. :)
There is no functional account migration, therefore your choice matter unless you think what you write doesn’t matter, in which case, why write at all ?
It’s very long standing issue, first issue was closed as completed but not complete
Apologies, my familiarity with some of the terms of Mastodon are still a bit rough around the edges. By relationships, do you mean your followers and who you follow?
If so, it does seem like your followers is preserved (so long as nothing inhibits the move signal), as for who you follow its not clear on the docs whether that is preserved or not (and I’ve not done an account move of my own) - but you can export a list of who you’re following from your account preferences, and then reimport it on your new account for sure.
No choice doesn’t matterat all. However, the decision on which mastodon server to use for your social media is about as important as what you’ll choose to eat today for dinner. Yeah, kinda important for the dinner itself and you don’t want some crap, but if you do, you could just eat it anyway for now and try something else tomorrow.
When you pick "federated" you'll see all posts, independent from your instance. But that's pretty much impossible because unless you have Tusky the posts will be too fast.
So yeah, to be able to read anything you have to just read the posts on your instance, meaning it does matter which one you pick.
It’s not even the speed. It’s also the content. All from all instances seems cool until you can’t read 80% of it because it’s in another language. I’m glad those instances exist but when I have to scroll through 5 posts to see one I can read, and it’s some low-effort post (on average) the experience is not a good one
Even after all that work, you’ve gotten through 3 seconds of the world’s timeline
Local is a good one, if your instance is lively enough. Then you can add people and see boosts and your world grows nicely
I find the "explore" page super useful for exploration! Spend a few minutes twice a day or so and the content quality is quite high, great place to branch out into boosts from. On my instance, I also do my best to curate the global feed to be somewhat useful (though things to creep in at the edges, I need to do some culling now for some Misskey bridges that are pretty loud in that feed).
added in March of last year, and not sure about third party apps since I use the official interface. I find it very useful though, between that, hashtags, public lists of people to follow, and boosts, I set my feed up in about 6 hours and it's been on minimal-maintenance-mode since and serving me fine. depends on how much the niche communities you like adopt the Fediverse too, YMMV!
Favorites (likes, stars, whatever) don't Federate, so the only favorites that your instance shows are the ones it knows about, being the favorites that are local.
Favourites absolutey federated. They just follow the same federation rules as everything else: They federate from actor to follower. So, if no one locally is following a remote user that favourites a remote post, that favourite doesn't get sent to your local server.
O, I see. That makes sense. A bit of a bummer, because having a total number of likes would be more informative (imho) than only seeing the number of your own server.
RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server
Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in
There's a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:
In the Administration section, there's a Relay page where you can put these in.
For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn't enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.
For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/
Yes. Your server Admin would have to enable this on the server. They may not be aware that this is available or they may not want to use it because it does consume database and media space which they may not have available.
I was also wondering this and found the following:
How to subscribe to a relayOnly instance admins can subscribe to a relay. In Mastodon you can do that by going to Settings > Administration > Relays. There you can enter the url of the relay - add "/inbox" at the end of it. Then you just have to wait for your instance to be accepted by the relay owners
Yes, relay subscription is done at the server level.
That's probably not really the issue, though. Hashtag search has been severely hampered following the Twitter migration by... People not using hashtags.
This is less a technical issue than it is one of the tool being designed by people who were trying to be an anti-Twitter, and it now bring populated by Twitter users.
The other microblogging platforms on the Fediverse have full text search. Give a Calckey or Akkoma instance a try.
Welp, don’t like that. US nonprofit is a huge misnomer. For the most part they’re used by the wealthy to create businesses that don’t need to pay taxes.
Edit: Not sure why I’m getting mass downvotes. The non profit system in America is where the wealthy go to create tax free income. The CEOs of non profits still get huge salaries. Just seems out of line with the vision of a true non profit IMO. That’s why I call it a misnomer. Non profits are almost never set up to do what they actually say they are trying to do. They’re often just created to get public favor and money laundering.
All I’m saying is generally when those in big tech establish a non profit, it’s for the wrong reasons, or it eventually becomes the wrong reasons. Look at open AI. They had a non profit and and profit side. The non profit side essentially controlled with the for profit side did, then when they ousted the CEO for doing things that were clearly in the interest of profit over the betterment of society, the CEO had set it up so that without him the open AI ship began to sink. Then those on the board that were against him were ousted from the board. It was a hostile takeover.
I’m not saying that’s going to happen with mastadon, I’m just saying they have some key players that are investors and/or long time workers in big tech and it puts a bad taste in my mouth.
The open AI governance model was doomed to fail, however, and structurally had no chance to work. By ignoring human nature and greed, things ended up with the profit side getting backing from a massive for profit company and employees voted with their pocket instead of sticking to some mission statement idealized by the non-profit board.
Check out Phanpy.social for the Catch-up algorithm, which allows you to fully customise and sort your feed.
For a real 'For You' algorithm that suggests posts by people you dont follow, check out SoraSNS on iOS. That has a fully customisable algorithm where you can completely customise the topics the algo recommends, as well as how likely each topic is to be recommend.
There isn’t anything official but there are third party apps that provide something similar. I am not really interested in a feature like this so I don’t know how well it works but you can check out Mammoth.
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