I have re-read the magnificent article by @kissane, titled "Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t". On Bluesky, she asked those people who had tried/used Mastodon and bounced off, what had led them to slow down or leave.
Couldn’t find people or interests, people didn’t stay
Too confusing, too much work, too intimidating
Too serious, too boring, anti-fun
Complicated high-stakes decisions
"I don’t know if Mastodon can grapple with the complexities of mass scale. Lots of people would prefer it didn’t—staying smaller and lower-profile makes it friendly to amateur experimentation and also a lot safer for people who need to evade various kinds of persecution. But if Mastodon and other fedi projects do take on the mass scale, their developers must consider the needs of people who aren’t already converts. That starts by asking a lot of questions and then listening closely and receptively to the answers you receive."
For many parts I agree. But despite everything, Mastodon/Fediverse is still the best place to be on social media. Let's make this even better. We have the power. #Mastodon#OpenSource#Fediverse#Bluesky#BlueskySocial
Musk is indeed a dictator of one. And as much as I love Mastodon, the train left the station & it missed it. And without the equity of a mover like the EU or the US govt, it's sadly never going to pull in users to attain critical mass.
Point blank, a mass Fediblock isn't going to work with #Meta.
The cold truth is that people will use #Barcelona whether it federates or not. Even if it fails, Barcelona will probably have more users out of the gate than almost every project save Mastodon. Hell, it will probably eclipse #Bluesky too.
And even if you convince every server to defederate -- which you won't -- this will not be a PR coup for the Fediverse. Newspaper headlines won't blare "Fediverse successfully resists Meta." Instead, they will probably follow @gruber take with "Open source zealots complain that an open protocol is open."
Again, as I've said countless times, I'm not saying you should federate with Barcelona or any Meta-owned property. If you want, defederate. The joy of the Fediverse is freedom of association.
But a mass Fediblock doesn't solve a few important problems with Meta, and perhaps makes them worse.
The most critical problem is that Meta users need to migrate away from Meta-owned social networks. Until now, a migration path has simply been unfeasible to most. But when Barcelona gets launched, it is possible that many of them will become aware of a greater Fediverse.
How to build that awareness? By interacting with them through services beyond Barcelona.
This approach works. I've interacted with many Mastodon users through services beyond Mastodon, and this has resulted in adoption of other Fediverse software. #Calckey is a case in point.
However, there's a bigger problem concerning Meta: Fediverse replacements for Meta-owned social networks aren't getting mass adoption. And it's not because these apps aren't good.
#Pixelfed is an #Instagram replacement. It is also one of the slickest apps on the Fediverse. Yet, Pixelfed only has 150,000 registered accounts.
#Friendica is a #Facebook replacement. It's been around since 2010. It is a mature product that does many things very well, but Friendica only has 17,000 registered accounts.
The software is great but we are failing to effectively market the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. Now I'm trying my darnedest to change this, and so are many people. But facts are facts. Fediverse alternatives to Meta are a blip on the radar.
Refusing to federate with Barcelona won't change this. How do I know?
Because we don't federate now, and the status quo remains intact.
Meanwhile, Meta is practically gifting Pixelfed and Friendica an opportunity for federation, and it would be foolish to not consider broader implications.
How is it that more people aren't considering this opportunity?
Dare I say that most people -- including devs -- suffer from myopia concerning what the Fediverse is. The Fediverse is not Mastodon, and it is wrong to view the Fediverse solely through the eyes of Mastodon.
And I'll go further: by focusing Barcelona on text, I suspect that Meta is likewise making the same mistake of viewing the Fediverse as a "Twitter killer".
What they may not be considering is that the Fediverse might be a "Meta killer" too. And connecting Barcelona to the Fediverse is opening a can of worms Meta hasn't entirely considered yet.
If Barcelona is indeed text-based, what will happen when a Barcelona user encounters Pixelfed and asks, "Why does this post show reels? And why can't I do the same?"
Believe me, this is the kind of content that triggers migration.
We need to think bigger than Fediblock. Yes, for your own mental health and safety, you may not want to federate with Barcelona. However, there needs to also be a means for Barcelona users to encounter content outside Barcelona.
Perhaps there needs to be "lobby" servers that help Barcelona users enter the greater Fediverse -- helping them make the switch beyond Meta.
#BlueSky and #Fediverse developers could learn a lot from each other: right now it feels like they could learn a lot from here on moderation…but seeing their new “anyone can create and use and share their own algorithm” - that’s great and Fedi should immediately learn from, implement and improve on that idea…
It’s approximately one year since the peak of the enshittification of Twitter and the big Mastodon influx. Let’s ask again: What is your main microblogging platform? Boosts welcome.
As Big Tech smells blood in the water and starts circling around #Twitter’s floating corpse, I’m perplexed and angry that #Mastodon still gets dismissed as something that is ‘too complicated’ or ‘doesn’t work’ - seen this recently from tech savvy friends and in a Guardian article. Why?? It obviously DOES work, and doesn’t feel very complicated to me. But people are going to be pushed towards #Threads & #BlueSky, perpetuating the problem.
#Bluesky now allows you to “choose your own algorithm”.
Which sounds “incredible” and “sci-fi”—but it really isn’t.
What it essentially does is give a Twitter-like service Reddit-like features.
As an aside, now I’m wondering why Reddit doesn’t offer an alternative web front-end to make it more Twitter-like!
But how does this apply to the #ActivityPub flavour of the #Fediverse? This feature now makes me realize how big a deal Fediverse groups are going to be, and if I were @Gargron, I’d be even more excited about rolling out Mastodon’s group functionality.
Because while groups aren’t exactly relevancy algorithms, once you add a “New”, “Hot”, “Best”, etc. feed to groups, now you’re in business.
I don’t know if choosing your own algorithm is the killer feature that Bluesky thinks it is. My experience is that most people hate choice. Nevertheless, I still thinks it’s important.
Constantly hearing ”got tired of Mastodon’s technicalities, Bluesky is simple and amazing”.
How we could design Mastodon to be more simple and have less technical-feel to it? UI is one thing, but that will not cut it all. I have probably said this before, but I am starting to believe no matter what we do we can’t ”win”. The narrative might need to change. 🤷♂️
En av poängerna – på gott och ont – med #Twitter/#X har varit att det är en (påstådd!) spegling av det offentliga samtalet. Den "spegelbilden" blir som bekant alltmer falsk och förvrängd, men inläggen har iallafall kunnat läsas av icke-medlemmar. #Bluesky känns hittills mer som en engelsk privatklubb. #Mastodon är som ett mysigt kafé eller bar där folk från olika samhällsklasser möts. Men (än) är det inte stället där man får en bild av vad som sker "på gatan" innan det publiceras i stora medier.
@TiiaMaija ei mainitse Mastodonia tai fediversumia ollenkaan Kansan Uutisten #Bluesky-aiheisessa jutussaan. On se kumma, kun ei vasemmistolaisia tunnu kiinnostavan tuotantovälineiden haltuunotto, kun siihen kerrankin olisi tilaisuus.
”Se on hirveän vaikea yhtälö kaikille ilmaispalveluille. Massan ylläpito maksaa, mutta jos palvelua yrittää monetisoida, tulee näitä ongelmia, jotka tuhoavat sen idean ja käytettävyyden”, Järvinen pohtii.
”X:ssä on edelleen niitä kultahippuja, joiden takia sitä haluaa käyttää. Bluesky tuntuu samalta kuin Twitter viisi vuotta sitten, siellä on vain vähemmän käyttäjiä. Mastodonissa käyttöönoton kynnys oli erilaisen rakenteen vuoksi aika korkea.”
Tämä on se kuva mitä maalataan. Bluesky parempi ja helppo, Mastodon vaikea.
👉 Wieso die teilweise ablehnende Haltung auf #Mastodon ein Fehler ist
👉 Wieso Threads uns und die Netzkultur offenbart
👉 Welche Daten Threads im Vergleich zu #Bluesky & Mastodon sammelt
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't think about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate some of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we need these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This is exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information will eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we should not worry about a surveillance state that we pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is sent to a third party for AI labeling.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they can use content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
The paper figure is a lot cuter, but by linearizing it and presenting it as two parallel tracks they have obscured the most salient feature of the network: the big relay in the middle. Beyond "centralization bad," that pins down most of the undesirable and dangerous features of the protocol, and makes it seem like theres a lot more choice than there is.
Since the design purposefully hides the architecture: you dont know where your feed generators are drawing from, or those used by your friends. So you cant know what the effect of choosing a different relay would be, aka the main relay is always indispensable. Importantly the relays subscribe to you, you dont push to the relay, and since you arent really supposed to operate your own data store, you can be dropped from the network without knowing - the relay serves as an unaccountable point of moderation.