Almost everyone who says "Mastodon didn't work for me" on Bluesky seems to have posted only "me me me" stuff for months (if that) on Mastodon, followed about 10-20 people, never replied to anyone and then gave up because "nobody there, it didn't fly".
It seems there is a big misunderstanding how this free and healthy social media works. We are not here for the easy wins, likes, shares and dopamine spikes. We are here because we accept the fact we are not part of the commercial hype machine. We choose natural engagement over spoiling algorithms, we choose conversation and meaning in our social media. At least that is how I see it.
@rolle
discoverability on mastodon is not great at all > lashing out against people who left mastodon because of its less-than-okayish search function only underscores that leaving that platform might be advisable: things must improve on the fedi
A photo from the kitchen of the home I grew up in:
the metal fixture on the bottom right is for laundry. We stick clothes out of the kitchen so they air dry (with poles). In 90F weather every day, clothes dry in hours. Almost no one has dryers
red and white apartment building is another public housing apartment, just like the one I'm in
tall gazebo in the top left: from the tall modern condos that house foreign / visiting university professors' families
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
@skullgiver
when it comes to creativity, mastodon ui is a pre-emptive strike against creativity > vanilla mastodon does not support emoji reactions, and damn!!!!!!! mastodon ui hides that there are other platforms on the fedi than mastodon > mastodon is perfectly fine for all those who want to see mastodon content, and nothing else > creativity? no! creativity starts with openness, and mastodon surely has a rather isolating approach
@gombang
wth, didn't see your reply on blahajzone with notifications broken on that instance! but Just saw it in kbin, so i reply from here
re: your question - the author does not provide any link to the poll mentioned, but it must have caused a fuzz > quote:
No, it was stupider than that. Users on the (streams) instance created a poll, a Mastodon admin panicked because the poll was so terrifying, blocked the whole instance, and now thanks to blocklist copying, other instances are blocking it too, even though the original blocker reversed their decision.
Or something like that. But it was "blocklist culture" and not technical differences.
No estaba muerta pero tampoco estaba de parranda, apenas tengo un poco de ánimos para interactuar.
Me dió Dengue y es horrible amigos cuidense y usen repelente de moscos 😭😞
@geraineon i guess that it has to do with privacy settings, i.e. following from kbin is possible only if follow request is switched off > kbin is very much early beta for real