What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?
After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and … whatever they use.
Bluesky is a lot easier to use fresh out of the box. Even though their feature set is quite similar, Mastadon has a clunky and confusing UI, and still lacks a native iPad app-- instead they offer a poorly ported iPhone app.
That’s led to more people using Bluesky, and it snowballs from there.
Mastodon and the fediverse in general are weirdly user-unfriendly, and then some fucking programmer pops in to say,
“Oh! You can fix that! All you have to do is hop over to their github page and…”
Lol
If they can make the user experience good, we might get the basis for a new internet, but they’d have to build it first.
weirdly user-unfriendly
I thought that was a feature
In addition to many of the fine points made in other comments I think it’s silly to overlook the power of celebrity worship and weird-ass parasocial relationships with famous people.
There exists a large number of people who aren’t really interested in discussing <topic_x>, they just want to know what <favourite celebrity whos life I have deluded myself into thinking is attainable by me> thinks about the topic so that they can regurgitate it and feel like they’re “the same”.
I’m sure if Chappell Roan or whatever “the kids” think is cool these days had jumped to Mastodon we’d be seeing something very different. TBH I’m mildly surprised that we didn’t see more record labels standing up instances. It’s always boggled me that people have just trusted the service desperately trying to be known as “X” as an authority on identity.
One reaon for why any company would rather just an x alternative rather start up a lemmy or mastodon instance of their own is externalize the responsibility. If someone else run the site then you can’t be blamed when it goes down
Don’t forget about moderation. It’s all fun and games until someone starts posting hate speech, copyrighted material, porn (legal or otherwise) or worse…
If Brazilian fediverse is anything like English fediverse, its community was probably tied up in discussions who to deferderate from next and vegan cat food instead of promoting Mastodon.
My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:
- Easier onboarding overall since you don’t have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
- despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter’s
- Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it’s easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
- Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing “starter packs” with lists of people to follow
- I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
- meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I’m following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I’m interested in
- quote-retweets don’t exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
- the stackable moderation also helps a lot
Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon’s side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo
Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.
Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.
Most people didn’t have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.
for me, it was discoverability. Like, several guides said “use tags” but 4 out of 5 people DON"T. And more often than not, when you do search the tags, you see several posts that aren’t what you wanted at all. Or worse, the tag you search doesn’t have any posts newer than several months to a year. Basically it relied on an honor system where few people had honor.
Is it really that surprising that large companies with lots of money can advertise better than user run instances of open source software?
As depressing as it sounds, most Twitter users actually like Twitter. They’re fully okay with all of its dystopian features (some even idolize pre-Musk Twitter). Mastodon is a break from Twitter in many ways, whereas bluesky is just another Twitter in their eyes (many of them probably dgaf about federation and ignore it).
Twitter and YouTube are the least toxic social media platforms I use. I know toxicity exists on both but it is not being served to me. My feed is what I want to see and only that.
On the other hand, something like Reddit or Lemmy needs a huge amount of curation to keep the feed even half decent.
Those people are just crazy.
- There are more people there.
- Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
- Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.
People dumb.
I use both, but honestly, some mastodon users can’t help but be outright patronising and hostile to newcomers.
The whole “we don’t do that here” vibe clearly puts folk off. Weirdly, it isn’t the long term users that do that, bug more recent converts.
Why do you think that is?
I needed to scroll way too much to see people mention marketing and advertising. It’s a huge deal.
The power of good advertising is not to be underestimated. There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it. And it’s not only traditional advertising but viral and “astroturfed” advertising.
There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it.
Too many smug people think, “advertising doesnt work on me! Hah! Only weak minded normies fall for it…”
Wrong… Advertising works. And that’s the reason a shit ton of money that goes into it.
You want to know the reason why i run adblockers in my browser AND DNS levels? Because i KNOW advertising works on me… i KNOW i’m not smart enough to outsmart the army of engineers, and copywriters generating this stuff.
Source: i work in advertising lol
“Advertising doesn’t work on me!” I mutter smugly, before loading up the Apple keynote to see what my next phone will do.
The “this would never happen to me” mindset really is cancer to logical thought and reasoning.
I somewhere read (maybe it was thinking fast and slow by Kahneman?) that even psychology students learning about certain behaviors would later anonymously claim they would never fall into these patterns. But plot twist: they are also only human, so of course they also could fall into these patterns.
Another example: People that think they would never fall for a scam. If it is the right scam they will fall even more easily for it than people that know that it could happen.
“Of course it can’t be a scam. Scams are obvious and only idiots fall for them.”
People I spoke to didn’t understand how a server and an app could be disconnected. They also didn’t want to learn what the hell federation was and why people could register the same username for some reason. By the time you get to “it’s like email” they’ve already downloaded another app.
Most people didn’t want the Fediverse. They wanted Twitter that wasn’t as shit as Twitter. Nobody cares about ActivityPub or ATProto, those are side notes to usable apps and experiences.
Bluesky also has more people go follow and interact with. Mastodon is for people who have a favourite Linux distro and people who follow people who have a favourite Linux distro. Bluesky is for everyone else.
Threads came free with an existing account. People downloaded it out of curiosity and were already signed in and set up.
The guy behind Technology Connections is on Mastodon and has explained several times what terrible consequences having more than a few friends follow you can have for usability. None of these apps were designed for a million followers, human moderation falls short and automatic moderation doesn’t work. Every server has a different view of existing comments so they’ll think they’re the first to make a certain reply, causing a horse of reply guys to all say the same thing. His complaints are very valid and I don’t expect him to last long on there, but he’s doing his best to stick around. If he goes, I’m sure at least a few people will go with him.
Platforms like Bluesky have it easier dealing with moderation and are willing to use automatic moderation. It’s hardly perfect, but it works better than not moderating anything until a report comes in.
causing a horse of reply guys?
Horde* I’ll edit my comment
