Mastodon and Pixelfed got a short mention on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
(files.catbox.moe)
from squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de to fediverse@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 2025 11:56
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/31067980
from squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de to fediverse@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 2025 11:56
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/31067980
More from the episode on YouTube: youtu.be/nf7XHR3EVHo
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Here's a Peertube mirror, timestamped at the shout-out to Mastodon and Peertube:
https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS?start=25m14s
why is always Bluesky on top of these lists, better marketing?
It’s Twitter 2.0. It’s what the average person wants. It’s popular because it has algorithms and all the other addictive things from corporate social media.
Mastodon and others don’t have these things and are harder to get started with. Picking a server is weird and scary. After that, getting your home feed started is difficult if you don’t know to just follow some hashtags.
Even then like, I don’t know. I don’t want my feed to be strictly chronological. For stuff like Twitter-likes and TikTok-likes I want an algorithm. I don’t want to be on there all the time, and I don’t want it to be my only form of social media. But when I do go on there I want an algorithm to serve me some slop that I don’t even know that I want but actually do.
Then you’re the target audience for Bluesky and similar. Mastodon and other fediverse sites don’t have that and that’s what most of the people here prefer.
I forgot about Lemmy for a few days just because it’s not so addictive and I like that. It’s actually refreshing when you realise you’ve been gone for a few days without missing it.
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Yes! I used to open reddit instinctivly when I was bored.
I do find lemmy more entertaining, just less addictive.
Until recommendation algorithms are transparent and auditable, choosing to use a private service with a recommendation algorithm is giving some random social media owner the control of the attention of millions of people.
Curate your own feed, subscribe to people that you find interesting, go and find content through your social contacts.
Don’t fall into the trap of letting someone (ex: Elon Musk) choose 95% of what you see and hear.
Algorithmic recommendations CAN be good. But when they’re privately owned and closed to public inspection, then there is no guarantee that they’re working in your best interest.
Nothing you say is wrong, it’s all factual and correct and if the majority of people were wired the way you are I think the world would be a better place. As is though, I think the amount of work Mastodon expects you to put in seems exhausting and off-putting to most people. I know it does me. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The discussion isn’t really about the virtues of each social media platform, the question is why does Bluesky appear at the top of the list and not Mastodon. And the reason is that Mastodon refuses to provide the service most people want from a platform like this: a well-tuned suggestion algorithm. In doing so they maintain purity and a sort of moral high ground, but will always struggle with mass appeal. Most people don’t care about what’s good for them, they only care about their end user experience.
Some things are incredibly appealing to everyone and also bad for society. We have to treat those things responsibly.
Recommendation algorithms can be useful, to assist you in discovering content. But only as a tool that you can choose to use. If I can select a person that I like listening to and get a list of other people who I may be interested in (assuming that the algorithm is simply matching me to similar peers and not also adding in some “also Elon/Bezos/whoever really wants you to see these guys” skew)… that would be a useful tool.
However, the recommendation algorithms should not be used to make the second-by-second decision about what you see next. The next item in your feed should always be there because of a decision that you make, not as a means of “maximizing engagement” + whatever skew the owner wants to add.
Of course people like these features, these algorithms are literally trained to maximize how likable their recommendations are.
It’s like how people like heroin because it perfectly fits our opioid receptors. The problem is that you can’t simply trust that the person giving you heroin will always have your best interests in mind.
Recommendation algorithms are a useful tool but, only when used in moderation. Attaching a recommendation algorithm directly to your brain via a curated content feed is incredibly unhealthy for both the individual and society.
Treating it responsibly in this case would mean actually offering a recommendation algorithm that is free of corporate interest, then. To go along with your own simile, you can’t really go up to a junkie and say “Hey, you should really consider giving up heroin and having a salad instead. It’s better for you.” and expect it to be a convincing argument. Which is why Bluesky is succeeding and Mastodon isn’t.
It also means decoupling the recommendation system from people’s feeds.
Having a “you may like this” section is a lot less abusable than “the next item in your doomscroll is <recommendation>”.
Bluesky is just another Twitter. Everything that happened to Twitter can happen to Bluesky. It’s not fundamentally changing anything except trading Elon for a different owner.
It’s not a bad change, people want Twitter after all… but it isn’t fixing any problems in the underlying incentive structures or algorithm control.
The core problem is that curated feeds allow the owner to substitute their recommendations in place of recommendations that would interest you.
Until the owner can’t do that, the social network is always one sale away from being the next Twitter/Truth Social.
Bluesky is fixing social media by changing the owner, Mastodon/ActivityPub is fixing social media by getting rid of the owner.
I think the latter is the better choice for how to structure these things.
Why are you ignoring the fact that Bluesky has a MUCH larger marketing budget AND it gets basically free unlimited (barely critical) coverage from the tech press??
You are drawing conclusions left and right on incomplete information and it destroys any semblance of a point you are trying to make.
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They’re good at predicting what people want to see, yes. But that isn’t the real problem.
The problem isn’t that they predict what you want to see, it is that they use that information to give you results that are 90% what you want to see and 10% of results that the owner of the algorithm wants you to see.
X uses that to mix in alt-right feeds. Google uses it to mix in messages from the highest bidder on their ad network and Amazon uses it to mix in product recommendations for their own products.
You can’t know what they’re adding to the feed or how much is real recommendations that are based on your needs and wants and how much is artificially boosted content based on the needs and wants of the owner of the algorithm.
Is your next TikTok really the next highest piece of recommended content or is it something that’s being boosted on the behalf of someone else? You can’t know.
This has become an incredibly important topic since people are now using these systems to drive political outcomes which have real effects on society.
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I’m carrying on multiple conversations in this thread, so I’ll just copy what I said in a different thread:
I understand that the vast majority of people are simply going to follow the herd and use the thing that is most like Twitter, recommendation feed and all. However, I also believe that it is a bad decision on their part and that the companies that are intaking all of these people into their alternative social networks are just going to be part of the problem in the future.
We, as the people who are actively thinking about this topic (as opposed to the people just moving to the blue Twitter because it’s the current popular meme in the algorithm), should be considering the difference between good recommendation algorithm use and abusive use.
Having social media be controlled by private entities which use black box recommendation algorithms should be seen as unacceptable, even if people like it. Bluesky’s user growth is fundamentally due to people recognizing that Twitter’s systems are being used to push content that they disagree with. Except they’re simply moving to another private social media network that’s one sale away from being the next X.
It’d be like living under a dictatorship and deciding that you’ve had enough so you’re going to move to the dictatorship next door. It may be a short-term improvement, but it doesn’t quite address the fundamental problem that you’re choosing to live in a dictatorship.
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As a scientist, I would be cautious of inferring the reason and beating ourselves up for it until we have crystal clear proof that that is the specific thing that’s turning people away.
Not that one thing alone, obviously. But it’s a big part of it.
We can call it a hypothesis if that helps.
I don’t think we need a full-on study to show that an additional barrier to entry hurts adoption.
It’s no different than signing up for an email account
Email? Do you mean Gmail?
And you don’t see that as a problem for most users?
Plus, you could pick a server that quashes free speech (looking at you .world)
(Yes. I know I’m guilty too)
Its better than nothing though. The fediverse wasn’t catching on. We’re lucky a worse alternative didn’t gain traction instead.
Yes.
It also gets some free publicity by claiming to be federated/decentralized without the user having to make any actual choices in regards to a server (because there isn’t really any choice).
exactly, it’s not even federated but gets listed among the federated ones and your average bob would think they’re all the same 🤦♂️
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In November last year, Bluesky had more than 3 million daily users in the US alone. According to fedidb, the Fediverse as a whole has 1.5 million monthly users globally.
Bluesky could really do us a favour and turn on ActivityPub
Damn given that Bluesky has millions to burn on marketing I would say the Fediverse is clowning on Bluesky seeing as it the Fediverse has a $0 marketing budget.
For all the money and prestige Bluesky has access to, they still have only managed to double our size? That is kind of sad really, it must be because they keep adding things people actually don’t want.
That's double our monthly size in a single day, ignoring all Bluesky users outside of America, and using their stats from several months that ago when they have probably grown since.
So yeah, they are way bigger than us.
Bunch of spambots there though, but that goes for Fedi as well. So making a proper comparison is impossible. No doubt they have way more users than Mastodon though.
I mean, again this doesn’t surprise me, Bluesky not only has the money (and promises of future money if things go well) to go viral, it has to in order to survive.
If Bluesky grew at the rate Mastodon grew in the beginning it would already be dead and abandoned by investors, that isn’t a knock on Mastodon it is a statement about how problematically unstable and fragile the traditional approach of building for profit corporate social media spaces is that Bluesky embodies.
Just FYI, fedidb is wildly wrong on the numbers lately. You may want a different source.
For example, there are instances on GoToSocial that have 2-3 users showing up with thousands on fedidb EX: fedidb.org/network/instance/s.scintilla.social. And some lemmy servers show up multiple times on their statistics.
Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?
Wish I did! I know lemmy has lemmyverse.net which seems accurate. Maybe others can chime in?
Ive been keeping my eye on fedidb for a time, after they stated we had over 12 million users…then it dropped off to 11 almost overnight. It did some retroactive counting. I then looked at software in general and found they are not counting things correctly. Some things overestimating wildly (like the example above) and some its not indexing at all.
I guess there's also Fediverse Observer:
https://fediverse.observer/stats
They put the whole Fediverse at 1.38M active, so a bit lower than Fedidb. Might be more accurate.
Interesting. I hope so.
I cant find GotoSocial so I cant check the above server I used as an example. However I do have a couple of servers. Let me see if they show up.
EDIT: Looks like its MUCH more accurate on one of the servers I maintain. However im seeing a couple of servers not showing up:
So it might still be having issues with GoToSocial OR GoToSocial might be the odd one out. It is much better though.
It seems GoToSocial comes with some reservations against being crawled, which is why fedidb had to update their robots.txt. So it might not be included here by design.
Or at least that's the impression I get from this comment section: https://piefed.social/post/496750
It'll be interesting to see what's going on with today's bump in users. I'm afraid you might be right about the reliability, but then again the GoToSocial instance you linked earlier has now been removed.
Better marketing, better UI, lots of users, and plenty of non-political content.
What’s non-political content, Lemmy?
Looking at my current feed, that would remove … upwards of 90 percent of the content.
The cat pictures community mostly.
Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.
As is reasonable
bsky.app/hashtag/cats
Non-political Lemmy is… Bluesky?
Also:
bsky.app/hashtag/beans
Fediverse is intimidating to normies.
“Email is hard!”
was hoping it verbal mention but was a screenshot, still feels good being recognized