A nice read. I have the same opinion of the so called “tech journalists” here in Denmark. It’s crazy how little they research or know about the subject they write about.
I remember during the initital wave of twitter refugees, a zdnet article covered bluesky and threads with glowing reviews, and then completely missed the point on mastodon, signed up for two servers, got no application back (waited 2 days) and has no idea what federation is.
I’m glad I read the article, the dripping irony and mockery in the title for some reason didn’t trigger for me until I actually started reading. The idea that someone who considered Google Plus the “next big thing” has any ability to predict the success or failure of social media platforms is indeed pretty comical.
I joined Google Plus with a group of a couple dozen friends from a long-time online community, and many of us loved it! As i recall the biggest issue at launch was that you couldn’t push a pay to a circle and still leave it discoverable on your timeline, without pushing it to everyone. That kinda made it more insular than it should’ve been. Slowly we all stopped because no one else (family, friends,) was joining.
Yeah, same. I tried getting people to switch, but it was like pulling teeth. It’s even worse now, even with all the Meta Zuckerberg Trump bullshit and the obvious privacy problems.
The circles feature was awesome. Could post stuff for specific groups of people. Sometimes your posts aren’t for all your friends to see.
At first Diaspora seemed to propose a good alternative to Facebook ang G+. It has “aspects” which work similarly to circles. And the interface is similar to Facebook’s. However, it didn’t take off as much as anyone would’ve expected.
Now there’s also Friendica which closely resembles Facebook, but it appears limited in functionality. It looks more like a Facebook-UI to the fediverse, like Mastodon is a Twitter-UI to the fediverse. It’s missing the whole “circles/aspects” feature, and we still don’t have the groups feature either, which I think is very useful and much appreciated by Facebook users.
EDIT: Actually I just double checked and it does have circles actually.
I’m hoping to start a Friendica instance, it’s been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don’t like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there’s no other easy way to create and invite people to events.
I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.
“Tech” journalists spend way too much time in the headlines of other outlets, getting a much too shallow idea of the actual tech that they’re supposed to cover. It’s quite sad that this is the state of so-called tech journalism.
EuroCentrist@feddit.org
on 11 Apr 18:00
nextcollapse
If a company called TikTok can survive and thrive, surely one called Mastodon can too.
Let’s not kid ourselves the user experience is much much nicer on tiktok than on Mastadon.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Apr 18:03
nextcollapse
some weird wannabe social network with no large corporation behind it and no VC money in the bank cannot work, should not work, will not work.
techbros can’t even imagine something working without capitalism, they truly have no imagination… no wonder they made genAI
PoopingCough@lemmy.world
on 12 Apr 01:09
nextcollapse
Which is crazy because like… you think they would have heard of linux before
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 12 Apr 02:14
collapse
tbh these people would probably say linux is too niche anyways
but, like, imagine a project that’s entirely free, backed by donations, fully open-source, and so successful that it’s name has become a generic term for what it is. a project so successful that basically everyone who’s ever been online has used it and uses it frequently. a project so ubiquitous that almost everyone takes it for granted.
I really hope you are right. I currently predict some issues with the scalability of the fediverse, maybe due to ignorance. If the majority of people switch their social media to the fediverse, the current volunteer hosted infrastructure will crash. Such infrastructure is not cheap to maintain and donations may dry out at some point. Specially for pixelfed, loops and peertube. The fediverse may run into trouble without easy self-hosting solutions
Condiment2085@lemm.ee
on 11 Apr 18:44
nextcollapse
Wow a really well written article. Not too long - proves it’s point well - and ends nicely.
I feel like the majority of people I see quit Mastodon do so because the platform (and Federation in general) don’t coddle their egos. With no algorithm to game and ingratiate themselves on everyone’s timelines, they make a public exit and talk about how broken Mastodon is and offer their takes on what it needs to be. Which, unsurprisingly, sounds like a non-Elon-ed Twitter.
I love Mastodon. I love discovering new people and accounts by happenstance (and not spoon-feeding).
SpicyColdFartChamber@lemm.ee
on 12 Apr 18:40
nextcollapse
Yup, that’s a major reason why people didn’t want to leave twitter. They’d built a following that they didn’t want to rebuilt.
I know people who hated elon Musk and had accounts on other microblogging platforms, but continued to post on twitter because that’s where they got their fill of engagement.
Shifting away from reddit to lemmy is fundamentally easier than it is from Twitter to mastadon. I think it’s part in due to the nature of the type of social media platforms they are.
technohippie@slrpnk.net
on 12 Apr 21:21
nextcollapse
We may have to just accept that it won’t ever be a big platform for this very reason and just have fun there as a niche site.
I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?
I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.
I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.
Marleyinoc@lemmy.world
on 13 Apr 02:26
nextcollapse
I didn’t know it was so old. I joined in Nov 2022 and check it about as much as I check any social media. I don’t really post and just boost here and there.
Edit: Now that bluesky is (seemingly) taking off, I wonder how much of a chance it has to survive.
Bluesky is still pretty centralized and venture-capital backed. There’s been discussions about monetization. It’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world
on 13 Apr 03:02
collapse
From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There’s no ego about it. The system doesn’t carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I’m trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn’t only be on Mastodon. I’m not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn’t generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.
For some people, this is a benefit - it’s a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it’s not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.
I’d prefer for my social media to not be full of ads for “content”.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world
on 14 Apr 00:30
collapse
I’m not talking about ads. Let’s say I’m a video essayist and I publish my essays on PeerTube. The recommendation algorithms aren’t going to show the free content I make to nearly as many people as if I put them on YouTube or Tiktok. And overall, that translates to fewer Patreon subscribers, FAR fewer.
That’s still an ad, you want money for a product you’re offering. The only difference is in your case there’s an extra step between impression and conversion.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world
on 14 Apr 20:34
nextcollapse
I’m so sorry but you really need to reevaluate this because it categorizes like 80% of authentic internet content as ads. Is a graphic artist who works commission posting their art on social media an ad, if they’re doing it to hunt for commission? A streamer who posts their funniest clips on social media to get more paid subscribers? A game dev promo-ing features in their next game patch?
Self promotion is a form of advertising, doubly so if it’s done for the purpose of attracting revenue via some means. People can opt into it if they want via subscribing/following but it’s still advertising.
So yes most “authentic” content is just people advertising themselves. I would prefer not to see that unless I have opted into it.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world
on 16 Apr 18:24
collapse
Okay let me rephrase. I’m offering 100% of my work on PeerTube for free. They’re high quality, long-form video essays, and people clearly enjoy watching them. I link my Patreon in case people wish to support, but no other product exists on a subscription basis.
Even if PeerTube were substantially more popular, the lack of recommendation algorithms would keep my content from proliferating nearly as well as YouTube. This translates to fewer Patreon subscribers which means less opportunity and funding to create high quality videos. No self-promotion, just content that can’t perform as well because it doesn’t get recommended.
This translates to fewer Patreon subscribers which means less opportunity and funding to create high quality videos
If there’s an algorithm to game, and money to be made, I don’t see how that’s any different to self promotion. Boil it down and all that’s happening is you are performing an action, so that more people see you, in the hopes that some of them will give you money.
The lack of an algorithm is a feature, I don’t want content I havent explicitly asked for to be shown.
Yes. You can easily spot them, either with masto in the name of the user instance or from the fact that the post or comment will contained mention in the @user(orcommunity@instance format.
derpoltergeist@col.social
on 12 Apr 22:38
nextcollapse
Draconic_NEO@chaos.social
on 14 Apr 06:06
collapse
@Wanpieserino Only if those posts are to/mentioning a community on Lemmy or Mbin. Profile/public posts don't show up on Lemmy since Lemmy requires all post or comment content to be associated with a group actor (AKA the community/magazine).
threaded - newest
A nice read. I have the same opinion of the so called “tech journalists” here in Denmark. It’s crazy how little they research or know about the subject they write about.
I remember during the initital wave of twitter refugees, a zdnet article covered bluesky and threads with glowing reviews, and then completely missed the point on mastodon, signed up for two servers, got no application back (waited 2 days) and has no idea what federation is.
I’m glad I read the article, the dripping irony and mockery in the title for some reason didn’t trigger for me until I actually started reading. The idea that someone who considered Google Plus the “next big thing” has any ability to predict the success or failure of social media platforms is indeed pretty comical.
This is probably controversial, but Google Plus was better than Facebook in every way.
Not that high of a bar, but I agree
I joined Google Plus with a group of a couple dozen friends from a long-time online community, and many of us loved it! As i recall the biggest issue at launch was that you couldn’t push a pay to a circle and still leave it discoverable on your timeline, without pushing it to everyone. That kinda made it more insular than it should’ve been. Slowly we all stopped because no one else (family, friends,) was joining.
Yeah, same. I tried getting people to switch, but it was like pulling teeth. It’s even worse now, even with all the Meta Zuckerberg Trump bullshit and the obvious privacy problems.
The circles feature was awesome. Could post stuff for specific groups of people. Sometimes your posts aren’t for all your friends to see.
At first Diaspora seemed to propose a good alternative to Facebook ang G+. It has “aspects” which work similarly to circles. And the interface is similar to Facebook’s. However, it didn’t take off as much as anyone would’ve expected.
Now there’s also Friendica which closely resembles Facebook, but it appears limited in functionality. It looks more like a Facebook-UI to the fediverse, like Mastodon is a Twitter-UI to the fediverse.
It’s missing the whole “circles/aspects” feature, and we still don’t have the groups feature either, which I think is very useful and much appreciated by Facebook users.EDIT: Actually I just double checked and it does have circles actually.
I’m hoping to start a Friendica instance, it’s been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don’t like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there’s no other easy way to create and invite people to events.
I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.
Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t know it had events,
“Tech” journalists spend way too much time in the headlines of other outlets, getting a much too shallow idea of the actual tech that they’re supposed to cover. It’s quite sad that this is the state of so-called tech journalism.
If a company called TikTok can survive and thrive, surely one called Mastodon can too.
Let’s not kid ourselves the user experience is much much nicer on tiktok than on Mastadon.
techbros can’t even imagine something working without capitalism, they truly have no imagination… no wonder they made genAI
Which is crazy because like… you think they would have heard of linux before
tbh these people would probably say linux is too niche anyways
but, like, imagine a project that’s entirely free, backed by donations, fully open-source, and so successful that it’s name has become a generic term for what it is. a project so successful that basically everyone who’s ever been online has used it and uses it frequently. a project so ubiquitous that almost everyone takes it for granted.
too bad that doesn’t exist!
Imagine if someone teaches them about volunteer work
I really hope you are right. I currently predict some issues with the scalability of the fediverse, maybe due to ignorance. If the majority of people switch their social media to the fediverse, the current volunteer hosted infrastructure will crash. Such infrastructure is not cheap to maintain and donations may dry out at some point. Specially for pixelfed, loops and peertube. The fediverse may run into trouble without easy self-hosting solutions
Wow a really well written article. Not too long - proves it’s point well - and ends nicely.
I completely get that someone used to monopolies can’t understand Mastodon. I don’t think it has anything to do with understanding technology, though.
I feel like the majority of people I see quit Mastodon do so because the platform (and Federation in general) don’t coddle their egos. With no algorithm to game and ingratiate themselves on everyone’s timelines, they make a public exit and talk about how broken Mastodon is and offer their takes on what it needs to be. Which, unsurprisingly, sounds like a non-Elon-ed Twitter.
I love Mastodon. I love discovering new people and accounts by happenstance (and not spoon-feeding).
Yup, that’s a major reason why people didn’t want to leave twitter. They’d built a following that they didn’t want to rebuilt.
I know people who hated elon Musk and had accounts on other microblogging platforms, but continued to post on twitter because that’s where they got their fill of engagement.
Shifting away from reddit to lemmy is fundamentally easier than it is from Twitter to mastadon. I think it’s part in due to the nature of the type of social media platforms they are.
We may have to just accept that it won’t ever be a big platform for this very reason and just have fun there as a niche site.
I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?
This has long existed. It’s an Open Social Web client called SoraSns
TIL lol
I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.
I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.
I didn’t know it was so old. I joined in Nov 2022 and check it about as much as I check any social media. I don’t really post and just boost here and there.
Edit: Now that bluesky is (seemingly) taking off, I wonder how much of a chance it has to survive.
Bluesky is still pretty centralized and venture-capital backed. There’s been discussions about monetization. It’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There’s no ego about it. The system doesn’t carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I’m trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn’t only be on Mastodon. I’m not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn’t generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.
For some people, this is a benefit - it’s a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it’s not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.
I’d prefer for my social media to not be full of ads for “content”.
I’m not talking about ads. Let’s say I’m a video essayist and I publish my essays on PeerTube. The recommendation algorithms aren’t going to show the free content I make to nearly as many people as if I put them on YouTube or Tiktok. And overall, that translates to fewer Patreon subscribers, FAR fewer.
That’s still an ad, you want money for a product you’re offering. The only difference is in your case there’s an extra step between impression and conversion.
I’m so sorry but you really need to reevaluate this because it categorizes like 80% of authentic internet content as ads. Is a graphic artist who works commission posting their art on social media an ad, if they’re doing it to hunt for commission? A streamer who posts their funniest clips on social media to get more paid subscribers? A game dev promo-ing features in their next game patch?
Self promotion is a form of advertising, doubly so if it’s done for the purpose of attracting revenue via some means. People can opt into it if they want via subscribing/following but it’s still advertising.
So yes most “authentic” content is just people advertising themselves. I would prefer not to see that unless I have opted into it.
Okay let me rephrase. I’m offering 100% of my work on PeerTube for free. They’re high quality, long-form video essays, and people clearly enjoy watching them. I link my Patreon in case people wish to support, but no other product exists on a subscription basis.
Even if PeerTube were substantially more popular, the lack of recommendation algorithms would keep my content from proliferating nearly as well as YouTube. This translates to fewer Patreon subscribers which means less opportunity and funding to create high quality videos. No self-promotion, just content that can’t perform as well because it doesn’t get recommended.
If there’s an algorithm to game, and money to be made, I don’t see how that’s any different to self promotion. Boil it down and all that’s happening is you are performing an action, so that more people see you, in the hopes that some of them will give you money.
The lack of an algorithm is a feature, I don’t want content I havent explicitly asked for to be shown.
Do we see mastodon posts here on Lemmy?
Yep all the time. Other platforms allow you to subscribe as well.
Piefed you can subscribe to individuals like they are communities. Works really well.
Yes. You can easily spot them, either with masto in the name of the user instance or from the fact that the post or comment will contained mention in the @user(orcommunity@instance format.
@Wanpieserino @mesamunefire I'm writing this from Mastodon, and now you're seeing it.
@Wanpieserino
Only if those posts are to/mentioning a community on Lemmy or Mbin. Profile/public posts don't show up on Lemmy since Lemmy requires all post or comment content to be associated with a group actor (AKA the community/magazine).
@mesamunefire
@fediverse
Masto-what?