The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.

The reasons, summarised by @[email protected] are:

marketing

not having to pick the instance when registering

people who have experienced Mastodon's hermetic culture discouraging others from joining

algorithms helping discover people and content to follow

marketing

and I'm saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.

Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.

How do we get "normies" to adopt the Fediverse?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People have suggested making a portal/quiz for instance signups, but that adds to the barrier. There are also problems like how in-depth and inclusive it should be. It reminds me of Linux distro pickers that often suggest weird niche distros.

There are already big/default instances in the Fediverse though but there are people who actively discourage this. Maybe Mastodon just had a bad start and Bluesky learned from that. I wonder if Bluesky's PDS will be like Fediverse instances though. Many Fediverse instances are built around shared interests but the PDS just looks like a glorified handle.

Personally, I think the Fediverse discourse should shift to designing social media with decentralization in mind rather than mimicking mainstream social media with a "decentralized twist". I don't think the Fediverse will ever be as big as Twitter, but it doesn't have to be. It just needs to be sustainable enough to keep new conversations going.

Doesn't answer the question but maybe it's worth sharing anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

PDS just looks like a glorified handle.

They look the same to me. I had a look at Bluesky yesterday, every PDS I could find was just using their domain as username, I could never find a [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The users with PDS use something like @user.domain.com. Users with just @domain.com are under Bluesky IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wait

example of users with a PDS: https://bsky.app/profile/felipeneto.com.br
example of user using Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sannewman.bsky.social

I have yet to see someone with @user.domain.com, do you have an example?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oops, I misunderstood how it works. You can add subdomains as your handle.

I thought subdomains were people using PDS. So I don't know anyone running a PDS. I might try running one just to see what it's like and actually learn the network.

But here's an example of @user.domain.com: https://bsky.app/profile/tomoshika.voms.net

I don't think they're using a PDS though. In fact, it's really hard to tell who's using a PDS or not. I'm not sure what the effect of this is in community-building and I wonder if control over the network is really decentralized. This is really... confusing.

Anyway, the PDS is a lot more complicated than I thought: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/category/advanced-guides

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Thank you for your comment!

Yes it is confusing, and looks falsely decentralized, but actually centralized