this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Why don't people want to use mastodon?
Are they following rasputin again?
Does Mastodon refuse to deal with its issues, like Lemmy?
Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.
Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there's an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.
FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don't think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren't things I could've figured out or worked around, I just didn't feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they've smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I'm happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.
There's an add-on to help find the people you followed on Twitter on Bluesky, FYI.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge/behhbpbpmailcnfbjagknjngnfdojpko?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-bridge/
Excellent, thanks!
If there are these roadblack to you as a profficient computer toucher then I think it's safe to say this is system is already doomed to cultural irrelevance, at best just another one of our private clubhouse nerdtoys, sad !
Hopefully this defeat in the face of bluesky shocks the dev out of their uncompromising complacency and start fighting FOR the users
It's entirely possible that my timing was just bad for Mastodon and good for Lemmy. The fact that I could jump on Boost and have an extremely familiar experience was a big plus. Bluesky was more similar in terms of migration experience to Lemmy than Mastodon was.
The other issue is that in a forum site you follow topics, where on a microblog site you follow people. The topics are here on Lemmy (to some extent), even if the people aren't, but I don't really care about the individual contributors as much. The people I wanted to follow for microblogging went to Bluesky, and that matters a lot more there.
Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.
Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.
Yeah, on reflection, I think that's the crux of it. There were some users from a more tight knit subreddit that I got to know well, but we all moved to discord a few years back. I miss some of the more active niche subreddits, but otherwise Lemmy replaced it very easily.
yea in the beginning it can be hard. Just start following people. And get your timeline filling. Try to check out other users posts/comments and follow them as well if you want to. That will you get started.
That was actually part of my issue, and I experienced the same problem on Bluesky at first. The difference for me was ease of discovery and the influx of people I followed on other platforms. If they had gone to Mastodon instead, I'd have been more inclined to give it more effort. As it stands, I'm content with Bluesky and don't feel I'm missing much on Mastodon. Perhaps I'm mistaken, and that's my loss. Just trying to add some perspective.
We need those cracked TikTok algos which keep children glued to their screens for 16 hours a day
Some children are even behind the screens for more than 26 ½ hours per day.
Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.
It ain’t that complicated.
It's important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn't see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.
I'm not saying the platform can't work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn't there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.
I’ve been on there two years now, so 🤷🏽♀️
Mastodon does refuse to deal with its issues but i wouldnt say that about Lemmy. Lemmy just has a very small dev team working off no funding.
I've heard rumours that Lemmy Devs run that Tankie Shit-hole Lemmy.ml
Kbin is dead, Mbin is good but different to Lemmy. Also see PieFed and Sublinks.
The wonderful thing about federated services is that you can have fun with all the users on Lemmy and see all the content but not have to actually use the Lemmy software. You can even follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon and interact with posts from there (just in a Mastodon way).
Sublinks?
Yip, Sublinks.
I'm not sure how far along they are, I don't think I've seen a sublinks instance in the wild. Their demo seems to be running the Lemmy frontend still, if I'm understanding things right. But it's basically a community project to build lemmy but in java instead of rust and they have a lot more moderation tools. It's what Beehaw are planning to migrate to, but I think it might not be ready yet.
It's nice to see other federated "link agreggators" available to try!
Out of the loop, what happened to kbin?
I don't think anyone really knows. It's the single person issue, that Ernest was the only person to have access to do anything. It seems something is personally wrong for him, maybe unwell, maybe something else, but no one hears from him for months. The flagship kbin instance run by Ernest, https://kbin.social/, has had an error and hasn't worked for months.
To my knowledge, this is the last anyone has heard from him:
That was 5 months ago.
It's clear something is very wrong, but because Ernest is the only one with access that means no one can help. Mbin forked Kbin and have been actively developing Mbin. Many, if not most of the sites called "kbin" are now running Mbin.
So?
So they dont deserve a single penny, I'd rather watch this platform burn to the ground.
Eh, I’m not interested in supporting them, but the code is free and open source. I’m using a client written by not-them, to connect to a server run by not-them, and reading federated content from dozens of other servers run by not-them.
You can feel that way. but I see it as supporting the product not the people. When I think of the people behind the biggest social media companies in the world they're awful far worse than some tankie larper online and the product is worse.
Because it doesn't have a proper discover feed.
But there is a discover feed in Mastodon, isn’t it ? That’s what I use to discover new accounts. Am I missing something ? For me Mastodon is way better that twitter and I wish more people used it.
Discover feed in Mastodon sucks a lot for me, the number of posts there are very limited and not tailed to my preferences. On one hand, that makes it less addicting than twitter which is good for me, on the other hand, it doesn't make me use it much which is also good for me but bad for them ig.
Because the concept of federation is still impenetrable to a layperson
It's just not implemented well from a user standpoint imo.
email. email is federated. literally everyone has an email address and understands they might be on a different service, but its all email, and you just use their account name and the service part with the @ in between.
it's not a complicated subject at all, and a good chunk of the humans on earth have no experience being alive without a federated service being a part of their daily life. (lets not mention telephones, or national postal services)
the issue isn't perceived complexity, it's that the negatives of using a centralized service are outweighed by the benefits. people don't see it as a personal liberty issue, or a free speech issue, or a propaganda issue, or a billionaire oligarchs ability to control the flow of information between citizens issue. they just want it to be easy to use. and the more people that do it, the less personal responsibility they feel about the choice.
learning from history is for suckers, I guess
Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.
The issue isn't really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it's not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.
Layperson: But I already HAVE an email!
Not enough people on Mastodon are into the things I was using Twitter/use BlueSky for.
That's regular critical mass problem. The real question is why the Xitter exodee didn't make it to mastodon in the first place?
When I investigated, I didn't get past the account creation stage. Because each server is its own fiefdom and your account will largely be prisoner there, the more you get tangled on it, the more you become subject to its rules. I found that unacceptable.
which mastadon instance to join?
Yes, I never got past that stage. It seems most instances are either nazis, crybullies or flake. I guess first step of joining mastodon is buying a domain name to run a server instance on and then join mastodon as a single user instance. But then I assume most servers also ban single user instance and I just could not be bothered to join was is probably "worse twitter" when I never participated in the twitter mental illness in the first place.
If you can't decide, then you can just use the flagship instance, mastodon.social.