this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Subpar UI really is what kills almost everything...
I can't be tired of saying how much I hate mastodon's default UI, where you can't pull posts from users simply because you server doesn't synchronize (what's wrong with pulling it straight from the original server)? Imagine if you subscribed to a community on Lemmy and it only showed posts AFTER you subscribed...
Or the follow menu that says "please copy and paste this on your app"... Really? If you check docs.joinmastodom....something it even says "just type your username@domain and we will do a remote follow"
I think Lemmy apps will evolve faster and show others what is needed to progress quickly. This is natural when considering how Lemmy users interact with each other.
I have been really surprised by how little progress Mastodon has made in terms of features. Especially compared to something like Calckey.
It really is a little embarrassing for the fediverse I think. Many of the people that went back to Twitter essentially did so because of a lack of features. Some of those were controversial like QTs, but all around it’s a rather spartan platform that sometimes feels like it doesn’t want you to socialise too much.
That being said, it’s also the most stable and snappy. Calckey, I think, has some problematic performance issues. And Lemmy has its issues too, though I’m fairly hopeful they’ll get fixed over time. Mastodon, once you get used to it, kinda just works. For competing platform devs it’s a quality probably worth noticing.
I think the biggest problem with that is all the people complaining about "meta" trying to get into the fediverse (don't get me wrong, I am not a meta user).
Because the protocol is open, it is impossible to stop it. If meta does make a product with better UI, even if they don't change the underlying protocol, guess what the majority of people will be using?
Yep. Meta have even announced that they will allow people to migrate from mastodon to meta’s platform.
Meanwhile mastodon have no such feature for migrating from anywhere else to mastodon. And you can bet it won’t be easy to perform the migration away from meta.
More deeply, it seems to me that the fediverse hasn’t really appreciated that it needed to find ways to work together and not reinvent the wheel for every new platform or UI. As a result, its killer feature should have emerged by now but hasn’t, arguably at all … namely the whole fediverse and all its various platforms becoming one giant “actually meta” platform. This requires good interoperstion and good standards etc. But once you’ve got it, any new feature or idea anywhere can contribute to the whole and stay behind the reach of any big corp’s abilities. Instead, the fediverse is a bunch of separate and small independent hackers trying to clone big social platforms without much help and now in a race to stay ahead of big corporations.
If the fediverse dies, failing to create modular and composable software will probably be the ultimate killer.
Exactly. I've even seen a fair amount of Mastodon essentialism when alternates are brought up, but in order to prevent a takeover we need a healthier ecosystem than anything they can offer. I think the threadiverse is in a healthier place with two major alternatives that have slightly different overall ideas about which direction things should go. All that said I love Mastodon. In my mind the killer feature for any of these apps is still a smart, private take on an intelligent content algorithm designed around human growth and personalization rather than doom scrolling and ad views.
Well, a bunch of the old 3rd party Twitter devs (& new devs) made a bunch of excellent Mastodon apps. If you use those, the experience is excellent.
My personal fav is IceCubes, but Radiant or Ivory are also great.
We might see some of those devs branch out into Threadiverse apps/UI
If you're on a small instance, that's actually the case with Lemmy, lol. You can only see a remote community if someone from your instance subscribed to it.
You can see the remote community once you search and you can see all posts in that community, from your server.
On Mastodon, even after you subscribe, you CANNOT see old posts on your instance, unless you put each post url individually in the search bar.
So, not the same at all.