What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?
After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and … whatever they use.
Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.
So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.
And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.
Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).
So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.
Wild! This was my exact thought as I was signing up for Mastadon. I spent like 15 minutes figuring out what Mastadon is, what server to join, what each server means. Then I did the thing like I did with Lemmy and created half a dozen accounts waiting to see which server gave me my “Account Created” email first.
I agree with you, people end up going the perceived “easy route” because of the amount of explaining and low level protocol exposure that they receive from someone who is trying to sell them on joining an ActivityPub network. And that’s just the people who are trying to encourage them to join, then there’s the people that straight up think “normal social media” people don’t belong on the fediverse because of one biased reason or another…
A marketing budget. The Fediverse has none, and we’re competing with the big boys.
- There are more people there.
- Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
- Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.
They have marketing budgets.
Do they? Have they been running marketing for it? Much of what I’ve seen/heard of it has been more a result of Twitter imploding and people bringing up alternatives than any concerted marketing pushes.
- 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.
2 and 3 are massive. I’m on Mastodon, but am having a much better time on Bluesky. Mastodon is full of gatekeeping and policing and people complaining - Bluesky is just fun and interesting, like Twitter 12 years ago
Who are these people who actually FIND users go follow on either service???
I have Bluesky. I have Mastodon. I log into each every few months, realize nothing has changed, and there is nobody to follow.
Then I don’t use either, until I wonder a few months later “heeeey, I wonder if people are on these services yet…”
Still no.
Use lists on bsky to find people.
And just gained a million people, biggest spike yet. So should be a bit more active.
Yeah, but won’t those 1 million all be speaking spanish?
It’s 2m now.
And plenty of them pick up English online
Nope, portuguese
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This is the thing I dislike more about Mastodon, I do not know if Lemmy handles it differently, but I don’t have this problem with Lemmy.
*Portuguese
Potato/Tomato.
I guess some people don’t get the joke.
The sayings potato/potahto and tomato/tomahto mean they’re the same thing.
No one in their right mind would say a potato is a tomato or vice versa, just like no one would ever argue Portuguese and Spanish are the same. They’re both of a category (veggies and languages respectively) but totally different and distinct items within that category.
Mastodon revolves around following topics and hashtags, not individuals. I learned that early on, and am having a much better experience.
Well then it will never be useful for me. I want to follow PEOPLE. I want people to follow me for the random shit I say.
Then they retweet the random shit, and now a whole NEW group of people can wonder what’s wrong with me.
Put hashtags on your random shit and more people will find it
I’m going to copy/paste my last comment. You tell me what hashtag I’m supposed to use.
ABYSS LOVES CHICKEN WINGS!!!
CLAP-CLAP-CLAPCLAPCLAP
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I follow hashtags I like, then see who the people are who use those tags, then follow those people.
I find that I discover people that way I would not have found otherwise.
It’s worked well for me so far. I wasn’t a twitter person before though, so I don’t know if I have the experience you did for comparison.
See, I already know who I want to follow. I want to follow Nintendo. I want to follow Game Grumps. I want to follow my local pro wrestling indy. I want to follow MXRPlays.
But none of them are on the fediverse. Although, Andy Richter is on BlueSky. So that’s something…I guess…
Ah, yeah fair point there.
If you start following hashtags, then you find interesting people. There are also curated lists that you can sign up for. That will introduce you to a lot of new content.
there’s plenty of that going on, too, just not on as large a scale.
Sounds like a worse lemmy 😅
Not really. In terms of engaging with posts, oh my god, absolutely it’s worse. Twitter and its clones suck when it comes to engaging with things people post (but Mastodon at least makes it a bit better by increasing the character limit). But there’s just something different about following a hashtag versus following a Lemmy community. Like for example, when it comes to getting highly detailed, up-to-the-minute news about things, Mastodon beats Lemmy every time. Additionally, I can see people’s random, one-off takes that wouldn’t really warrant a post on Lemmy.
I would argue too that it’s not even true that you should just be focused on following hashtags, but rather that you should be trying to do both.
To me, Lemmy is the type of place I could kill two hours; for Mastodon, it’s maybe 15 minutes, but that doesn’t make it inferior, just a different use-case. It’s pretty apples-to-oranges.
There’s algorithms you can subscribe to and use to discover people based on your interests. Theres also algorithms that show you posts based on who you follow and what posts you like. You can also enable your normal Following feed to show you some algorithm posts
I’m following like 3 people. One is a bot that reposts things from twitter. One is a bot that posts local weather. And one is what I THOUGHT was Nintendo, but turns out it’s just Nintendo@Lemmy.World.
Well that’s the issue then stop following bots? Look up a hashtag or keyword and find people or subscribe to one of the many algorithms
like Twitter 12 years ago
So don’t use it then. Gotcha.
- Is bigger than the rest.
Take Brazil. Blusky saw the writing on the wall with Twitter, so they threw a ton of money into media. Guess where everyone went.
Do you have a source for that?
Nothing specific, just knowledge from those closer, and not likely they’ll publicize ad spend, but uptick was seen. Bluesky ads started around April when they had the big influx after the first suspension. Overview, but not a reference: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cm2nkdkypk7o
The over policing thing is so true. I’ve gotten messages from techhub.social mods with warnings about making jokes that even hinted at breaking one of their precious rules. Like if I did something wrong, ban me I guess. It’s pretty clear I didn’t and the mod just wanted to flex his power towards me.
Marketing, sure, but the onboarding from Instagram was a massive factor for Threads growth.
I’m not on any of the services currently, but I have tried Mastodon in the past and point 4. was what made me bounce off it. I know Mastodon flaunts its algorithm-free feed as almost a point of pride, but as a user it just doesn’t do it for me. I could not get it to serve me the type of content I wanted the way I wanted, and it just felt like way too much work for what I was looking for.
I solved this issue by following multiple tags that interest me. People tend to tag their posts on Mastodon it seems, so discovering posts about, say, wine and cacti is as easy as following #wine #cactus #cacti #redwine #oragewine and so on and so forth - it’s working pretty good for me without an algorithm recommending stuff to me, maybe it’s worth a try?
I’d still rather have algorithmic recommendations of what’s been “hot” lately in the tags I follow over a chronological feed. But I’m considering giving Sharkey/Firefish/Iceshrimp another go.
Absolutely agree with point 2, not just for Mastodon, but others like here on Lemmy or Misskey or whatever it may be.
The process of finding an instance can sometimes be annoying because you might find an instance that sounds alright, like I did for Mastodon, and then find that there’s the problem of sign-ups not available. That, and signing up for the instance I got on then had a waiting period for account review and all that before I could do anything.
I assume, from what I’ve heard, all you gotta do for threads and bluesky is just sign up and start posting with less effort, which is what the majority of people want.
If Mastodon wins out in the long run the only reason will be persistence.
All these other “like Twitter but ______” micro blogging or whatever sites only stay viable while they’re profitable.
If Bluesky or Threads become (net) unprofitable, they’ll die. Mastodon is already unprofitable, so that can’t kill it.
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
For #2 some person or group needs to develop a Mastodon app (FOSS obviously) that has a “just do this part for me” option, probably automatically enabled.
#3 is on us. We have to do what we can to make Mastodon (and Lemmy) more open and accepting without falling pretty to the paradox of tolerance.
#4 is hard… Although I think if Mastodon follows or tries to replicate the “early” Facebook user experience where most or all of the content people got was from people they follow, that could be better. The only challenge is that algorithms tickle our anger/hate/disgust impulses to drive and maintain engagement. That’s some very strong “lizard brain” stuff.
So… let’s get going y’all! :)
I think we could compete with #1 just by word of mouth.
There’s no way in hell, even if you ignore #5
There are some advantages to algorithms for discovery - it’s certainly is more user friendly. It’s just a shame they tend to enshitify or become toxic. Bluesky seem to offer an API of sorts to plug in feeds you create. Perhaps open algorithms are more accountable?
Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.
Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.
Most people didn’t have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.
Valid question, but Americans in particular are easily swayed by the fact that the corporate ownership is listed as a “Public Benefit Corporation.” Bluesky is a PBC and for most people that’s enough “proof” that they will “be for the public good.”
In that it is set up to “benefit the public good” people just… buy into that, even if the company isn’t actually benefitting the public good.
Look at how long it took for people to wise up that the Susan G. Komen foundation was spending most of its money on their CEOs and ads and very little on actually helping people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Pinkwashing
For the general public, Open Source generally means “difficult to set up and use with bad user interface.”
And yes, the whole self-hosting thing with numerous servers is confusing to people who have never had to step outside of the corporate-dominated internet.
All that is self-evident based on the original reddit exodus to here on Lemmy. The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light. They’re just far too used to private company doing all that “for free” (*cough for all your private data cough) and struggle to understand how the different way it is set up means you don’t get all the fancy features from the get-go.
So people saw an option with corporate sponsorship and money behind it, and they leap to that. Also I’m sure Bluesky is investing in advertising their product, which is competing with zero advertising dollars spend on the no-corporate fediverse.
The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light.
Dude…I have zero clue how to use linux. Which I assume is easier than writting code. You think I’m going to write a program in C++ or whatever language?
Saying the users aren’t developing the program is like saying the hospital patients aren’t willing to be their own doctor.
Users will ALWAYS bring up issues, and if the developers want the platform to grow, they’ll implement upgrades to fix those issues.
Otherwise, you just have a userbase that rejects your platform, goes somewhere else, and a small group on the platform wondering why it’s not growing.
Which is basically the core of this post.
To be fair, people having ideas for features is a valuable contribution in its own right.
Entitlement to them, not so much. But feature suggestions have value even if many of them aren’t practical and many more never get added.
Agreed, but during the exodus it was less “this is a positive feature that we need and I’m willing to be patient” it was more like:
“This feature not existing is why no one will ever use this product! I’m sick of this and going back to reddit!” after being on Lemmy for 10 fucking minutes.
Oddly enough that secondary exodus is probably why this place is so much more positive
I don’t disagree with your points but I think they apply to pretty specific groups. I doubt that the average person knows or cares that Bluesky is a PBC. The reaction of the average person to ‘open source’ is probably, “I have no idea what that is and please for the love of god don’t explain it to me.”
This is weird on multiple levels, Bluesky code is Open Source, it’s federated and no one gives a damn about it being a PBC. It’s mostly about culture why people have gone to Bluesky and Threads
No, AT is open source, not Bluesky
Is it really that surprising that large companies with lots of money can advertise better than user run instances of open source software?
Fediverse sounds too much like metaverse so people assume it’s crypto bullshit
My personal opinion is that it was:
- Easier signup
- A wider variety of opinions… Fediverse imo is known for tankies and progressives. I’m a progressive so I’m OK w/ the latter, but it can be an echo chamber at times.
- Built-in audiences (Threads especially but also Jack founding a spinoff helps)
- Similar to Linux, one of the benefits to open-source is plenty of forks and standards. This leads to a more fractured landscape at times and so it’s rockier than the alternatives
I know it’s not the main point, but I wouldn’t call Linux fractured. Linux has multiple choices, but they all work fine unless you’re going into an experimental realm or uncommon distros that beginners shouldn’t be getting near anyways.
“Everyone”? I know exactly zero people that have admitted to having a Bluesky account, but I know plenty that have an Mastodon etc. one.
I think this is at most a very regional or specific user bubble thing, and official user numbers for these commercial services are never trustworthy.
I’m only on the fediverse but I miss algorithms. Recommended accounts (which to be fair exists on a corner of Mastodon), similar accounts to one you just followed, custom home feed, suggested posts, etc. Discoverability sucks on fedi and the lack of interest from devs for some sort of private FOSS implementation is disappointing.
Loops was like let’s have a “For You” algo early this year but even that seems to be a dead idea.
People love corporations
It’s multiple factors but boils down to them being easier for non-techie people to access. It’s also a culture issue. Bluesky culture is more like Mastodon than not but it is more diverse and shifts younger. Lots of gatekeepers and harassers ruined it for would be mastodon users particularly Black and Brown folk that were harassed out of the space. One of the biggest minority ran instances was shut down due to overwhelming harassment. People also don’t want to be preached to nor want to be told how to use their own damn social account and be told they’re using it wrong. Most people legit just wanted Twitter without Musk.
There are a lot of people I follow who moved to Mastodon, that now appear to have moved to Bluesky (I’m seeing posts on there from people I know used to post on Mastodon).
I’m not sure why. If I move over it’ll be because everybody else is there. At the moment I’m not using it much.
