I use twitter and I really like the furry art community on there. I also like Mastodon or related ActivityPub services.
Due to recent events lots of people search for alternatives and I feel just very frustrated see all those artists looking for Zucks Threads or Jacks Bluesky when Mastodon is right there, without a chance of a twitter situation ever happening again. They seem to avoid Mastodon like cats avoiding water.
What have we done wrong, and how can we make it better.
I think it’s just marketing, tbh. Bluesky is exclusive and thus getting into it means You Are Important. Threads is basically one click away for people who already use Instagram, which I guess is their target market. Such is the power of these megacorps, they can just throw advertising at the problem and it mostly works.
I want to hope that eventually people will leave those platforms once the excitement wears off and they realize that they are problematic (training AI with user posts, poor moderation, privacy, etc.). Or maybe some big controversy will happen which causes a Twitter like situation for them. But realistically, I don’t see either happening short term.
But honestly, Mastodon has the IRC problem where it seems to be aimed at “techies” and require significant buy-in to its ideology. I made an account with Otaku to follow someone last night, and all it needed was an email and password. Whereas for Mastodon you need to pick an instance, write an application (how much do you need to write? Is it an exam? Will you get rejected?) and wait. The Mastodon team have done an amazing work on making all of this as smooth as possible, but ultimately it’s a hurdle that you need to invest time and energy to understanding. And then your friend just sends you a BlueSky invite and you decide to just go there.
I’m not sure I agree with other comments saying that it’s because it’s too hard or that people think it’s too hard… It’s more that it’s an additional hurdle and complexity that people won’t go through unless they agree with the fediverse ideology.
And then there’s the elephant in the room, which is probably just my personal experience. My first Lemmy account was on an instance that defederated with a bunch of others, and my “main” Mastadon account is/was with an instance that was silenced by meow.social for an unknown reason. Not a good experience for me. Not to mention the immature “I’ll defed you if you don’t block Meta!” thing going on right now…
Fear of “Picking the right instance” is legit something I would have left the fediverse for if I wasn’t so angry at megacorps all the time. I don’t want politics in my social media as a matter of policy, and “fediverse politics” is something that I feel I always need to be aware of. And it results in me making long venty posts like this, because I have Opinions…
Although, I have a question… How many fediverse accounts do people here have? Is having multiple mastodon/lemmy accounts something that’s normal, but not really talked about?
EDIT: Wow, I did not realize how much I posted until I sent it. See why I try to avoid drama and politics? :P
Wait what? Seriously? This was not a thing back when I created my account.
This is something I’ve been thinking about, imagine you have no experience with Mastodon, and you go to an instance that looks good. You go to sign up and you are hit with a form saying “Please leave a message with your application”.
Of course, we know that it’s just for rooting out bots and obvious trolls, but without that experience, it looks like you are being judged as to whether you are a good “fit” for the community. Most people’s experiences with “applications” are for jobs, university, that sort of thing, where you need to convince someone that you are good enough to join them.
Some smaller instances have applications. This is not a feature used by any site looking to be larger or general interest.
Complaining about it is a bad faith argument and points to the argurer having not even tried the main servers.
Want to be in a niche community? Be prepared to demonstrate you belong there.
To be clear, I’m not really complaining about it. I actually think this is something that should be normalized and is good for social media platforms (as opposed to verifying you based on phone number or photograph or nonsense).
I’m just saying that Mastodon and Lemmy are the only platforms where this kind of thing is relatively widespread, and it does act as a hurdle for those who have never seen this kind of thing before.
I honestly do not understand niche mastodon servers. I follow the users I want to follow, no matter on what instance they are and finding new users happens by the retoot of users they find interesting. I just see no reason why it would matter that they are all on the same instance as me.
The ‘local’ timeline is probably more useful on niche servers.
Might also flavor your federated feed and make finding others in the niche more likely.
Also if the niche is of an unpopular or marginalized or nsfw sort, you’ll know the local moderation will be more amenable to what you want to post about.
But in general it doesn’t super matter, no.
Yeah I don’t view instances in terms of content but rather in user experience. I chose kbin because I tried a few and liked it. I like a lot of options to curate my own feed both in maximum possible sources and ability to block sources. If I moved to another instance it would likely be around that type of ideal. That being said Im sorta lazy.
@savvywolf @Alexmitter
I have exactly one account since the very early days. I somewhat would love to split in two or three for different niche interests on different servers but even i am somewhat paralysed by the choice which one
and meow.social maybe i am stuck in the same trap as i try to contact someone there since a year without any reaction ever
What I do is to search a handle on the other instance (e.g. search for @[email protected] in meow.social’s search box). I think if it shows up there (and is decently up to date), it means the instance hasn’t entirely defederated. I can’t say that this is 100% accurate though, or if it covers other things that can happen.