I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
billionaire ran
Billionaire-run
Another contributing factor is that Lemmy & Mastodon “care about privacy”. Odd, in my opinion, for a public social network.
Their interpretation of that is that they don’t send referer headers. So to any site receiving Lemmy traffic, we’re invisible.
As a non tech expert, in my view, the biggest concern for the fediverse to grow, presently, is how difficult it can be to sign up.
Go to a instance listing, try and choose one, signup… all of this should be acessible but mostly invisible for the average user. The user should only be questioned what sort of content they mostly intend to browse, have a NSFW explicit option, perhaps a server location preference, and that should be it.
Beneath the hood, this process should trigger a call to the network requesting a user slot for any server that could catter to that generic profile the prospect user filled. Even bans should be handled differently, in my opinion.
I mean have they seen how good Ice Cubes and Mlem look? How can they choose the default Twitter and Reddit apps over those masterpieces.
No, they haven’t. 99% of people have never heard of the fediverse or any app within it.
People here are so out of touch here; it’s super interesting
In a way, it’s a good sign. The threadiverse is tight-knit and comprehensive enough to become people’s primary social site. I’ve never seen any other reddit alternative get to this point.
Discuit still has less than 200 weekly commenters: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/HCHvcmBc
Lemmy has 42000 monthly active users
Dang, those numbers are moving though. Not bad.
That explains why I recognize people all the time. We’re basically a small city
I don’t think so, just activists who like to complain about not enough people being aware of the alternative.
I told everyone in my family, and it was one ear and out the other.
My sister told me the other day, “I didn’t know I could add reddit it to my Google search and get better results.” All I could think is, “you figured that out right when everything went to shit, damn.”
My wife still uses reddit. She’s well aware of the controversy, and why I left, and just doesn’t care.
It’s unfortunate, but there’s a real chicken-and-egg problem here. Those of us who are on here are here because of how strongly we believe in the ideal of it, but for the average person who just cares about talking about their favourite interests, there’s a serious lack.
I’ll use two examples, one that you clearly care about, and one that I do. /r/stopkillinggames is hardly super active, but in the last 3 weeks it’s had 11 posts with a cumulative 68 comments. [email protected], by contrast, has had just 8 posts, all by a mod, with just 6 total comments. /r/AgeofMythology is very active with artistic appreciation posts, balance discussion, and advice just within the last 24 hours. [email protected] has failed to attract a single post from anyone other than myself, and it’s been over 3 months since anyone other than myself has left a comment. It’s disheartening, not being able to have conversations about the stuff you love, when you know that just over there it would be so easy.
Lemmy’s excellent if you want to talk about politics, or open source, but there’s not a huge amount outside of that. The Star Trek communities are pretty good, but they pale in comparison to a great sub like /r/daystrominstitute, and the amount and depth of discussion on ttrpg.network is slim compared to /r/pathfinder2e, /r/dndgreentext, /r/dndnext, etc. And these are some of the best-supported hobbies on Lemmy.
So as much as I’m staying here and trying to do my part to make it better, and frequently encourage others to join…I also can’t really blame people who don’t.
(I feel less charitably towards people on Twitter. Because that place is a total shithole, and Mastodon is surprisingly good, if you like microblogging platforms. Plus even Bluesky is better than staying on Twitter, and it has most of the celebrities and micro-celebrities some people might want to follow.)
Lemmy doesn’t have much to offer compared to the “billionaire run” social media.
This is the real answer. I forget the exact numbers, but the vast majority of people on reddit are just lurkers. When you have an enormous user base, that still translates to lots of content to consume. Lemmy has way less content and very small communities (if any) for most niches.
Of course you can point to bots on reddit inflating those numbers and that Lemmy has more meaningful interaction, but that’s not what most are looking for that are on reddit.
Also, as others mentioned, there’s no negative engagement algorithm drivers on mastodon like there is on Twitter. Fact is, a lot of people just like to be angry and combative.
Good point, if I just wanted to lurk reddit would be fine for that purpose. But the users are so wretchedly toxic that commenting is a no-go.
Voyager, Thunder and Arctic blow the Reddit app out of the water
The problem is that the app doesn’t mean much to people if it’s not serving up the content they want.
Yeah, a lot of people have quit Twitter over Musk being a huge douche and migrated to… Blusky. And they think they’ve done something really great. It’s sad.
Mastodon is not a twitter clone.
Bluesky is a twitter clone, without musk. That’s all these people want. They’ve never heard about the fediverse. They’re not protesting corporate centralism.
They just don’t like twitter being a right wing agenda. They want a twitter experience circa before musk bought it, simply because it was left wing before.
That’s bluesky. That’s not mastodon.
To be fair, Twitter is so bad now that Bsky is an improvement.
And Bsky has to appear trustful as they need to attract users.
That’s how they all begin.
Of course, but if the most urgent priority is to get people off Twitter, then Bsky is a better alternative at the moment.
Hopefully at some point Mastodon and Keyforks will catch up on discoverability
It blows my mind that all these services announcing their leaving of X haven’t spun up their own Mastodon instance.
social.transitchicago.com sounds just fine to me.
Bluesky is…fine. Currently, it operates the way that I wish Twitter did. It lets you curate your feed, it shows the feed in chronological order, and finally and most importantly it has a critical mass of users so there is actual content there, rather than every 5th post complaining about how everyone is on another platform or not using Linux.
Really, the only issue I have with it is that it is owned by a corporation. But like Twitter and Reddit, I am willing to abandon it for something else when it gets shittier.
What are your complaints (iiuc) for Bluesky?
my personal dislike for it is that the claims of decentralization are countered by how expensive it is to operate in a truly decentralized manner.
To be truly decentralized you would need to run a relay server, not just a PDS which many people already do and simply holds your data. Unfortunately, the cost to run a relay server today is already about $500+ a month [1] and will only be getting more expensive.
Lastly, while the fediverse has figured out decentralized DM’s, Bluesky DM’s are completely centralized [1] and only work thanks to being funneled through their servers. I wouldn’t call what they have private considering they can read what everyone on Bluesky is saying privately. Granted, fediverse DM’s are not encrypted either, but at least they’re decentralized and don’t allow a single provider access to everyone’s private messages.
[1] https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Not OP, but the leadership has just shown themselves to be unable to run the platform how users want. They’re refusing to ban serial harasser Jesse Singal. Its head of trust and safety banned a bot and its creator because the bot pointed out that they liked a porn post on their work account for ‘harassment’. Bear in mind the entire point of Bluesky is for all this info to be public and easily accessible.
I mean just because the info is there doesn’t mean you should run with it. It’s just rude
Just that there’s nothing keeping Bluesky from enshittifying the same way Twitter (and all the other centrally-corporate-owned social media platforms) have. By migrating, the former Twitter users are just delaying the inevitable.
See the context and discussion on previous posts here:
The fediverse is like a cafe with an unusual menu and interesting conversations. Most social media is like a McDonald’s in Altoona PA.
Fruit is not addictive. Cocaine is. There’s the answer
I haven’t done cocaine in awhile but I eat fruit every day. Am I doing it wrong?
Tell that to my Mbin addiction.
We are all addicts.
Which one is Ice Cubes? First time I hear about it
It is an IOS client for mastodon that uses a glassy design aesthetic.
Ah, make sense!
that uses a glassy design aesthetic
What, like Windows Vista? (Ngl, I actually loved that design aesthetic. I kinda miss it.)
eats a red delicious
“everyday people” being autistic furries with opinions on Linux distributions and/or preachy anarchists who take Star Trek a little too seriously
You seem cool
