Technology

Yeah. I've been mourning the loss of Earth's future for some time now. It's very sad.

That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It's a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.

That's dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.

It's because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It's kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.

It's a containment site; has been for a while.

You need a couple of people to follow, then it’s great! I met most of my Twitter folks on conferences and such. The majority has now moved to Mastodon. It’s mostly programming folks.

For me, it was the interface. I found it rough around the edges and not as inviting as Twitter used to be. I know it's seen as superficial but UX/UI is important.

Like, for example, to create a post or reply, the input was on the left navigation panel for some reason. I used to have trouble visually separating one post from the next in my head until I got used to it. Also, the way thread comments were nested could've been improved. And why did it only show me the top 5 trending news stories? Why couldn't I browse more? Idk, overall I felt like I was fighting the UI mentally.

I think Lemmy did a better job subtly improving on the details. I didn't see Mastodon doing that much when I was on there.

What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.

Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I've discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.

If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:

• Polygon (@[email protected])
• The Conversation (@[email protected])
• The Intercept (@[email protected])
• Voice of America (@[email protected])
• Ars Technica (@[email protected])
• Semafor (@[email protected])
• Kotaku (@[email protected])
• The Christian Science Monitor (@[email protected])
• Fast Company (@[email protected])
• The 19th (@[email protected])
• Vox (@[email protected])

There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @[email protected] regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you'll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.

The statistics thing is a downside of how Mastodon implements ActivityPub.

Two possibilites:

1. I think you can simply hide the counts if it irritates you.

2. You can install Fedifetcher to pull in missing interactions to your local server: https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher

Did you use Twitter much before then? Some people just don't like the format. I use it to get updates on some things, but I don't use it as much as Lemmy (or Reddit before that).

If you did use Twitter, perhaps the content you followed back then still didn't make its way to Mastodon (or it went to bluesky/threads?)

Last thing you could try is following more people. I find that fediverse platforms need you to seek out content more actively, while old profit driven social media platforms were constantly seeking engagement. On top of that there just isn't as much content on any of the new platforms compared to the older ones.

That all being said, the quality of the content is equal or better every time

isn't that why the hippie movement ended?

I remember that /r/all was actually pretty educational back in the day. There were specific users that you would know by their user names that always posted something insightful.

And this is why I'm perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

The decline started somewhere around 2011-2013.