A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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Also, let Mastodon shrink if that means that the "market share" of other native Fediverse server apps grows.
The fewer people think the Fediverse is Mastodon, and the more exposure the other stuff in the Fediverse gets and what features it has over Mastodon, the better.
Decentralisation and having multiple instances isn't even that much of an issue. 99.999% of all Twitter refugees were railroaded to Mastodon and what seems like 99% of these straight to mastodon.social. They genuinely thought mastodon.social was "the Mastodon website", just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. It took many of them months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised. And it took some of them even longer to notice that the Fediverse is, in fact, more than just Mastodon while half of them think that Fediverse = Mastodon after almost two years.
No, the biggest issue is: What they were looking for was not something radically different from Twitter, now that Twitter sucked. They were looking for a Twitter without Musk. Like, a drop-in replacement that doesn't require them to adjust in any way. A 1:1, 100% identical clone of Twitter how it was the day before Musk took over with the same UI and the same UX and the same culture.
When they were railroaded to mastodon.social, they were told that Mastodon is "literally Twitter without Musk". And they took it as literally. By face value. And then they ended up on something that looked and felt nothing like Twitter. No matter how many of Twitter's limitations Gargron arbitrarily and unnecessarily implemented into Mastodon, he never got close enough to Twitter itself.
People would stick around because Mastodon felt like the only alternative to Twitter there was. Of course, they kept using Mastodon exactly like Twitter, not adopting to Mastodon's culture and relying on their toots being delivered to people by an algorithm that Mastodon simply doesn't have. Hashtag? Fuck hashtags, I didn't need no hashtags on Twitter, so I ain't gonna use none on Mastodon. And then they wondered why so few people discovered them and their content.
They didn't want to adapt. They were waiting for Mastodon to finally "fix the bugs" that made it different from Twitter. Which it didn't.
Instead, Mastodon developed its own culture (which is a story of its own). And they were pressured to adopt Mastodon's culture. CWs for sensitive content for any definition of "sensitive". Twitter ain't got no CW field. Alt-texts for all images, and it had to be actually useful and informative. They ain't never done no alt-texts on Twitter. Of course, the right hashtags. See above.
Also, Mastodon-the-app is lack-lustre. Whereas the official apps for just about everything else are fully-featured, the Mastodon mobile app is only there for there to be a mobile app named "Mastodon" for those people who join a new online service by grabbing their iPhones and loading the app with the same name as the service from the App Store. Especially newbies often can't wrap their minds around using an online service with an app that doesn't have the same name. But the official Mastodon app is actually just about the worst Mastodon app out there. At the same time, for many Mastodon users, this app IS Mastodon. They've never seen the Web interface. What the app can't do, Mastodon can't do.
Lastly, Mastodon was probably also way too techy. Like, you had people talking about Linux and Open Source and Web design and whatnot all over the place, something that they themselves knew nothing about and weren't interested in. On top came those people with their weird-looking monster posts that said the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and they were posting from something that is not and has never even been affiliated with Mastodon.
And then Bluesky came along. And Bluesky looked exactly like what they've been wanting all the time: a 1:1 Twitter clone. One big reason for Bluesky's success is that it shamelessly ripped off the UI of immediately-pre-Musk-takeover Twitter, both the website and the mobile app. A fully-featured, well-polished mobile app with all the same features as the website. And at first glance, it feels like the same monolithic walled-garden silo as Twitter with the same kinds of users as Twitter, minus the Nazis. At least not as ripe with übergeeks as Mastodon.
Also, Bluesky grew faster and quickly had more users than Mastodon. Which sounded like more followers in less time. Exactly what all those famewhores that brag about their Twitter follower counts were craving.
People wanted a pre-Musk Twitter clone. Mastodon isn't one. Everything else in the Fediverse is one even less. Bluesky is just that. Bluesky is what people had wanted all the time.
Same reason i don't use Twitter, I'm not a narcissist.
Mastodon has a horrible UI and UX, at least in my opinion. I've found Misskey and its forks to be better.
I've been engaging with Lemmy more than Mastodon. Lemmy allows for more interactions through discussions. To me, it seems like Mastodon is slower to get interactions (for context, I have accounts on three different instances and used to post dark/gothic/satirical/surrealist poetry written by me daily, but I haven't posted in days because no one seems to be really engaging with it). Mastodon has a lot of potential, but I think few are really committed to stick to the fediverse and all its potential.
As for why people don't come back, maybe they're confused about which instance to use since there are thousands of different instances for different purposes, I'm not exactly sure.
So... This is stalkerish, but I was curious about your dark/gothic interests and I read some of your comments and you seem like an interesting person. I'd be grateful if you could share your poetry (a link to your accounts or whatever medium). 😳 Sorry; thank you.
I read some of your comments and you seem like an interesting person
Thanks!
I’d be grateful if you could share your poetry
I use the same handle/nickname as here (dsilverz) on Mastodon's main instance (mastodon.social). There's a mix of poetry types and genres (some are really dark, found under the "Content Warning" Mastodon feature), but all of them tries to fit the 500 character limitation. There are other instances as well (one where I post AI imagery illustrating the poetry I've written, other has a plus 500 character limit, where I posted storytelling but has no many posts because it's not well federated) I'm yet to find a Mastodon instance that both supports over 500 characters and has a reasonable federation and user activity (so that posts gets to readers).
I never really got into Twitter format. Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight. Mastodon and bluesky just fill that void, although has replaced twitter for me.
Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight
Me too. I don't like the 500 character limit. It forces us to use slangs and internet abbreviations. Also, it allows for less information when I post in Portuguese (I'm Brazilian, so it's my first language besides English) because Portuguese has all these long conjugations (differently from English). Some sentences are shorter in Portuguese (for example "O rato atravessou a rua" is shorter than "The rat crossed the street"), but they tend to be longer.
I'll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.
I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.
Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there's no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say "I'd like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel" and now you've got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it's trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.
I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers
Generally speaking, you're not on these services to follow strangers per say. You're on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you're on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I'd never talk to these people IRL. And I'd never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little "oh let's check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?" fan relationship that's fruitful and fun for everyone involved.
But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.
One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you're talking about an audience in the... thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it's low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
You do know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, Truth Social and the Threadiverse?
Search that covers 100% of the Fediverse is technologically impossible. Any Fediverse-wide search would need to know all of the Fediverse. All of it.
Like, let's suppose R is B's personal instance. Let's suppose B spins up the instance for the first time. Any all-encompassing Fediverse search would have to know about it immediately. The very millisecond Apache or nginx or whatever comes to life, that search would have to know it's there to be able to always cover exactly 100% of the Fediverse.
How's that supposed to work?
If it's one centralised search engine, it would have to be hard-coded into the source code of every last Fediverse project out there so all new instances can automatically announce their existence to the search engine.
And that's not four projects or so. It's over 100. Not only Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed. It's also Ecko and Hometown and Glitch and many other Mastodon forks. And Pleroma and Akkoma and other Pleroma forks. And Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Iceshrimp.NET and Sharkey and CherryPick and Catodon and Meisskey and Tanukey and Neko and dozens upon dozens of other Misskey forks. And Mitra. And Socialhome. And GoToSocial. And micro.blog which, by the way, is closed-source. And Friendica and Hubzilla and the streams repository and Forte. And Pixelfed. And Funkwhale. And Bandwagon. And Castopod. And PeerTube. And Owncast. And Mobilizon. And Gancio. And BookWyrm. And Flohmarkt. And so forth.
It'd be even worse if it was supposed to be built into the Fediverse projects themself. Like, you could search the whole Fediverse from Lemmy's Web interface or any one Mastodon app.
That'd require each new instance to announce its instance to each running instance.
That'd require each new instance to know all running instances immediately.
That'd only be possible by building a list of 20,000++ Fediverse instances into every last Fediverse server software repository so that it's installed along with new instances.
And that list would always have to be up-to-date.
So when B spins up R, the following would have to happen:
git pulls the most recent version of the main branch of Mastodon's source code to have a most up-to-date list of active instances possible.Any Fediverse server out there would be able to hack into any Fediverse server code repository and manipulate the production code. Otherwise, this whole thing couldn't work.
Fediverse server code repositories would be flooded with automated pull requests plus mergers. Oh, and if Mastodon can add a new instance to a list in the Mastodon production source code, anything could remote-manipulate anything in the Mastodon production source code.
I think people are tired of the 140 character type social networks, the novelty has simply worn off. It's either self-promotion or "I had two eggs for breakfast lol" type of posts.
People who came to Mastodon, posted "Hello world!" and didn't bother to set a profile picture or add a description will always complain about the lack of discoverability, or the place being boring.
You literally have to put in work to set up your feed, follow hashtags, people and post yourself for it to be a network and not just a feed of things. And I think people struggle with this concept a lot.
I do understand that it's not for everyone. But it's not a problem with Mastodon, it's just a natural filter IMO. "You have to put at least this much effort to integrate". Low-effort things are usually just rage-bait.
i posted in another thread how i think content discovery stinks on mastodon. bluesky is much better at it. mastodon feeds are a wall of noise
mastodon + opt in to bridgyfed is the way
Because it doesn't have $100s of millions to throw at marketing, or the name dropping of Twitter creators behind it.
It is what it is. You can either be alright with being small, or hurl money into it, but the people who hurl money into things tend to want it back at some point, and that means becoming a shitty business.