Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn’t be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided ‘vision’ by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.
I’ve said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a “trending” tab, cause that’s what users want to see.
Yeah, most people aren’t on social media to see “what their friends are up to,” they’re there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest “thing” is. Mastodon doesn’t have any of that, or at least it’s very hard to find.
The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you’ve got your sea legs
I really dont get this “Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for”. I’m a barely technoliterate 30 something who’s closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.
Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.
That’s how I feel right now. I don’t need the Fediverse to replace reddit and Twitter, I want it to be a refuge from the commercialized crap! The people who can’t be bothered to figure out Lemmy or Mastodon can stay right where they are!
Exactly, lemmy feels like my kind of people. Going against proprietary stuff, against privacy nightmares. It’s the fact that I can relate to people here that makes it such a good replacement for commercial alternatives.
But people using those platforms is not good for our society. Of course if they cared about freedom a little bit of extra difficulty wouldn’t really bother them. But the goal should be to make the switch as easy as possible.
The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.
Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.
Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone
Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.
Funny, that’s exactly the reason I like Mastodon’s feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I’m following and the posts they make.
You’re saying this… On Lemmy. You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?
I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that’s what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.
The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
I think that’s why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, “here’s some stuff the community was into recently”
I used a general term that’s been in the zeitgeist of the Fediverse for a while. Clearly this is a point that will need some onboarding documentation in the overall “what is any of this” for new users
I’m using the Thunder app to access my lemmy.world account. Is Mastodon also Lemmy? Can I browse lemmy.world and mastodon at the same time? I’m so new and vv confused.
They’re both fediverse, but one is designed to follow communities, and the other is designed to follow people. A Mastodon user sees a community as a user, and can thus subscribe to it. There’s not really a way for a Lemmy user to do the inverse and subscribe to a user.
If you want a platform that does both (can subscribe to both communities and users), check out Kbin.
I figured it out, but after nearly giving up on it. There’s basically no algorithm to suggest you content like on other sites, so you gotta search for hashtags for stuff you’re interested in and follow them. You basically create your own content pushing algorithm by scratch.
I like it, but considering the average twitter user isn’t going to get it after having content and people pushed to them by twitter’s algorithm, I can see why so many people gave up on it. Then again the people who are actually there seem cool enough, and it’s nice to have a microblog and drip feed that isn’t drowning in drama and sponsorships. I think I kinda prefer if Masto stays small.
I feel like the strange one in this post because I HATE algorithms. I want chronological order of what I am following, and a chrono feed of everything for discovering new people. I find that Mastodon is great this way so long as you’re on a server that hasn’t disabled the federated feed.
All the folks complaining about their only being able to discover people/content from things their local instance are following are apparently on instances that only have the local feed turned on, or maybe have never looked at the federated feed.
The official Mastodon app doesn’t show federated. Tusky is the way.
you think they know?
you think that Instagram users have any idea about what they are getting into?
most of them probably don’t even know that Instangram is owned by Meta / Facebook, despite the small logo.
Nerds, geeks and general outsiders like and look for things like Mastodon and the fediverse, the majority of people just want convenience and ease of access and things like Twitter and Threads have that. Until celebrities and companies join the fediverse you won’t get normal people and at that point it won’t be any different from Twitter. I like Mastodon but it has nothing on the ease and just general amount of everything that Twitter has which is what brings in users.
The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won’t sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads’ algorithm is pretty bad, but it’s still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I’m not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don’t have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
I’m curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I’m into photography, but I don’t want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.
Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.
The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn’t it for me, and won’t be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.
I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.
That’s my other issue with Mastodon, it’s development doesn’t seem that open, it feels like the head dude isn’t really open to change. When asked about fixing search, he said it was “intentional” and he wanted people to search less. Seems weird, let the users have the choice, right?
Heck, even Bluesky, which is VC funded feels more open than Mastodon at times.
I particularly like Mastodon’s chronological and weak search. You won’t be easily found unless you wanted to, and your timeline is well-ordered and never will it be disturbed by some algorithms. To me these are its advantages.
I don’t like it because my feed gets flooded with low quality content that’s only there because the poster used that particular hashtag. It needs sorting like Reddit, so that I can keep the good quality content on top, but also have a chronological option if I ever get bored.
It makes no sense to choose chronological when you can make it optional. Bluesky is much, much better in this regard.
The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.
Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.
Oddly, I thought that was one of the worst parts about Google+. I get your point though and I respect your opinion, I just thought it was interesting how we disagree 😄
I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.
I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.
I love combing through the federated timeline and randomly finding someone new to follow or maybe just interact with that day. It’s my choice, it’s happenstance (based on chronological feeds and when I take time to look) and it feels like running into new people in the real world in a way.
Algorithms tend to funnel people into partisan views of the world. They find people that think like you and follow the same topics as you and eventually without realising it you become partisan and unwilling to talk or compromise with someone with different views. It’s this part of social media that has made political situations hot and compromise seem impossible… I am digressing in my ramble though.
I curate people in my follow list based on looking for things I know I like at first and people/celebs I know I follow elsewhere. 10-15 minutes a day I spend looking through the federated timeline (not the local timeline which is the only one available in the official Mastodon app) and I will interact with or find new people to follow at random. And then occasionally I go to people I am following and see who they are following to find new things as well.
All my posts are chronological in my feeds, which means I can actually find them again.
And one other thing I’ve noticed on sites with algorithms like Twitter… eventually you’re just seeing the same people over and over again from the algorithm. There are thousands and thousands you’ll never see because it will never think they are important enough to show you. Chronological feeds are unbiased and give everyone and equal platform… for better or worse… but after years of Facebook and Twitter algorithms, I strongly feel that’s for the better.
I’m really digging the simplicity at Lemmy.world, though I haven’t gotten mastodon yet. Still not up to speed on “instances” & the federated timeline (?).
Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn’t blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances’ rules against advertising.
No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I’m a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Yeah, it’s unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That’s a massive number of people who could be easily informed “hey, wanna try our new product?” As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads’ numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
There was a time - when facebook/ig didn’t exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn’t make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
I’ve been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
It’s one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
We’ll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we’ll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the ‘cool’ thing around.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !memes@lemmy.ml
Rules:
Be civil and nice.
Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
Anyone else notice the cursor on the top left?
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What is Twitter then?
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What OS is Twitter?
Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn’t be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided ‘vision’ by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.
deleted by creator
Federation is so confusing! Why can’t I just sign up at facebook.com where the rest of the internet is? You guys and your cryptofederatedarkweb.
yes, that is exactly what the Internet should be, with full VR…
Instructions unclear; dick in toaster.
(BEEP!)
Twitter … never heard that in a while.
In it for the long haul, its going to bathtub but we’ll get there eventually
I’ve said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a “trending” tab, cause that’s what users want to see.
Yeah, most people aren’t on social media to see “what their friends are up to,” they’re there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest “thing” is. Mastodon doesn’t have any of that, or at least it’s very hard to find.
The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you’ve got your sea legs
I really dont get this “Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for”. I’m a barely technoliterate 30 something who’s closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.
Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.
Counterpoint: This tiny little hurdle keeps out the lazy and ignorant.
That’s how I feel right now. I don’t need the Fediverse to replace reddit and Twitter, I want it to be a refuge from the commercialized crap! The people who can’t be bothered to figure out Lemmy or Mastodon can stay right where they are!
Exactly. Why would I want anyone else in my community when I can just talk to myself! !league@lemmy.ml
I think these communities are plenty big already! I spent a while on tildes before coming here so in used to, and enjoy, smaller communites.
Exactly, lemmy feels like my kind of people. Going against proprietary stuff, against privacy nightmares. It’s the fact that I can relate to people here that makes it such a good replacement for commercial alternatives.
But people using those platforms is not good for our society. Of course if they cared about freedom a little bit of extra difficulty wouldn’t really bother them. But the goal should be to make the switch as easy as possible.
The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.
Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.
Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone
Mastodon’s own app is kind of trash. Mastodon confused the shit out of me until I tried Ivory.
That’s not what I want to see.
Funny, that’s exactly the reason I like Mastodon’s feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I’m following and the posts they make.
No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.
You’re fired
You can’t fire me I quit
You can’t quit I’m leaving!
You can’t leave you’re a frog!
You’re saying this… On Lemmy. You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?
I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that’s what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.
Which are optional so what’s your point?
Don’t forget that some people have more than one account
But twitter people love bullshit!
The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
I think that’s why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, “here’s some stuff the community was into recently”
Did you mistake threads for mastodon?
What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything about Threads or Mastodon. I’m talking about Kbin and Lemmy
My mistake. I should have known when you said threadiverse you weren’t talking about threads. How silly of me.
Now excuse me while get a glass of Pepsi. (I’m obviously talking about getting a plate of olives)
You can’t just make up your own lingo and expect everyone else to know what you’re talking about.
I didn’t make up anything:
I used a general term that’s been in the zeitgeist of the Fediverse for a while. Clearly this is a point that will need some onboarding documentation in the overall “what is any of this” for new users
Idk. The earliest I can find threadiverse mentioned is just last month. Threads started development in January, and is actually called Threads.
It’s an unfortunate term to coin and isn’t appearnt as to what it’s referring to.
I’m using the Thunder app to access my lemmy.world account. Is Mastodon also Lemmy? Can I browse lemmy.world and mastodon at the same time? I’m so new and vv confused.
Not really.
They’re both fediverse, but one is designed to follow communities, and the other is designed to follow people. A Mastodon user sees a community as a user, and can thus subscribe to it. There’s not really a way for a Lemmy user to do the inverse and subscribe to a user.
If you want a platform that does both (can subscribe to both communities and users), check out Kbin.
I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic
Mastodon is a mess though.
I figured it out, but after nearly giving up on it. There’s basically no algorithm to suggest you content like on other sites, so you gotta search for hashtags for stuff you’re interested in and follow them. You basically create your own content pushing algorithm by scratch.
I like it, but considering the average twitter user isn’t going to get it after having content and people pushed to them by twitter’s algorithm, I can see why so many people gave up on it. Then again the people who are actually there seem cool enough, and it’s nice to have a microblog and drip feed that isn’t drowning in drama and sponsorships. I think I kinda prefer if Masto stays small.
I feel like the strange one in this post because I HATE algorithms. I want chronological order of what I am following, and a chrono feed of everything for discovering new people. I find that Mastodon is great this way so long as you’re on a server that hasn’t disabled the federated feed.
All the folks complaining about their only being able to discover people/content from things their local instance are following are apparently on instances that only have the local feed turned on, or maybe have never looked at the federated feed.
The official Mastodon app doesn’t show federated. Tusky is the way.
you think they know?
you think that Instagram users have any idea about what they are getting into?
most of them probably don’t even know that Instangram is owned by Meta / Facebook, despite the small logo.
I truly do not get it. I hate everything lizard boy touches :(
Nerds, geeks and general outsiders like and look for things like Mastodon and the fediverse, the majority of people just want convenience and ease of access and things like Twitter and Threads have that. Until celebrities and companies join the fediverse you won’t get normal people and at that point it won’t be any different from Twitter. I like Mastodon but it has nothing on the ease and just general amount of everything that Twitter has which is what brings in users.
The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won’t sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads’ algorithm is pretty bad, but it’s still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I’m not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don’t have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
I’m curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I’m into photography, but I don’t want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.
Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.
The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn’t it for me, and won’t be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.
I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.
Custom algorithms like community plugins is actually such an incredible good idea I wonder why we don’t have it already on mastodon
That’s my other issue with Mastodon, it’s development doesn’t seem that open, it feels like the head dude isn’t really open to change. When asked about fixing search, he said it was “intentional” and he wanted people to search less. Seems weird, let the users have the choice, right?
Heck, even Bluesky, which is VC funded feels more open than Mastodon at times.
I particularly like Mastodon’s chronological and weak search. You won’t be easily found unless you wanted to, and your timeline is well-ordered and never will it be disturbed by some algorithms. To me these are its advantages.
I don’t like it because my feed gets flooded with low quality content that’s only there because the poster used that particular hashtag. It needs sorting like Reddit, so that I can keep the good quality content on top, but also have a chronological option if I ever get bored.
It makes no sense to choose chronological when you can make it optional. Bluesky is much, much better in this regard.
The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.
Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.
Oddly, I thought that was one of the worst parts about Google+. I get your point though and I respect your opinion, I just thought it was interesting how we disagree 😄
I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.
I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.
I love combing through the federated timeline and randomly finding someone new to follow or maybe just interact with that day. It’s my choice, it’s happenstance (based on chronological feeds and when I take time to look) and it feels like running into new people in the real world in a way.
Algorithms tend to funnel people into partisan views of the world. They find people that think like you and follow the same topics as you and eventually without realising it you become partisan and unwilling to talk or compromise with someone with different views. It’s this part of social media that has made political situations hot and compromise seem impossible… I am digressing in my ramble though.
I curate people in my follow list based on looking for things I know I like at first and people/celebs I know I follow elsewhere. 10-15 minutes a day I spend looking through the federated timeline (not the local timeline which is the only one available in the official Mastodon app) and I will interact with or find new people to follow at random. And then occasionally I go to people I am following and see who they are following to find new things as well.
All my posts are chronological in my feeds, which means I can actually find them again.
And one other thing I’ve noticed on sites with algorithms like Twitter… eventually you’re just seeing the same people over and over again from the algorithm. There are thousands and thousands you’ll never see because it will never think they are important enough to show you. Chronological feeds are unbiased and give everyone and equal platform… for better or worse… but after years of Facebook and Twitter algorithms, I strongly feel that’s for the better.
I’m really digging the simplicity at Lemmy.world, though I haven’t gotten mastodon yet. Still not up to speed on “instances” & the federated timeline (?).
Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn’t blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances’ rules against advertising.
No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.
The watch what you see with your own eyes now
oh wow, fucking lol
wait, isn’t that for their shitty VR headset?
Exactly, they’re advanced, you know 🤮 It’s getting ‘really’ disgusting, not just viirtually
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I’m a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
Great opportunity to educate them, and then have them host your own instance :)
Yeah, it’s unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That’s a massive number of people who could be easily informed “hey, wanna try our new product?” As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads’ numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
There was a time - when facebook/ig didn’t exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn’t make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
I’ve been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
It’s one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
We’ll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we’ll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the ‘cool’ thing around.
Until then, it will be much much better.
Of topic, but wtf is that logo?
Sure, it’s a tangled thread, but is that it?
It looks like it could be a C or E, but that doesn’t seem meaningful.
Is this a bit? It’s an @ sign with the weird lowercase a most fonts use.
It’s an @.
Pretty easy to figure out. Everyone only uses it for everything.