this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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I've been on Mastodon for over a year and the content simply isn't there. Several of the people that I follow on Twitter have tried moving or duplicating to Mastodon. They've had a fraction of the visibility and engagement from commenters that they would get on Twitter. Invariably after a few months they have essentially given up on it as a primary medium. For me the discoverability is essentially non-existent, which I don't think is helped by the idea of it being based around instance-local communities, which have no meaning when you're looking at something like Twitter.
Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y'know enjoying a community?
You can not have one without the other. Influencers look for audiences. If the community has no influencer, it means that the audience is irrelevant or inexistent.
I preferred the Internet that isn't driven by non-genuine posts by profit driven influencers. I am glad that those people don't like mastodon so they don't ruin another platform.
You are missing the point. The point is that there is nothing to ruin here.
The Fediverse is by and large composed of antsy, narcissistic tweenagers who never created anything and use this space as some form of support network. They think that just because they are outcasts they are part of some counterculture movement (like the punks or the OG hackers from the early internet), but they miss the very important part that these movements need to create something meaningful.
All they can do is ridicule (parts of) the status quo and resort to shoot down anything and anyone who is willing to take any risks to effect any type of change. And for all the talk about diversity and inclusivity, one can read any news headline or article here and know exactly what is going to be the reaction from the people
The only way to break away from this unbearably boring monoculture is by bringing more people. We need to get of our comfort zones, dealing with differences and learning that (some) conflict is important. The alternative is stagnation, and culture-wise stagnation is the same as death.
Is anyone here opposed to bringing more people? I'm upset that people are going to an unfederated platform like BlueSky. I wish more people to join, no matter who they are.
I haven't been on mastodon much, but lemmy is quite diverse.
Apart from a bunch of thriving specialist techie communities, what I see there is mostly tiny spaces dominated by intolerant groupthink and tyrannical moderators.
Indeed I just had a very bad experience in one of those that left me (almost) regretting the R-site.
What are you interested in? !newcommunities@lemmy.world promotes a lot of different communities, which usually have less moderation debates than the largest ones
Intriguing, thanks.
How do you bring more people? I don't think people would disagree with that, the hesitancy is from for profits and EEE. People want the fediverse to grow.
The profit-motive and capitalism is not the problem. Corporatism is.
Mastodon and Lemmy are doomed to stay irrelevant for as long as their leaders believe that "the Community" will support them.
You can not EEE an open standard. XMPP didn't die when Facebook and Google dropped it.
We need to assess the power imbalances and strategize accordingly. This whole "boycott Threads" reaction, for example, works in their favor. They already have hundreds of millions of users. Because of the whole "FediPact", now we have lots of people migrating away from Mastodon because their instance does not let them follow some celebrity or NBA player, or sports journalist. Instead of blocking Threads, we should have worked to let people away from Twitter and into Threads so that they could learn and understand how federation works.
After this would be the time to go after the popular YouTubers and say "hey, why don't you setup your instance instead of using Threads? You won't lose your audience, and you have more control over your brand and online presence!"
This is what any sane person with minimal understanding of marketing would think. But instead of that, we got some reactionary crybabies that want to have the Fediverse only to themselves.
The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn't have celibrities and NBA players. It's (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it's not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it'd get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. ...eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it's about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. ...destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it's value is gone.
I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don't need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is 'linking' with any for profit entity.
Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I'd argue Lemmy isn't the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it's going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.
I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.
If you are starting with something that is completely subjective, how do you expect to get any meaningful discussion? You might not care about these things. It doesn't mean that this is not important to others.
Also, it's not just about the celebrities and NBA players. It's about the conversation surrounding these different interests.
It happened on Reddit many years ago, and because of the long tail it simply didn't matter. Just stay from the (relative) popular subs and things work quite well, as long as they are some minimal critical mass. If you are the type that insists in participating in tiring and pointless discussions about politics, then yeah you are going to have a bad time.
Conjecture, that's not a certainty. In an open network, it's a lot easier to design and implement systems where you can actually verify who is behind an account. Or to implement a system that filters content from anyone who is not part of your web of trust. Or to do like spam filters that run content analysis before even hitting your inbox. You can not implement these things on closed networks because it would destroy their KPIs, but we don't care about that here.
Of course it isn't, but it's the best we have at the moment. If we keep waiting for some ideal solution before working to get people out of the closed systems, it will never happen. Worse still, if we don't get more people, we will hit a local maxima and never innovate. This is already happening on Mastodon.
Here we agree, 100%.
thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.
I don't really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it's too unimportant and tiny right now ;)
Thanks!
Maybe I wasn't too clear on the post about one thing, though. There is no need to fork the browser. I believe this could be implemented as a simple browser extension or even as Progressive Web App, like Voyager or Elk. The idea that I'm working with is actually to fork either one of these applications and just change its internal libraries to make it "speak" ActivityPub directly, instead of using Mastodon's or Lemmy's APIs.
Specifically about this approach, no. But https://matrix.to/#/#fediverse:pixie.town is a good room for people working in Fediverse/Social Web.