Social media is a cancer on society.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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The thing about Mastodon for influencers is... you don't even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.
If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.
Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
That's an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there's a lower financial incentive.
Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.
Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create a false appearance of success.
Of course, there's still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.
But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.
All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon's algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.
Mastodon doesn't by design
There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn't shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it's not entirely lacking discovery features either.
Trending section often unusable and basically only rewards the majority (a.k.a Western fediverse).
If you host instance for non-English language for local communities, trending will quickly populated with Western/US-centric conversation and news.
Please tell me how I can keep posting to twitter after I was banned for being a journalist?
My point was for people who are scared to leave Twitter. They don't have to. They can just dip their toes in while still holding their Elon-themed blanket.
I understand that often you can't just drop the platform where all the engagement is when your job is to promote something. However, you can still enable people who do want to make the switch.
What's happening right now is eerily close to the "Gleichschaltung" that happened after Hitler took over Germany, basically bringing all media in line with the will of the party and the leader. It was news media then, it is social media now. Because for many people, social media is their primary news source.
Will smaller alternatives be enough to upend their plans?
The smaller alternatives will get bigger as the mainstream social media gets worse and worse. The job for us, in whatever way we can, is to build the alternatives and make them ready to handle the influx, and make them welcoming to new people.
It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven't migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They're not that hard to set up, and there's so little risk when you just don't accept public signups on your domain.
I agree. The Fediverse stuff is really well suited for governments and businesses. They can be in complete control of their instance, post whatever information they want distributed, and they don't need to rely on any other business for it.
Yeah. I'm surprised businesses haven't been quicker to setup self-hosted Mastodon as their primary, and then mirror that to Twitter and Bluesky and such, for disaster recovery protection.
You'd need something that is literally only a few clicks and it's set up, and it auto updates with 0 user intervention. Until that happens your typical business will never want to touch their own hosted mastodon server.
Yeah. I think we're waiting for the kind of installers and updaters that WordPress achieved before we see typical businesses running their own Mastodon server.
But I do think many organizations have got the risk/reward wrong, by underestimating the risk, at the moment.
Businesses I understand because that involves listening to your tech guy and approving time for it, and businesses hate spending money, even if it wouldn't really cost them that much in practice. They have a lot of institutional inertia.
From talking to someone involved in local government software, it seemed to me like there is a push in the opposite direction from that; they want and are moving towards offloading as much as possible to third party software vendors.
Completely agree! Seeing the dumb little logos all over timetables and the sides of buses always makes me roll my eyes. First they had to change the "t" logo to the bird, then that's out of date on a billionaire's whim and they have to replace it with the apocalyptic "X". Come on guys, this is getting embarrassing. Stop treating big private companies like Daddy, it's time to stand on your own feet. The tools are there.
Go and sprinkle the simplest keywords in the thread - Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed - and tell them your experience.
Add links as well, Lemmy onboarding can be very clunky: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
I thought they're removing posts with links.
Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you've still got reddit and don't mind being a fediverse evangelist please go hit this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i6rp3o/decentralized_social_media_is_the_only/
Especially for Redditors, Lemmy is such a no-brainer alternative. I think I'm gonna try to do more, and try to bring some of my audio communities out here by promoting Lemmy in the subs.
Look at this for inspiration: https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Someday it will happen for Lemmy again.
Did hit it. Keep servicing that thread, you're doing well. It's blowing up a bit.
Repost this in other communities in Lemmy. Shitpost, technology, etc.
Oh no. Centralized social media fights back! 😂
Damn we had a good run.
EDIT: We'll Streisand em
I think the join-lemmy.org link was fine, it seemed to get deleted when you edited in links to specific lemmy instances?
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lmao clicked that link and one of the first comments I see is “reddit is pretty decentralized”
I get that 404 needs to make money but this article could greatly benefit from not being paywalled. Or at least list a definition of what decentralized social media is with some actual recommendations before the paywall because people clearly have no fucking clue
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How much of the fediverse runs on AWS and how willing do we think besos would be to pull the plug on those?
Lemmy.ca will be moved on a fat server in Vancouver colo. Currently on cheap hardware in OVH. Not sure about .world. Probably similar. AWS is expensive. So Bezos would have to have Trump annex Canada before he'd be able to put his fingers on us.
.world and a majority of the fediverse uses Hetzner afaik.
EDIT: According to Fedidb Hetzner is the most common ASN (excluding Cloudflare).
Doing my part running my instances locally 🫡
They don't control the domain registrar's at least. Yet. (Or at least not de jure)
Don’t they have their own DNS? It’s called Route 53 I think?
Though I don’t think you are required to use it with your AWS hosts. But that’s not exactly what I meant by pulling the plug. They could quite literally pull the plug on your service. (Disconnect you from switches/routers, power off your hosts, etc.)
Oh indeed, don't disagree there, we are as in most respects, at the mercy of our corporate overlords
Can someone please post the full article in the comments?
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