Mastodon and Pixelfed got a short mention on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
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Nothing you say is wrong, it's all factual and correct and if the majority of people were wired the way you are I think the world would be a better place. As is though, I think the amount of work Mastodon expects you to put in seems exhausting and off-putting to most people. I know it does me. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. The discussion isn't really about the virtues of each social media platform, the question is why does Bluesky appear at the top of the list and not Mastodon. And the reason is that Mastodon refuses to provide the service most people want from a platform like this: a well-tuned suggestion algorithm. In doing so they maintain purity and a sort of moral high ground, but will always struggle with mass appeal. Most people don't care about what's good for them, they only care about their end user experience.
And the reason is that Mastodon refuses to provide the service most people want from a platform like this: a well-tuned suggestion algorithm.
Why are you ignoring the fact that Bluesky has a MUCH larger marketing budget AND it gets basically free unlimited (barely critical) coverage from the tech press.
You are drawing conclusions left and right on incomplete information and it destroys any semblance of a point you are trying to make.
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Damn given that Bluesky has millions to burn on marketing I would say the Fediverse is clowning on Bluesky seeing as it the Fediverse has a $0 marketing budget.
For all the money and prestige Bluesky has access to, they still have only managed to double our size? That is kind of sad really, it must be because they keep adding things people actually don't want.
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Picking a server is weird and scary.
As a scientist, I would be cautious of jumping to a conclusion and beating ourselves up for it until we have crystal clear proof that that is the specific thing that's turning people away.
Not that one thing alone, obviously. But it's a big part of it.
We can call it a hypothesis if that helps.
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They're good at predicting what people want to see, yes. But that isn't the real problem.
The problem isn't that they predict what you want to see, it is that they use that information to give you results that are 90% what you want to see and 10% of results that the owner of the algorithm wants you to see.
X uses that to mix in alt-right feeds. Google uses it to mix in messages from the highest bidder on their ad network and Amazon uses it to mix in product recommendations for their own products.
You can't know what they're adding to the feed or how much is real recommendations that are based on your needs and wants and how much is artificially boosted content based on the needs and wants of the owner of the algorithm.
Is your next TikTok really the next highest piece of recommended content or is it something that's being boosted on the behalf of someone else? You can't know.
This has become an incredibly important topic since people are now using these systems to drive political outcomes which have real effects on society.
You’re very fixated on something we all agree with and missing the thrust of the point.
People want an algorithm, whether it’s parasitic or manipulative or whatever. Most people do not care enough to object. They will pick it over a mastodon/lemmy/etc experience to get curation. That’s all we’re saying
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Treating it responsibly in this case would mean actually offering a recommendation algorithm that is free of corporate interest, then. To go along with your own simile, you can't really go up to a junkie and say "Hey, you should really consider giving up heroin and having a salad instead. It's better for you." and expect it to be a convincing argument. Which is why Bluesky is succeeding and Mastodon isn't.
It also means decoupling the recommendation system from people's feeds.
Having a "you may like this" section is a lot less abusable than "the next item in your doomscroll is <recommendation>".
Bluesky is just another Twitter. Everything that happened to Twitter can happen to Bluesky. It's not fundamentally changing anything except trading Elon for a different owner.
It's not a bad change, people want Twitter after all... but it isn't fixing any problems in the underlying incentive structures or algorithm control.
The core problem is that curated feeds allow the owner to substitute their recommendations in place of recommendations that would interest you.
Until the owner can't do that, the social network is always one sale away from being the next Twitter/Truth Social.
Bluesky is fixing social media by changing the owner, Mastodon/ActivityPub is fixing social media by getting rid of the owner.
I think the latter is the better choice for how to structure these things.
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why is Bluesky on top of these lists always, better marketing?
Better marketing, better UI, lots of users, and plenty of non-political content.
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I don't think we need a full-on study to show that an additional barrier to entry hurts adoption.
It's no different than signing up for an email account
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Better marketing, better UI, lots of users, and plenty of non-political content.
What's non-political content, Lemmy?
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It's no different than signing up for an email account
Email? Do you mean Gmail?
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What's non-political content, Lemmy?
We're the non-political ones
- everyone on the Fediverse who keywordblocks everything political
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We're the non-political ones
- everyone on the Fediverse who keywordblocks everything political
Looking at my current feed, that would remove ... upwards of 90 percent of the content.
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Just FYI, fedidb is wildly wrong on the numbers lately. You may want a different source.
For example, there are instances on GoToSocial that have 2-3 users showing up with thousands on fedidb. And some lemmy servers show up multiple times on their statistics.
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What's non-political content, Lemmy?
The cat pictures community mostly.
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It's no different than signing up for an email account
And you don't see that as a problem for most users?
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Just FYI, fedidb is wildly wrong on the numbers lately. You may want a different source.
For example, there are instances on GoToSocial that have 2-3 users showing up with thousands on fedidb. And some lemmy servers show up multiple times on their statistics.
Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?
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Damn given that Bluesky has millions to burn on marketing I would say the Fediverse is clowning on Bluesky seeing as it the Fediverse has a $0 marketing budget.
For all the money and prestige Bluesky has access to, they still have only managed to double our size? That is kind of sad really, it must be because they keep adding things people actually don't want.
That's double our monthly size in a single day, ignoring all Bluesky users outside of America, and using their stats from several months that ago when they have probably grown since.
So yeah, they are way bigger than us.
Bunch of spambots there though, but that goes for Fedi as well. So making a proper comparison is impossible. No doubt they have way more users than Mastodon though.
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What's non-political content, Lemmy?
Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.
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That's double our monthly size in a single day, ignoring all Bluesky users outside of America, and using their stats from several months that ago when they have probably grown since.
So yeah, they are way bigger than us.
Bunch of spambots there though, but that goes for Fedi as well. So making a proper comparison is impossible. No doubt they have way more users than Mastodon though.
I mean, again this doesn't surprise me, Bluesky not only has the money (and promises of future money if things go well) to go viral, it has to in order to survive.
If Bluesky grew at the rate Mastodon grew in the beginning it would already be dead and abandoned by investors, that isn't a knock on Mastodon it is a statement about how problematically unstable and fragile the traditional approach of building for profit corporate social media spaces is that Bluesky embodies.
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Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?
Wish I did! I know lemmy has https://lemmyverse.net which seems accurate. Maybe others can chime in?
Ive been keeping my eye on fedidb for a time, after they stated we had over 12 million users...then it dropped off to 11 almost overnight. It did some retroactive counting. I then looked at software in general and found they are not counting things correctly. Some things overestimating wildly (like the example above) and some its not indexing at all.
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Closest thing we have is people really hating Windows.
As is reasonable
