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Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

I don't use Mastadon cause I don't care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.

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[–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon's UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.

In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that's constantly bubbling content to the top, but that's a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "Why can't the algo find me better content?"

    Motherfucker, it's social media. You have to get social with people. Make a fucking friend, right?

    Like, I fixed that shit by following George Takei and Mark Hamill and some reporters. The algo shouldn't be finding things for you. You should be finding people.

    Yeah, scratching my head just the same. My only problem with Mastodon is the same I had with StumbleUpon. It's way too good about putting neat people and conversations in front of me and I feel bad not rising to the occasion more when I just want to deadbrain.

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  • [+] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I've heard that they're working on this feature.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Genie's out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren't. Bluesky's were. Casuals don't care about what-ifs or principles, it's a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It'll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I hear what you're saying and think you have a good point. It's very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    There's also just the naming problem. Social media works best when its name sounds like a place and its verbs sound like normal actions. Mastodon is a three syllable elephant (or a metal band), versus a sky or a book (note: this isn't a hard and fast rule, since Twitter and Instagram pulled it off). And they call their posts toots. Officially, too, unlike the user-made meme of "Skeets". Toots are farts. No politician or business professional is going to say "retoot" with a straight face.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I don't think either of those are major issues. I happen to think that Mastodon is OK, almost catchy. Their mascot is very cute too. They officially did away with the Toot terminology quite a while ago, like a year or two, but some instances modified the code to keep that, and the old hands keep calling it that too. Also, keep in mind that I said that I fully expect Mastodon to stay a minor but viable player. It's never going to overtake a corporate behemoth like Meta, and most likely not even Twitter.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Bluesky has the USP of people being able to choose from multiple algorithms or even use multiple ones at the same time; and that certainly has resonated with a lot of people.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    That sounds pretty neat. Are all the algos developed by Bluesky (i.e., corporate/billionaire/VC-driven) though?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    no, but the various algorithms that control and construct these "user customized feeds" is precisely the part of bluesky that is architecturely a bottleneck, and it isn't a bug, the ceo of bluesky has gone on record that bluesky hasn't ruled out using this intentional centralization point to force ads on the system

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    That's actually a fair point. I've seen it in the UI but I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it seems like there's communities to moderate and curate and you can simply enable them to moderate your feed, if I'm understanding it right. If so, it sounds like a really good way to compartmentalize that stuff to allow users to sort it themselves.

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