this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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Mastodon is just so empty as a platform. I hope for its success but I am not seeing it at this point the way we are with Lemmy.
This is a strange take - Mastodon makes up ~80% of the Fediverse, whereas Lemmy makes up like 3% or something.
Mastodon is the entire reason the Fediverse as a whole ended up taking off - for most people, it is the only thing they are aware of.
According to fediverse observer Lemmy hit 2.2 million users to mastodons 8 million, so it's up to like 17% now!
Not accurate unfortunately as the vast majority are bots. It's more along the lines of 300k to 500k currently.
What is the evidence that these are bots?
It was obvious - the instances are not shown on sources like fedidb.org anymore, but if you went to the instances which were growing fastest, all the accounts on there had gibberish names with almost no user activity.
It would be great if Lemmy actually had 2 million users, but it just doesn't, sorry. :(
I think the reality is just that microblogging is always going to be devoid of content when compared to a messageboard system like lemmy or reddit
Microblogging success seems to come from very popular users with many followers, such as celebrities, athletes, institutions, etc. Without these, Twitter would also feel empty.
I Iiterally cannot keep up with my feed. You have to build a network there. It is not spoonfed to you.
Which it should be if you want it to.
Nah, man. I get things and people I like spoonfed now by active boosters. The more you interact and add to your network the better it gets.
I really don't get how people don't understand that for mass adoption you need as little fucking friction as possible, lol. What you are doing is just gatekeeping. My experience with Mastodon:
The home feed is completely empty at first. I can go to some recommendations which are (I think) based on my home instance. I have no idea what those people even talk about so I just follow them to be able to check the platform out at all.
Looking at the "Trending Topics" (or whatever) tab shows stupid hashtags like #silentsunday or #photomonday. I don't really care about those and they don't even matter for my home instance infosec.exchange. So how do I even find any topics I really care about? It's so much work.
I'm very technically inclined and I went in with an open mind and am now following quite a few people and have even found properly nice profiles like bellingcat. But that was way too much friction - there should be less, and I'm not talking for me.
Anyway, I never really used or liked Twitter and Mastodon seems the same. There's just too many uninformed opinions and people fishing for likes. I don't care about that, I want proper discussions even if I, IMO completely undeservedly, get downvoted ;) I like Lemmy way more for that.
Is it really harder than with lemmy? In mastodon, basically:
Subscribed = home feed
Local = local
Global = all
If you join a big enough instance, the local and global timeline will have plenty of posts. Possibly, what you're looking for is 'algorithms' that recommend juicy things (for you). But this is usually something favoured by for-profit sites, which want to push certain things and not others to increase the time people spend on the app and therefore maximize their ad-based profit.
A big factor is that most fediverse instances aren't really looking for mass-adoption. Since these things are usually run by volunteers that have to pay for hosting with their own money or donations, and not a for-profit corporation, there's no real incentive to advertise and get as many people as possible to a single instance. The ideal is that smaller instances federate together, there's no centralized "fediverse" interest that wants to get them all.
Ideally, we'd want a web that is less corporate and more federated, but if no one is currently able to give the time and money to pursue this more aggressively, it will not happen. That's not really gatekeeping. In theory you could fork mastodon, improve it to make it easier for people, market it and sustain the hosting and moderation costs. But when you complain about how nobody is doing it already and call it gatekeeping, it's not really fair.
A lot of the fediverse is also composed of 'beta' software that will probably improve with time, but these improvements are based on people that work on it on their free time.
Yes, there's an inherent difficulty in competing with big corporations, but this is an open problem so far. Yes, if meta or some for-profit company join the fediverse and use their large budgets to make them very attractive for mass-consumption, it will grab most of the users. This is the whole embrace, extend, extinguish problem that has supported other closed system that dominate the market. How to fix that is a larger problem.
You need to start following people and hashtags.There is no algorythm filling your timeline.
If you're looking for the exact same celebrities you followed on Twitter, you're going to be let down.
If you follow hashtags instead, there's a lot to like. In a sense, Mastodon almost seems more Reddit/Lemmy-like, in the fact that content is more discoverable by topic instead of person.
I mean all your can do is engage with the community and actually work to get it up to what you want. I've commented more in the last 3 days then I did in 8 years on Reddit cause I want it to thrive
Same, plus it's nice that people aren't hyper aggressive like Reddit was, nearly every time I commented someone told me to kill myself/ called me an idiot.
My masto feed is really active, but I've also been there for a couple of years and migrated instances at least twice.
How did you migrate between instance?
I would say it's still not at the level where you have a nomadic identity. However, it's better than it is for lemmy (which would involve using an external script to recreate your followed and blocked communities).
So migrating in mastodon is basically recreating your followers (all the people that follow you) in the old account, without external tools. To do this you log in to the new instance, and in account settings there's an option "move from a different account". Then log in to the old instance, and choose "move to a different account".
Then allow it some time to complete this in the background. You can additionally use the export/import options to transfer your follows, lists, blocks, bookmarks, etc. This will probably re-request the people who you follow, so people usually leave a message in both the new and old accounts about how I'm migrating so that they know it's the same person.
Hopefully something similar will be developed for lemmy