Tech “journalists” have no idea how to speak about Mastodon or the fediverse.
They seem to think that unless something has billions of users, it’s dead. They can’t even comprehend how people could prefer a smaller more selective userbase
Yeah tech journalist don’t seem to have any critical thinking skills. They praise any technology coming from a big tech company. I have only seen one wired article mentioning the fedivere
They’ve just tied their careers to the profits of tech and have lost all passion they have for the nerdy hobby of their youth
Many “tech journalists” are about as old as Facebook.
When they started using devices, the iPhone had been around for years, and the only discussion platforms they ever knew where centralized platforms with millions and millions of users run by mega corporations. In their personal life experience, Reddit has always just existed, they’ve never known a world without YouTube, Snapchat is what they used when they were little kids, TikTok had been around long enough that’s it’s considered an established media outlet.
They’ve never seen a Usenet group, they’ve never had accounts on phpbb forums. Choosing a smaller platform with a more selective userbase just doesn’t exist in their reality.
I think most people just want to follow famous people for celeb stuff and corporations for news etc. Mastodon is not there yet.
Personally, I just want to read tech news like an RSS feed. All my sources I followed on Twitter are not on mastodon. So far it’s a no go for me and most people. I wish it was.
I think the issue with mainstream mastodon discussion and adoption is several fold.
The first is that for a large chunk of the population the appeal of twitter is that it’s full of famous people, big name professionals, industry insiders, journalists, local governments, and etc. Mastodon users will often brush this off as not why they enjoy microblogging, but a lot of mainstream users care a lot about this. Twitter is a service where you follow individuals not communities and topics and so if the people you follow arent on the replacement service it matters.
The second is that mastodon is over protective about pulling in posts and messages if nobody in that instance follows them which makes using mastodon a pain. The instance I subscribed to for example is federated with mastodon.social and many other major feeds but for some topics like say wrestling I have to open up another tab, and search on mastodon.social and then copy and paste stuff into the other tab. Its not necessarily unintuitive,but if we’re already federated why arent I seeing these posts? Of course then I can fix this by following these people, but of course that doesnt pull over the old posts either so I still cant see their stuff on my instance unless they post something new.
Finally the community comes off as super defensive about the way things are. People get suggested this product(by mastodon users) as a twitter replacement and when they bring up potential usability and connection issues the community treats these people like theyre absolute morons. This might be more of a reddit issue, since I’ve googled some questions and complaints I had with mastodon and it took me there. The github is more civil but there doesnt seem to be appetite to make changes that would make it easier to follow or find people that are several instances removed from you. I know someone put it like “you dont have to be a part of every conversation” which works for message boards, and communities like reddit, lemmy, and such, but on a service that built to follow specific people it’s a problem.
you are missing a couple things here, both twitter and mastodon allow following “topics” in that you can follow hashtags.
additionally you can federate more content from other instances that no one follows by connecting to a relay.
not saying this entirely fixes the problems you bring up just that there are ways to somewhat address them.
But Mastodon is built on a technology stack almost as old as Twitter’s, and has largely failed to achieve widespread adoption despite several mass-exoduses from Twitter. BlueSky is more promising, using a brand new protocol called AT which promises to let users not only create their own instances of the service, but filter their feeds with custom algorithms, instead of settling for one centrally-controlled “master algorithm” that prioritizes engagement above all else.
- A new protocol that’s not a standard being adopted elsewhere, is not promising, it’s just another protocol. AT protocol is MIT license, but it’s not a standard, ActivityPub is W3C standard.
- Also isn’t creating own instances, something that’s common in fediverse, while, is there any other AT protocol instances that’s not owned by Bluesky?
- And isn’t Bluesky a spinoff from original Twitter? What does she mean by old technology stack? LAMP? Mastodon is built on React, Redux, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, and Postgres. I can’t find any info about BlueSky’s server stack, but it seems like their frontend is using React, and maybe Go.
Am I fucking crazy, or do people just pluck information out of thin air, without any fact checking and call themselves senior journalists? Does she hold any investment in Bluesky?
Does she hold any investment in BlueSky?
Imo, it’s way more likely she got her information about BS from the website/a press release/a contact at BS and like you said, didn’t bother to get a contrasting opinion from anyone associated with Mastodon (probably because it’s a lot harder to get ahold of someone from a distributed project like Mastodon).
So she got BS from BS, what a surprise… This kind of “journalism” drives me nuts, more and more medias owned by idiots with too much money promotes these kind of crap with zero nuance and fact checking :/
So she got BS from BS
To be fair, my guess about the source of those claims is also totally unsubstantiated and quite possibly bullshit 😉
This was something I missed from reddit, the always relevant xkcd
And another article dismissing the fediverse. This people search for a new master that can hold their data hostage
This just means that the site is a bootlicker for capitalism
Honestly surprised there isn’t more. There’s a lot of money that would be lost if the fediverse became more mainstream.
Threads has all your favorite social media users, such as corporate brand accounts, annoying Instagram influencers, and minor internet celebrities who aren’t funny.
What bubble does the author live in where this is considered standout journalism? Like, congratulations on discovering the internet. What rock have they been living in since 1995?
The rock where they think people can’t tell the difference between a press release and journalism
When have people been able to tell the difference?
How is this a press release? It’s a negative story about Threads. Press releases are positive, almost by definition.
Not really. Privacy wise it’s terrible, but user experience is pretty alright I’d say for a microblogging platform. In fact I feel like it’s going to threaten the fediverse by being open at first and then slowly closing up and locking people in, creating an image where all the other nodes should be part of meta’s fediverse and follow certain rules, etc.
Related content. https://beehaw.org/post/719121
This article is “How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)” and it tells you how Googled killed a federated protocol for instant messaging, XMPP, by the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process.
I don’t see that connection. XMPP wasn’t big before and it wasn’t big after. XMPP is still not big. But it also still exists and is still used.
I think what Google achieved with the usage of XMPP was not some EEE tactics, just as I don’t see Threads extinguishing ActivityPub. I think they use open standards as a way to calm regulatory bodies. “Hey look, we have no evil in mind, we use open standards and allow others to play along.” Then once they are out of the spotlight, they can slowly defederate again and be a proprietary beast.
Users who leave other fediverse instances to join Threads (or back then Talk) would have also left if they never federated in the first place, simply because they have the bigger network and all their friends are there. The difference is, that they had a relatively brief period of time where you could actually keep communicating with friends without leaving the fediverse.
That is a great article. Everyone here should click over and read that one!
seconded! this one was excellent
this article doesn’t really make it sound any different than twitter other than not allowing porn
That’s kinda the point, it’s trying to be Twitter but “brand-safe”.
twitter already seems pretty brand safe judging by all the brands on it though.
Twitter lost a staggering amount of its advertising revenue.
Bad article. Not worth the read.
That fact that they made it natively in jetpack compose on android is actually really cool
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Stupid article. Threads at the moment is much better than Twitter.
I mean there’s no Elon, which is the worst part of Twitter so…no
Zuckerberg is just as insidious, but further under the radar. I don’t know which lizardperson I like less.
Exactly!!! How are people just giving him a pass all the sudden? Have we forgotten who’s behind these apps and their track record with dealing with user data?
The article reads as if it could have been written a month ago. My Threads timeline (albeit currently algorithmic) has settled into just accounts (news, tech, sports) I follow. Twitter is toast.
It’s a bit weird to see Threads being referred to as Facebook’s version of Twitter - wasn’t Instagram already Facebook’s version of Twitter, just with the gimmick being images of text rather than just the text? This seems like it’s basically the same social network with a different interface - all the users are the same and the list of banned content is the same, people are coming in thinking it’s the same thing so it will end up being the same.
Instagram was designed to share photos at first, with the filters added because old phone cameras sucked. Text pictures got added later as Meta adjusted Instagram to compete with Twitter and Tumblr.
Good point, I guess I should be specifically referring to Facebook’s Instagram, rather than the filter and photo-sharing app it was beforehand
