I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
Corporate owned entities will always enshitify.
Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.
Mastodon has shit branding and I’m not afraid to say it.
In general, I’d say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.
But I’m glad it’s like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.
The barrier to entry acts as a filter. Which is crazy to me, because it’s still so easy to sign up and conceptualize, imo.
I guess it just goes to show how accustomed people have become to uncanny and frankly insane levels of convenience.
I remember the first time I logged in to Gmail without putting my password in — when all of a sudden the entire internet used cookies in lieu of credentials (is that how it works? I’m not qualified).
I can absolutely understand that it’s difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.
But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don’t belong because you don’t understand what’s happening.
Ok, so you search around and work out that it’s across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don’t pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don’t want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?
Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.
Then there’s the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don’t talk about thing. I am guilty of this.
And then on top of that you find a random Mastodon link in the wild, click it, a Mastodon instance loads, but you can’t reply/toot/do anything, because it’s not your instance and you’re not signed in. I still don’t know how to “convert” a link to my own instance (granted, I haven’t looked into that much really).
There must be some sort of way to do it.
Lemmy doesn’t handle this nicely either, though I still use this extension last updated 3 years ago: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant
If you’re the one posting a link, you can use a service like https://lemmyverse.link/ which will redirect a user to the same items on their own instance (after they set their instance the first time), though that site is run by the guy behind lemmings.world that’s shutting down in a couple of months, so it’s future may be a little uncertain. I’ve also seen https://threadiverse.link/ but I don’t know who run it.
Right, so it’s all “this might work, or it might not, or might die in a bit” - it’s chaos. It should be a native feature of the fediverse to auto-redirect to your instance.
Ok it’s not BlueSky as in the BlueSky social media website. It’s another separate tool they’re developing.
The title is very misleading.
I really wonder if Mastodon would have done better with a nicer, more techy name. Also, it’s silly but the double @ usernames look worse than the AT proto usernames.
As long as it’s open source and customizable, I don’t see the problem with this.
It’s not bad that we have algorithms to find content. I’m sorting the comments of this thread with an algorithm
The key is that I can choose which algorithm I want to sort by, that algorithm is open source, and I can write my own algorithm, if I want.
The bluesky rise kinda pissed me off. More so because all my artist friends that were on twitter went to bluesky instead of Mastodon when I told them about it as an alternative. everyone collectively decided to ignore a system that already existed and to the centralized thing again. Big suprise.
Bluesky was easier to sign up and less confusing to use. It had a much better mobile app. A lot of pro newsies came to Mastodon and were roundly ejected and abused, so they up and went to Blurdky instead. That was a major shooting your own foot moment for Mastodon because those newsies would have brought engaged audience. I saw people celebrating at Mastodon when news reporters up and quit. Idiotic. I hope the Lemmy community doesn’t repeat that mistake.
Lemmy’s been stable and perfectly enjoyable for years.
I’d like to see it grow but even if it doesn’t I’m cool with that.
