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.
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on… That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.
Because BlueSky has designers and Mastodon is a nightmare for new users. Same reason a lot of “superior” open source apps never take off. Devs are rarely also good designers. Until we start caring about normal people it will stay that way.
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.
Apparently not nearly as many people as those who prefer Bluesky’s approach.
Most new users want to easily see feeds related to the things they’re into and that’s objectively more difficult with Mastodon unless you already have a list of accounts to follow. I want Mastodon to succeed and grow but it won’t if it only caters to tech heads.
Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I’ve heard that they’re working on this feature.
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.
I think it is because Bluesky is simpler and easier to understand, as well as more familiar to use than mastodon. My favorite streamer said he is reluctant to move to the fediverse because of how different it is and the learning curve it has to it. I’m also, like, EXTREMELY new here and understand but once you start to get used to it, its easy to see how the fediverse and this “New Social” wave is far superior; the only hard part is getting “normies” to try it long enough to build enough familiarity to see that.
Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
That and finding relevant things or anything at all sometimes; also I hear that people want to see everything like a friendica environment but don’t like the differences from the social medias they know already. I’m not sure if it is all valid or relevant because I am extremely new to the fediverse in general myself.
I guess I don’t understand. Why would someone want to “find” microblogs of people they don’t already know about from elsewhere? It’s like wanting to find someone’s email to me.
Not sure; I guess as a new person, I’d like to find micro blogs about topics and things that I might agree with? I was never really into twitter or micro-blogging; I don’t really understand the appeal but I figure since it is a social media, you might want to find similar people with like-minded blogs or whatever? Like I found a new up-coming political streamer that I like from another. Maybe that isn’t what micro-blogging is for and I’m off base.
I see microblogging as a way of following the thoughts of someone you’re already interested in. Maybe a friend, maybe a famous person. But it’s not a way to get deeper understanding. Nothing profound has ever been conveyed in a tweet. So I don’t know why I would look for the tweets of strangers. It’s more of a event tracking or relationship-maintaining kind of communication tool.
Fair enough, I just figured that as a social network, part of the goal is to connect new people together. You can look at Facebook in the same way you described it. That’s what its original purpose was. To just connect with people you already know, but I feel like social networking in general has since evolved from this. We can look at things like Facebook groups for example where it is more on the lines of what I’m thinking, people join groups that interest them and interact with like minded people that they have likely never met before.
I find the idea of using hashtags as the same.
Not saying I never made a friend online, but it was generally through more long-form blogging, friendsof friends, or gaming. That is, through more in-depth interaction than a quip-making machine. But I think the Internet was a little more innocent then too. People could be weird or awkward or overshare without getting doxed or harassed, maybe because we had more in our unmediated lives. Very little interaction is unmediated now it seems. I have seen even IRL friends, or people I thought were friends, start acting like online trolls. Online at least. “The medium is the message” seems to hold.