Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?
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Discovery on Mastodon is not great. At the time I signed up most of the accounts I followed from Twitter were just repeating content but never engaging with the replies. Felt very cold and empty.
Yeah, I don’t like it there either (never been a twitter user). But it sure is weird that Musk is basically making all the important tweets from organisations who rely on that platform unavailable to the majority of the public. If such behaviour continues even the least tech savvy orgs are going to have to start migrating there, and the organic interactions may follow. Musk is basically providing incentive to migrate at this point.
Yeah no doubt.
I think what I run up against is more fundamental to ActivityPub.
My wife was going to try and sign up for Lemmy tonight, but I didn’t even know where to direct her. Lemmy.ml has signups off. Lemmy.world is a version behind. I know nothing about the people hosting any other instance currently. Lemmygrad is great but it’s kind off in a corner. Defederated heavily and comes with normy hate baggage. She was calling her self a Communist well before I got on the train, but a more casual experience is likely what she wants. Just the stuff Reddit provided, pre sleep reading entertainment/news. Twoxchromosome, parents subs, subdrama, content creator related subs etc.
I took a look at /all on Lemmy.ml and I feel like it was over run by meme posts from a dozen meme communities across the network…
I guess hexbear is technically a Lemmy instance now but I have no idea what the community is like over there.
It’s just kinda a mess lol. I felt that way about mastodon too. I have no idea what I’m missing because of how both federation and defederation works. Creative communities seem almost non-existent.
I’m not sure there is a point im getting at here lol but onboarding is not easy.
These nice things you’re talking about, Reddit didn’t have them either when it was getting started. There ISN’T an alternative to Reddit because things were chugging along OK there until this month. And now, some ex-redditors are coming out to explore, so things will gradually improve, and more content and engagement will happen. But that takes time.
If you need some ready-made social media place to instantly replace Twitter and Reddit, then yeah, Lemmy and mastodon and whatnot aren’t it. Doesn’t mean they never will get there, but no guarantee either that they will get there. Only thing we can ever do is engage and provide content and all the things we would like to see, and help grow a community.
personally i think getting your wife to have a lemmy.ml account would be the best, because i doubt most lemmy instances have lemmy.ml blocked (as opposed to lemmygrad.ml), so she would have more choices when it comes to engaging in communities/posts from different instances.
hexbear is a leftist lemmy instance just like the 'grad, but it’s more casual (though sometimes gets heated) than the grad.
Yeah, as an answer to the specific question at hand Lemmy.ml is where she should make an account. That was my first instinct. Who can say when sign ups will be open again. Probably when 0.18.1 is out and there is a new captcha option available.
I didn’t think the parallel communities issues was a true issue until I was looking around yesterday however. All is where the discovery happens, but, if like 30% of the hot posts are from memes@inst1.com, memes@inst2.net, memes@inst3.ml, memes@inst4.org, memes@inst5.co.uk it becomes less useful.
Each hot post in those communities is independently ranked against each other then added to the feed.
I know there isn’t a simple answer and that reddit potentially had the same problem. However reddit would eventually have a winner in the memes arm race and the rest would wither in popularity. But on Lemmy there less likely to happen because of how local vs subscription vs all work.
I’m going to browse local, because at least here the culture is very different so it’s worth it. But in the sea of general instances trying to be “Reddit” you just end up with dozens of individual communities on a topic that all have the same homogeneous point of view.
I think overtime one generalist instance will rise above the rest, but in the meantime it’s just weird enough that I think you’ll lose some people back to reddit.
I feel like Lemmy is a lot closer to a functional replacement for reddit then mastodon is for Twitter. But it’s still weird enough to be hard to recommend.
I think overtime one generalist instance will rise above the rest
isn’t that lemmy.ml/lemmy.world? especially lemmy.world as it’s trying to be reddit 2.
in the meantime it’s just weird enough that I think you’ll lose some people back to reddit.
being unable to stay out of comfort zone for long moment
I feel like Lemmy is a lot closer to a functional replacement for reddit then mastodon is for Twitter
why do you say so?
But it’s still weird enough to be hard to recommend.
weird doesn’t mean bad, you know.
isn’t that lemmy.ml/lemmy.world? especially lemmy.world as it’s trying to be reddit 2
Yes, and beehaw, and shitjustworks, and exploding heads (🤢), and probably a few others. My point is, it hasn’t happened yet so it’s hard to say to someone “join this one”. Thankfully we know exploding heads is a Nazi Bar but I couldn’t tell you which instances still federate with it off the top of my head, and I’d rather not suggest someone join an instance that will federate with them.
why do you say so?
Because Twitter is about following people, and I feel like the discovery on that isn’t as good. I was able to follow some of the people I followed from Twitter on mastodon, but in some cases it was clear they were just reposting tweets and not engaging in the platform.
Because reddit was about the communities, and not personalities, anyone can recreate those communities and like minded people will gather and content will be more or less the same.
Let’s be real, 90% of people on Twitter are not worth following.
weird doesn’t mean bad, you know.
Weird can mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts. In this case it means unintuitive and sometimes ambiguous. Reddit sets an expectation of functionality and because Lemmy shares a lot of language from Reddit, it leaves room for misaligned expectations.
For example, I’ve seen plenty of people not understanding why the Hot sort isn’t like Reddits hot sort. Then you have to consider that votes are federated and so when your instance defederates a lot of other instances, that can change the ranking score (I think).
So my experience on Lemmy is a lot different then someone from another instance. Even down to the comments.
Which is weird. It’s not intuitive based on the standard reddit sets and is ambiguous to a lay person.
Then on top of that you periodically get posts on Lemmy that are actually toots from mastodon because people tootn at groups on their Mastodon instance which has federated with a Lemmy instance.
That’s, weird!
I think Twitter and Reddit going down the drains is an op at this point. The state department heavily used Twitter in their work. The NSA gathered a ton of data from both of them. They manipulated public discourse in real time when they needed to.
Musk is someone they have control over due to his ties to the MIC. He doesn’t just do things that would disrupt state propaganda operations without approvals.
Two major social networks effectively destroying their ability to get information produced by the community into the wider public through search indexing? This isn’t a coincidence.
Reddit would very much like their subreddits to all return to normal operation. They’re going to remove all mod teams that don’t unprivate later this week. Reddit’s valuation by Fidelity has been going down the drain since all this drama began. I don’t see evidence that they are purposely sandbagging against their own capitalist self-interest.
Musk being an incompetent (Hanlon’s Razor) can explain every single move he has made.
Reddit is also killing all sources of data egress and will likely sunset the old interface when their numbers look good enough and the new interface is less usable for finding counter-narratives and likely less searchable by search engines.
Remember that the profit motive of reddit is not separate from war profiteering as the companies that are involved in any IPO are the same companies that control pretty much every other industry.
If you grant Musk’s incompetence and you grant Twitter’s function in state propaganda then the MIC isn’t letting Musk buy it out and they aren’t letting him make decisions when they already have state actors in executive positions at Twitter to handle and manage him.
They’re not killing it, they’re monetizing it… That hinders researchers, and I guess reddit.baby anonymous users? But it’s all still available for scraping and for manually looking up which is the “normal” use case.
If you wanted access to it (and I don’t know why you would) you still have the web site and app. They haven’t even blocked search engines from accessing yet.
And keeping reddit as successful and open as possible would be the best way for reddit to support the MIC. Their users are bloodthirsty for Russians almost without exception. I’m not convinced at all of this conspiracy.
I don’t see what the objective would be though. If they remained the way they were, banning and co-opting any anti-capitalist community I think they’d have a much better impact for US interests. By airfrying the frog rather than just boiling it, they’re just scaring away even the most “normie” people and organisations to harder-to-control alternatives. Just look at beehaw and how many libs went there from reddit. Even the short-term benefits of such strategy (like making smaller international organisations hidden from the public), in the long term it’s making those same people consider at least keeping a mastodon/lemmy branch. That is unless the Fediverse is somehow owned by the feds. Would be funny ngl.
I don’t think their trying to control normies who use these platforms. I think their trying to disrupt information flow from power users/influencers to normies by destroying the search indexing. If I search for stuff about the war and I get results from Twitter and Reddit countering the narrative, that has broad social implications.
That is to say, it’s a mass media disruption, not a community disruption.
Fair point. I still think that their results would be very mixed if that’s the case, considering how suddenly alternatives are getting established.
I just don’t think alternatives are able to effect mass media narratives the same way. Think of it this way.
First, narrative control was mass media control. Then new media showed up. New media control started by flooding it with state activity. That didn’t go far enough. So next we get search algorithm changes, staring with Google’s individual search bubbles which allows for R&D of advanced “forum sliding” techniques being ported into “the algorithm”. Those algorithm techniques then get ported to every major social media platform and everyone is confused as to why every single platform slides every single user into right wing extremism.
Reddit and Twitter remain the exceptions because forum sliding works for the posts but doesn’t work well enough for the comments. Comments become the place for counter narratives and they are starting to show up in search bubbles because the article triggers state narrative but the commentary produces counter-narrative.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they don’t have search juice yet and likely won’t for a specific amount of time - say 3 months, say 9 months, whatever.
If this is state coordinated action, as I theorize, then the window to searchability is likely understood roughly or even potentially influenced since search is state influenced. This means that within this window we should expect the state to be taking actions that require counter narratives to die. We see this with Ukraine now. I dread the possibility that the social media disruption is a harbinger and not a reaction.
This has been going on for a while now. I don’t have a Twitter account but I regularly checked the hashtags the football (s*ccer) team I support during match days. Can’t do that anymore.
