Mastodon Is the Good One

Also obscurity, practically none of the content creators or companies I followed on Twitter have moved to Mastodon and getting news from them was the only purpose of that site in the first place (for me).

Algorithms are not inherently bad.

I think I've started learning that I'm kind of ok with that barrier to entry... I mean, it's pretty fucking low. It's not that difficult to understand if you are willing to take 5 mins to learn how it works.

Don't want to be gatekeeper-y or anything, but maybe if you can't pass that simple test, then the overall discourse is better off without you in it.

They've made huge improvements to onboarding over the past few months, it's as easy as any other app now:

1. Download Mastodon app
2. Make acccount

It's literally that easy now. Anything to do with Federation (like following other users) is also hidden to the background unless you go looking for it.

I can definitely see certain brands doing well with their own forums. Sports teams would be a very good niche for hosting their own instances. Another one would be the entertainment industry. It's just not feasible for companies that aren't interesting to talk about. Like there won't be a Coca-Cola instance worth a lot of users.

Im not bothered about adverting your products as long as its not just advertising in every single post and theres a human element to the social posting Rule 5,6 of Cupoftea.social (my instance) "No accounts setup purely to sell something / Fake Engagement (Such As Investments/NFT/Cryptos/Wealth stuff) There has to be a human element in your posting. ""No spam , Excessive promotion , Porn or S**t Posting, Its just not for this server " Mastodon.social is full of crap and its user numbers are mostly from spam bots and porn.

Eventually they will join, but will take a while...

Yeah there are a lot of little usability things that give mastodon a lot more friction to use compared to twitter. Sure a tech savvy person can figure it out and breeze through it but for an average user being forced to choose an instance, having to figure out how to find people on other servers that arent coming in, and using other websites to search and browser addons is a lot of work.

The site has gotten a lot more usable recently, but during the first few twitter exoduses Mastodon was very rough and it's no wonder that average users bounced off of it.

Thats not even getting into the network effect. Sure some people are there for the microblogs from anyone and building out the network effect. But twitter became mainstream with professionals. So for a lot of people the appeal of twitter was getting direct contact from celebrities and famous people, getting news from reporters as it was happening,Insight from industry professionals like writers, artists, and directors, and more! You could even get better customer service from companies because their twitter reps were more empowered to help you since your issue was more public.

Then there were the niche subjects that being big leads to. Wrestling mastodon is like 70% one guy on my timeline who is just really enthusiastic about womens wrestling(and posts news and cards for men's stuff too probably because he notices how little is out there). On twitter you have lots of people tweeting about it along with the actual wrestlers themselves!

There actually hasn't been a "choose an instance thing" for a few months now. If using the official app sign up is as straightforward as Twitter or any other app. Similarly, if using the official app following accounts is equally straightforward.

Content discovery is really easy for me on Mastodon, I can search for what I want via hashtag or a post, plus the people I follow and my followers always have nice suggestions. But if your instance has low federation, you might not see much.

They don't falsely advertise themselves as decentralized. They are decentralized even if you've come up with your own definition where there can be multiple "centralized" entities in control of the system.

There is no central authority in mastodon. There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email (which is also decentralized).

Nostr is also decentralized but it's decentralized by a relay (? -- the name of this sort of thing isn't super well established; they've never really caught on) system (which is a twist on peer-to-peer models that overcomes some of the issues with peer to peer tech) instead of using federation.

look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.

Let's not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of, regardless of any direct interaction with Facebook/Meta. The public pushback probably went a long way towards setting a precedent against that sort of activity. We're really breaking new ground here and have a chance to take back what is increasingly an essential function of society from folks who would rather fill every waking moment of your life with ads.

People underestimate the need for something like this. Society is only going to become more and more censored and monitored as technology evolves. It's not possible to escape that, so using communication where you are private is going to be extreamly important.

Also it needs to be able to resist being banned by governments.

How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed? If some asshole starts posting CP or other fucked up shit, what exactly happens? With mastodont the server admin has the control to remove whatever he or she wants. Not perfect, but you have plenty of servers to choose from (or you can start your own).

You want something like society, mostly free but still with some ground rules. If it's completely free there is also lots of scams and shady stuff. In the long run I think a platform like that will be banned by governments.

Nostr is for memes and bitcoins. Toxic AF.

what wrong with defederating meta