this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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I just do not understand using a corpo solution over a better OSS solution. You know where it's going to go in your bones, yet you sign right up for another 10 year run before you change all over again. Like these people were just waiting for another terrible option to show up before they switched.
Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?
I mostly use Mastodon, but I 100% get it. The onboarding process is much easier with centralized services (no need for analogies to email), and more importantly, you're not at risk of losing half your follows/followers when server admins have a pissing match. As long as those friction points exist, there will be a market for centralized platforms.
I was impacted by the closing of mastodon.lol and I never recovered either my follow count, or frankly my interest and engagement in the platform since. I'm not alone, either. The 'migration' behavior was half baked at best, giving me what equates to a 301, not much else. There's a lot of work to be done here.
I am the most active on Threads for my brand account, and my personal account on Mastodon is a distant second. I know the people here are gonna throw shoes at me, but my activity is on Threads because that's clearly where the numbers are for my field and the market outside of the total loss that is Xitter.
Mastodon is probably not going to be any bigger than it is now. But you can self host and dictate your fate. In a time of protocols, not products, existing is a great place to be in. Make your own fate.
If you are running a business account you really should be using your own mastodon server.
And poof! There goes the appeal.
Yeah, sure, being the absolute authority on moderation for your content is real unappealing to businesses
Agreed, but it is a cost.
👟👟 Here, hope they fit!
There's also less complexity for a centralised system, since you don't have a big confusing mess having to learn which server you want to sign up with, how that impacts what you see, and how you connect with other servers.
It's one of the downsides of Lemmy, since people get completely boggled over their heads, and either jump to the biggest Instances that they can find (assuming that the servers are basically completely separate), or give up on it entirely because it's too confusing when you just want something simple and straightforward.
The admin politics is exactly what turned me off to mastodon. It's like the worst people are in charge of everything
It's astonishing! I get why dril or some celebrity would go with BlueSky, but journalists seem to be trying to make it a thing too! It's like did you learn nothing?
dril and journos are just going where the numbers are. Simple as. Its not about what platform is best, they want exposure and reach. Mastodon's design makes it difficult to get both of those things, and that's why I prefer it. I want smaller, manageable groups. If I wanted to hear about "corncobbing from hte master" i'd use Bluesky.
Mastodon is a maze, or to put it differently, a mess. The one thing putting me off is needing to find an instance with the right collection of policies and rules, and I just can't be bothered.
The entire point is you have a choice, though
That's fine until making that choice feels like sifting through a massive stack of paperwork.
My experience is signing up to a Mastodon instance a while ago then switching instances about two months ago, and all of it was exemplarily straightforward
Admittedly those are both pretty big instances so it's not like I worried about either of them shutting down without notice or anything
Choice is sometimes a bad thing.
Choice paralysis + the the fact that this random shitty instance that hosts maybe 300 people could go down at any moment + the admin could boot you for no seemingly no reason + the various issues with federation make it extremely unappealing for the average Joe. And if you want actual content and adoption you have to make concessions for them or else you'll forever be irrelevant.
What you are partially seeing here is the fact that there is friction to the very idea of Mastodon not being owned by a massive corporation. People have been trained so well to expect their social media to be run by a massive corporation that even if an alternative social network like Mastodon did onboarding perfectly people are still going to get tripped up and feel confused about Mastodon simply because a bunch of rich people don’t own it.
It is maddening and there isn't much we can do about it other than treat that friction as an opportunity to help radicalize people into being more open in a broader sense to taking back aspects of their life from the control of rich people/massive corps.
People don't care that it's not owned by a millionaire. What they care about is it being simple and easy to understand. One choice is as simple as it gets.
People most definitely do care about that, and every single day more and more people are realizing how much ownership over their digital community spaces matters.
That process happens slowly most of the time but occasionally it happens in huge bursts that in a short time change the longterm growth trajectory overnight of the Fediverse. We can’t foresee when events will trigger that but the potential is always there.
Yes people will not use a service because a billionaire owns it. But nobody is using a service simply because a billionaire owns it. People might choose bluesky over mastadon because the owner created twitter originally. But nobody is choosing it because Jack Dorsey has a fuck ton of money.
Elon's rabid fanbase not withstanding. That's more the exception though, not the rule.
I get what you are saying but my point is I actually think subconsciously (and sometimes even consciously) this is how people think. The collective organism of (at least US) society desperately wants a businessman (especially a techy one) to tell us what the future of social media is. People aren't actually able to comprehend NOT needing a tech businessman to own their social media in a lot of ways. It is weird, but it is really just a natural consequence of how utterly obsessed US culture is with seeing all of society through capitalism and rugged individualism.
It’s the capitalist system we’re born into. It’s time living in a cocoon where these magic products appear to guide you. Then one day you wake up realizing they’ve been drinking your blood all this time. Open source might not lead to your perfect product, but it will be close, and mandatory profit seeking won’t turn the ecosystem hostile against the users. We leave that to the mods and server operators.