I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I’d like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:
-
I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
-
The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
-
Fediverse isn’t truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.
However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I’m struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.
I’d love to hear your opinions on this.
People complain about the algorithms on other social media but you can see here exactly why they have them.
Without them it becomes hard to get connected to things that interest you.
For Lemmy I’ve managed to build a decent feed by browsing all and subscribing to communities I like.
You just have to do the algorithms job now.
As for the big communities it’s exactly what happened to the old internet. It used to be a large collection of individual sites but discovery was hard. So the front pages of the internet started popping up.
I expect the same thing will happen to the fediverse eventually. It’s just a better user experience sadly.
Right, but the algorithms that other social media sites use are designed to drive engagement, NOT to help you find things you like.
They want you angry and/or scared and/or jealous so you post, rage argue.
I know it may feel worse, but less content, less clickbait is better for us and our mental health.
I didn’t even realise how much raging I was doing on reddit. And for what? To argue with right wing dipshits or bots or trolls, so reddit’s numbers can go up and they can sell more ads.
Fuck algorithms and fuck rage bait.
Lemmy still uses algorithms, but they do not use personal information. When you sort by “Hot”, “Active” etc. you are using an algorithm.
Hot, Active, Time Sort, are open algorithms that we can see exactly how they work. Unlike closed social media algorithms which I think is the point that he is making.
Like the Internet ten years ago???
You realize that ten years ago was 2013, not 2001 or something? The Internet was not quiet in 2013, in fact I found it a lot more engaging then.
Everything has positives and negatives. It’s up to you to evalute what you want and what you’re willing to put up with.
On one end, traditional social media is totally centralized, controlled solely by the corpo. On the opposite, you have total decentralization like P2P networks for torrenting.
You pointed out the problems on one end, very little regulation of spam, scams, total decentralization is often very much isolationist.
To me, federation is the best of both worlds, and I’m willing to deal with some of the frustrations of that structure.
I personally enjoy some regional centralization like you get in the Fediverse, if you really don’t like any instance’s policies, you can spin up your own personal instance and federate with the instances you want.
For me, the unifying nature of the All-feed allows me to enjoy the specific content I am seeking while still being stationed in a specific instance that generally caters to my preferences.
I am not sure what isthc issue with (1) I agree that you follow people or community, it’s a bit more complicated to follow the global which is too fast and the local might be to slow but how is it different from main social media ? If you follow no person/community you won’t find much content (well indeed tik tok has an amazeng algorithm)
The fediverse especiallà Mastodon/Firefish has a community large enough to be usable. May be not for a kid who want to spend 7h a day browsing tiktok but if you just want to see some post and comment there is already more than enough.
No idea about how crypto based platform fare. I tried lbry a while ago and never tried nostr
