It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
It won’t last unless Mastadon gets some serious improvements. It’s buggy, glitchy, feature-poor, and confusing to use. There’s no way in its current state it’s going to compete with the big guys for the average person’s attention.
From a user-experience standpoint I’m intrigued by the idea of someone who is comfortable using Lemmy finding Mastodon confusing to use. From a technical view it’s literally the same stuff (ActivityPub + a distributed network) fueling the same general concept (federated social media) just with a different skin on top (Twitter/Tweetdeck-flavored instead of Reddit-flavored.)
It’s all just decentralized online community organized by interest; a /c/ here is a hashtag on Mastodon. If you have already come to terms with instances and federation and such in order to use one, what about the other still confuses? Is it just the interface or are there deeper pain points?
“Just the interface” is a big deal.
Reddit is the same backend as the Reddit I was using through a third party app a few months ago, but the user experience is significantly worse for me, because the interface I’m accessing the service through adds friction to how I use the service and steers me towards how I don’t use the service. Same with accessing email through a web interface versus Outlook versus Thunderbird versus Alpine versus the iOS Mail app.
Lemmy is how I want to interact with user-generated text and comments. Mastodon’s interface is not. I don’t care that it happens to be ActivityPub on the backend, because the interface drives how I consume and interact with the content.
Do you remember the early days of social media? IMHO, as the new hotness I’ve seen a rapid pace of improvements that I honestly expect to ramp up further as more utilization comes. Pure speculation but I’m basing it on my grey beard and the refreshing experience I’m having here.
I mean, they need to ramp it way faster. It’s pretty garbage right now and there’s really no excuse. Compare it to Lemmy and it’s very obvious. Lemmy still has problems, but it’s much easier to use and has way fewer bugs and glitches. If you’re used to Reddit, then switching to Lemmy is pretty easy to do, and I can see average users making that jump. But Mastadon isn’t even close to the user experience that Twitter/X offered, and I cannot see the average Twitter user sticking around and waiting for all the issue to be fixed.
What would you say is missing from the mastodon user experience vs twitter?
Things I would like:
- better discovery/suggestions when people first join. I get a “selling point” is that the timeline isn’t algorithmically driven, but just to help people get their feet wet start showing them some stuff
- when displaying a post there needs to be a better mechanism to fetch all the replies. Right now it’s possible to respond and say something someone else already did because you you’re not shown their reply. For federation reasons I guess.
- better list integration
But overall, for me the functionality I used from twitter I have on mastodon too. The real missing feature is the huge variety of people, and getting that takes time.
Why are people so fucking addicted to Twitter? It’s just people posting a few sentences about shit I see on the Internet already. But what do I know, I’ve gone my entire life without using the stupid shit. Maybe I’m not taking into account how many people want to be internet celebrities with their parroted tweets and recycled jokes. Why is it so hard to make another site where dumbass celebrities can feed 2 lines to the drooling masses?
It was really good for artists and entertainers (streamers included) to gain a following
Twitter culture (depending on what parts of twitter you were on) was really hard to explain. Unless you used it and really knew how to, you don’t really get the benefit from it. Its feed structure combine with post length and algorith meant that it was really easy for you to know what other people were saying about things going on right now (reality shows, football matches etc). It also made searching for news so easy (due to its Trending feature), so you were kept in the loop about things.
The meme culture of Twitter was also very unique. I can say with absolute confidence that Twitter memes were bomb (before Musk ruined it). Way better than any memes I’d come across on Reddit or Lemmy so far.
The only problem is you had to take Twitter in small doses. Stan culture and cyber-bullying culture were real negatives of Twitter. Certain people on that app were unhinged and that went unchecked because of how echo-chambers were set by the algorithm. You really had to check yoursel to make sure you weren’t being corrupted, especially because cyber-bullying was so normalised there (at least in my experience).
I’ve never used it either, but it’s a fact that 90% of the memes on twitter used to come from Reddit, then end up on twitter, then be reposted back on Reddit a week later when someone “found it on twitter”
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren’t for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
I had one tell me “you know nothing about communism, stop talking,” and I was like, oh, that’s right, I know nothing despite being well informed about the history of workers movements going back to the 1840s, Das Kapital, the Manifesto, and despite these noble ideals, the fact that every single communist government relied on purges to accomplish its goals, formed an exclusionary ruling class, and were corrupt as fuck. Fucking teenagers and their black and white thinking.
Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it’s lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I’ve exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece…
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience
I’m one of them. I use Sync so the whole caboodle feels like just one site to me, whether it’s the Everything feed or my subscribed.
(I am not a techy person)
Soaring? 2.1M users is soaring? I’m all for the Fediverse, but it will never reach mainstream social media numbers, and honestly I hope it doesn’t.
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
Still waiting for my friends to make the switch so I can delete this shite.
Or I might just delete it anyway and maybe they’ll take notice and move. 😂
