Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?

  • Red Wizard 🪄@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Blinky_katt@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Aria 🏳️‍⚧️🇧🇩 [she]@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Red Wizard 🪄@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Aria 🏳️‍⚧️🇧🇩 [she]@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Red Wizard 🪄@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            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!