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

  • 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!