Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.
Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…
… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.
I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.
Well said. This almost perfectly describes my experience with Mastodon as well. I ended up joining a Firefish instance later which was better, but no amount of “antennas” or topic follows helps when your instance has 20 users and it can’t find anything.
I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.
Bluesky works almost exactly like Twitter right now. It makes a vague mention of federation on signup but it’s basically irrelevant and everything right now still goes through their central server, so there is no issue finding content or users.
Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?
Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.
Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…
… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.
I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.
Well said. This almost perfectly describes my experience with Mastodon as well. I ended up joining a Firefish instance later which was better, but no amount of “antennas” or topic follows helps when your instance has 20 users and it can’t find anything.
Bluesky works almost exactly like Twitter right now. It makes a vague mention of federation on signup but it’s basically irrelevant and everything right now still goes through their central server, so there is no issue finding content or users.
Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?