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

  • albigu@lemmygrad.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    Yeah, I don’t like it there either (never been a twitter user). But it sure is weird that Musk is basically making all the important tweets from organisations who rely on that platform unavailable to the majority of the public. If such behaviour continues even the least tech savvy orgs are going to have to start migrating there, and the organic interactions may follow. Musk is basically providing incentive to migrate at this point.

    • 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.

      • 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.

          • 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.

      • 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.