As many users seek alternatives to X, rival social network Mastodon says that its official app downloads are up 47% on iOS.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko says downloads on Android are also up 17%, while total monthly sign-ups rose approximately 27% to 90,000.
The open-source X rival functions much like its competitor, the site formerly known as Twitter, on the outside. However, unlike the centralized Twitter, Mastodon consists of thousands of different social networks, which are integrated into a web it calls the “fediverse.”
Fantastic! I’m reducing my dependency on for profit entities every day, and federation is a great means to that end. Let’s welcome those moving over during the exodus!
Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.
It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.
Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.
The guy who runs the instance I’m on sends out a statement every month, detailing how much he’s received in donations, what everything has cost, and how much there is leftover. Accounting for a small buffer to allow for emergencies, he donates the excess to Alzheimer’s research. We’re a Pritchett focus instance, so everyone’s happy with that.
I’ve paid far more to my Masto admin than I ever did to Twitter.
You can be against the US’s tipping culture while at the same time being someone who donates to things lol
But yeah, definitely. For a lot of these things the funding has to be coming from somewhere and there’s no way donations are enough.
hink about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.
a) it’s not significant amounts, it’s quite cheap, per user, to run lemmy, e.g. lemm.ee is one of the bigger instances and costs 200 Euro a month, b) tipping 20% on a bill that doesn’t even include any service is not the same as donating to a service you like. This is more like a patreon which doesn’t lock anything for non-donating users.
it’s quite cheap, per user, to run lemmy, e.g. lemm.ee is one of the bigger instances and costs 200 Euro a month,
storage requirements will only increase (attachments, linked website images), unless you are regularly deleting content and so contributing to link rot
lemm.ee currently even proxies links to external images, sunaurus identified some issues with it, storage wasn’t one of them. Storage requirements are going to look quite differently if you’re lemmynsfw.com but it’s not particularly hard to get enough donations to afford a couple extra TB a month. Much, much cheaper than paying admins an actual wage where I think the actual scaling pain will be.
Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.
Generally speaking if you aren’t the customer then you are the product. Individual Lemmy and Mastadon instances are getting around this for now because they are small enough that their operational costs can be covered by the ideologically motivated instance admins and users. If Lemmy or Mastadon ever gains wide popularity this will change.
But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.
Exactly.
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The weird thing is that it doesn’t matter what instance/server your friends are on. If they follow you, they’ll get all your posts in their feed. The best advice I can give anyone starting out on Mastodon is to follow tags instead of people in order to surface interesting posts, then you can follow people as they come up on feeds.
I mean, it’s just like e-mail addresses, I really don’t understand the difficulty. Yes technically if I want to e-mail joe smith, I need to know his address, including what mail provider he uses. Which is why when I ask for his e-mail address he tells me “Joesmith@gmail.com”. and not just joesmith.
Yeah, I really don’t understand why people are so confused. From a practical perspective your username is username@instance.tld and that’s it. You’re on some server and can simply follow that guy@mastodon.social and you will see the posts.
You need to know what instance your friend is on.
of course you need. your friends need to tell you. only they can know. just like with email and IRL cities
iOS friends, check out the Mastodon client Ice Cubes.
It’s free (beer and speech) and it’s very good IMO.
Also, after you settle on a server, consider setting up a recurring donation to your admin to help with server costs. The way I see it, it’s that or ads and enshitification.
Ice Cubes is a fantastic Mastodon client!
Does anyone know good people to follow? I’d rather not join Bluesky.
I learned to follow hashtags, not people on mastodon myself…
I joined bluesky because the weather group I followed on Twitter moved there, so deleted twitter and follow them on BLuesky now. Is there a reason not to join bluesky?
Not right now, except that it’s going to follow the same cycle as everything else: good to users at first, good to shareholders at the end.
Build an account on Mastodon if you want to escape the cycle and tangle with different problems ;)
It really is nice there; people seem to like talking to each other about varied things, but it is smaller than Twitter so you may need to be on mastodon for some things and Bluesky for others you can’t get on mastodon
I never really used twitter for more than weather lol, so I’ll make a mastodon account, but I’ll be as active on it as BS. Just don’t get the appeal of the format. Probably why I’m so much more active here than anywhere else.
Saaame. I’m jut on Mastadon now to boost ti’s numbers and support the fediverse.
Yeah I don’t know why, I never really got twitter. But Mastodon was addictive for me. I always want to see what people are posting
Hm… Maybe if I open the app more often I’ll get to that point?
Yes, and if you follow people you’re interested in. There is an account called https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows which posts themed lists of interesting accounts. I followed Cory Doctorow because I knew he was on Mastodon, and then followed a lot of people who posted interesting posts that came across my feed from people I didn’t follow yet. There’s no algorithm so you discover stuff more naturally as people you follow share stuff, and you decide to follow that too
I would say no* but the asterisk has a few paragraphs involving funding sustainability, cryptobro involvement, and dubious decentralization.
Ah, damn, now I wish more would have gone to mastodon.
Corporate vs. community. Bluesky is technically backed by an open protocol but it’s still controlled by a large corporation. A bad actor (read: Elon) could make it shit.
The biggest reason is that it’s centralized.
No, just a personal choice.
Don’t know who exactly you are interested in, here are some random known accounts:
- the EU commission (other EU institutions as well): https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission
- gog games: https://mastodon.world/@goggames
- The New Stack: https://hachyderm.io/@TheNewStack
- Mozilla: https://mozilla.social/@mozilla
- Rust foundation: https://social.rust-lang.org/@rust
- Free Software Foundation: https://hostux.social/@fsf
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://mastodon.social/@eff
- Greta Thunberg: https://mastodon.nu/@gretathunberg
Regarding individuals, I’m following a bunch of software developpers. I’m mostly interested in topics, hence I prefer Lemmy by far.
There’s Fedi.Directory which you pick whatever category of your interest and it list various Fedi account. It’s mostly Mastodon based-account but you get couple other non-mastodon account like PeerTube for example
That’s good news. Odds are that some of those people will go back to closed media platforms after ~2 months; but the ones who stay help Mastodon and the Fediverse to grow.
Good to hear at least some upside for Mastadon from the recent rise in Bluesky users.
Hopefully this trend will continue and and Mastodon can retain at least a solid percentage of those why try it.
Considering that every post about Mastodon has supporters who get the spelling wrong, it might be a little much to expect the general public to figure it out. Bluesky is pretty much the VHS to Mastodon’s Betamax.
Well played, sir!
Appreciate your leaving one of them so as not to ruin my comment! (Not a sir, though. Retired schoolmarm here.)
Apologies for calling you a sir, miss!
Proud to be part of that 47%
