I don’t think there’s any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they’ve grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.
But quantity drives quality. Many big names join platforms specifically for the outreach they provide. That’s by far the biggest reason that there’s still so many big names on Twitter and co that haven’t migrated.
Especially for the many people who need to make a living and thus need that outreach. The vast, vast majority of viewers will never pay for a picture they see on the internet or a streamer who makes them laugh. For a platform to be financially viable for creative types to make a living, they need a ton of viewers.
While generally true, moderator tools really aren’t there yet on Lemmy. Growth will need to be more measured until work on that front catches up. There are also massive gaps that need filling in terms of the potential for spam. Keeping spam in check was challenging enough on reddit with various tools at our disposal - it’ll be even more difficult here.
The fediverse isn’t driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn’t necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
Personally, I’d like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.
Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
Given the fediverse is a not for profit, any advertising campaigns would have to be fronted by someone who wants to pay for it. It’s not that we can’t do advertising campaigns, it’s just we can’t use the money people dontate to keep the servers running for marketing, because people expect that money to be used in making sure the server exists into the future - it would have to be a separate donation soley for marketing it, or maybe some rich person could decide to pay for marketing in full.
On top of that, we can’t let sign ups exceed to amount we get from donations - that would kill the server or force the server owner to shut down sign ups and, worst case if they happened way too fast- the owner remove some of the more recent signups, which would reflect badly on said owner.
In other words, if you want to advertise it, go ahead but don’t expect anyone else to contribute cash to help as marketing a open and donation based system like this could have its consequences.
Oh, I completely agree. What I mean is that a not for profit can still live in the commercial world of it wants.
Not for profits still need stuff. Like offices or servers or staff. How the funding comes about without compromising the mission is the question.
Look at cancer charities fund raising. Look at Wikipedia. Look at Firefox.
The funding model doesn’t have to be the same for every instance. Some could be just volunteer funded or donated by the admins as a cost of their hobby.
However, the broader community will not tolerate a social media space that is not professionally run with uptime and lack of errors and downtime. The only way the commercial ones die is if the free ones are better. Look at piracy. It’s not a cost problem in music versus movies versus games, it’s a service problem.
I’ll agree with you that a server needs moderation or administration staff in proportion to its size. Wether those staff are all volunteers or paid depends on the overall budget of the server.
But I don’t think office space really makes any sense For a decentralized platform like this one - the only place that makes sense is for the actual lead developers of the software that the platform runs. And even then with the WFH culture of today I think even that is not likely to exist.
As for server administration, the most I could really see is a regular online meeting to keep interests aligned as well as a staff audit log for the server owner to review. And Lemmy already keeps a public audit log anyway.
As for your last point I wholly agree with you. The whole point of federated systems like mastodon and Lemmy is to move away from the for profit system so we can avoid enshittification. It’s meant to be a method of spreading the cost across multiple smaller nonprofit organisations. And hopefully we can avoid it and therefore make the platform better.
That being said, the only thing that prevents a corporate entity from joining in is the instances and their federation policies themselves.
The only other way I see parts of the fediverse become for profit is if an existing non profit turns for profit, which is really only a big deal if it’s one of the larger instances. And as for how the rest of the fediverse deals with that. Well it’s again up to individual server owners, and the collective decision they may or may not make.
I’ve always said a social system that isn’t socialised is not a social system - I mean it’s in the name! And the fediverse is really one of the first major attempts at doing that. Wether it lasts or not we’re sure to learn a lot and if it fails, we can take those lessons and try again.
Thats likely due to lack of algorithms with goal to keep you browsing forever. Twitter likely harvests all the data it can get from you when you browse twitter. They can also track your browsing habits using your IP (among many other things) and sites that have embed twitter content like share button or embed tweets.
Just look for the things that you are interested in. That’s how i accumulated many of my followed accounts over time as well as subscribed subreddits over time.
You can also look for users under the same name on Mastodon and (hopefully) find them.
Please note that if you find an account you also followed on twitter and it ends with @bird.makeup, it’s a bot mirroring tweets on Mastodon without mirroring your answers on Mastodon back to Twitter.
Finding people to follow in Mastodon mostly happens by:
Search topics using hashtags
Randomly browsing local feeds of different instances
Randomly browsing the federated feed
Randomly browsing local feed
There are instances for different interests like game development, art, information security, foss etc so there’s a lot of places to dig for good content.
Hashtags are your friend. It also helps if you have some active posters for the tag. I get good content from following #sciencefiction #coffee and #python.
Ok. What’s next? There’s a tweet, there’s an icon that it has 16 comments, but I can’t read those. When I click on that icon I have the ui to write a comment.
I mean, each time he’s messed it up more, another group of people migrates off twitter over to alternatives. I also think more people in general are becoming aware of the fediverse in general thanks to what’s going on w/ reddit, but that’s speculation on my part.
A lot of people left due to it not being morally sound for them to support Musk and his actions.
But now there are paywalled features that are ruining the functional experience of Twitter. You can’t look at the site for more than half an hour before getting restricted on a free account
Plus Mastodon has had time to polish instances, apps and gain a userbase so it is a little easier to transition
To be honest - Lemmy migration made me an active Mastodon user.
I joined Mastodon right after Musk took over Twitter. I was never big on Twitter but wanted to try mastodon.
But never became active. Because I was not a tweeter. I was also not a tooter.
The Reddit exodus was a wake up call for me and I committed to become a user and supporter in fediverse. So the migration to Lemmy/Kbin activated me as a Mastodon active users.
No matter how much FaceMeta disgusts me, at least Threads has some semblance of moderation to keep the MAGA fascists under control. I rather have to deal with idiots than with the far-right cesspool that Twitter is turning into.
Thankfully, we have Mastodon, so I don’t have to deal with either. They’re both blocked on my PiHole, so I just get a DNS error when I accidentally click on links.
Always a bit of a sobering experience in the rare instance that I end up in Twitter. The fact that some of them are willing to be so blatant about being a PoS is a little concerning to say the least.
When the owner themself doesn’t hide what kind of PoS they are, this is what you get. I have no love for Zuckerberg, but if I can criticize him based on what he does and how he does it and the effects his decisions have on society, any one with brains could without having to resort to low brow insults of measuring contests. That’s basically the difference, one service is managed by someone who, despite all his flaws, is an adult, the other isn’t.
BTW, I used neutral pronouns for the “chief twitt” and not for Zuck just to spite him and make the point that one doesn’t have to lower the level bellow a certain threshold to provoke, all considering how they hate “woke” stuff…
That instance hosts news feeds copied from Twitter. I found it useful to replace what I used Twitter for mostly. I’ve since found other mastodon users to follow, you just need to lurk about a bit and look at what’s trending.
This is great! But generally can’t see Mastadon overtaking any other major social platforms until it introduces an equivalent of For you feed from Twitter. The days of following specific people and hashtags is over, it’s tedious and I don’t give a shit about 3/4s of the feed.
2017-2020 Twitter was absolutely peak Twitter algorithm wise and thousands of users want that exact experience back, yet nobody will provide it.
I’m really happy that this is happening, it’s amazing to have this collaborative power to ditch those abusive plattforms and make our own rules. 👏 Congratulations
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Mastodon and Fediverse etc. need to be more aggressively advertised. I realize Meta and Twitter have far more money to do so, though.
I don’t think there’s any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they’ve grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.
We growth with big corps big mistakes
Do they really? I prefer quality over quantity. We don’t really need a massive influx of users, just steady growth.
But quantity drives quality. Many big names join platforms specifically for the outreach they provide. That’s by far the biggest reason that there’s still so many big names on Twitter and co that haven’t migrated.
Especially for the many people who need to make a living and thus need that outreach. The vast, vast majority of viewers will never pay for a picture they see on the internet or a streamer who makes them laugh. For a platform to be financially viable for creative types to make a living, they need a ton of viewers.
While generally true, moderator tools really aren’t there yet on Lemmy. Growth will need to be more measured until work on that front catches up. There are also massive gaps that need filling in terms of the potential for spam. Keeping spam in check was challenging enough on reddit with various tools at our disposal - it’ll be even more difficult here.
I say keep the flow coming, because the good shit eventually floats to the top.
The more people here, the more attractive it becomes to bigger-names, which will then bring their audience over.
The fediverse isn’t driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn’t necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
Personally, I’d like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.
Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
Given the fediverse is a not for profit, any advertising campaigns would have to be fronted by someone who wants to pay for it. It’s not that we can’t do advertising campaigns, it’s just we can’t use the money people dontate to keep the servers running for marketing, because people expect that money to be used in making sure the server exists into the future - it would have to be a separate donation soley for marketing it, or maybe some rich person could decide to pay for marketing in full.
On top of that, we can’t let sign ups exceed to amount we get from donations - that would kill the server or force the server owner to shut down sign ups and, worst case if they happened way too fast- the owner remove some of the more recent signups, which would reflect badly on said owner.
In other words, if you want to advertise it, go ahead but don’t expect anyone else to contribute cash to help as marketing a open and donation based system like this could have its consequences.
Oh, I completely agree. What I mean is that a not for profit can still live in the commercial world of it wants.
Not for profits still need stuff. Like offices or servers or staff. How the funding comes about without compromising the mission is the question.
Look at cancer charities fund raising. Look at Wikipedia. Look at Firefox.
The funding model doesn’t have to be the same for every instance. Some could be just volunteer funded or donated by the admins as a cost of their hobby.
However, the broader community will not tolerate a social media space that is not professionally run with uptime and lack of errors and downtime. The only way the commercial ones die is if the free ones are better. Look at piracy. It’s not a cost problem in music versus movies versus games, it’s a service problem.
I’ll agree with you that a server needs moderation or administration staff in proportion to its size. Wether those staff are all volunteers or paid depends on the overall budget of the server.
But I don’t think office space really makes any sense For a decentralized platform like this one - the only place that makes sense is for the actual lead developers of the software that the platform runs. And even then with the WFH culture of today I think even that is not likely to exist.
As for server administration, the most I could really see is a regular online meeting to keep interests aligned as well as a staff audit log for the server owner to review. And Lemmy already keeps a public audit log anyway.
As for your last point I wholly agree with you. The whole point of federated systems like mastodon and Lemmy is to move away from the for profit system so we can avoid enshittification. It’s meant to be a method of spreading the cost across multiple smaller nonprofit organisations. And hopefully we can avoid it and therefore make the platform better.
That being said, the only thing that prevents a corporate entity from joining in is the instances and their federation policies themselves.
The only other way I see parts of the fediverse become for profit is if an existing non profit turns for profit, which is really only a big deal if it’s one of the larger instances. And as for how the rest of the fediverse deals with that. Well it’s again up to individual server owners, and the collective decision they may or may not make.
I’ve always said a social system that isn’t socialised is not a social system - I mean it’s in the name! And the fediverse is really one of the first major attempts at doing that. Wether it lasts or not we’re sure to learn a lot and if it fails, we can take those lessons and try again.
Advertising requires money. Its a slippery slope that’ll lead us down the same path as Reddit again. We’re better than that.
And I still don’t know how to use it, as in getting an interesting feed.
Ha, yeah. That’s what’s holding me back the most. Somehow it worked with Twitter.
I also didn’t understand how to do this in Twitter. Tried twice, didn’t succeed. At least, now I don’t miss it.
Thats likely due to lack of algorithms with goal to keep you browsing forever. Twitter likely harvests all the data it can get from you when you browse twitter. They can also track your browsing habits using your IP (among many other things) and sites that have embed twitter content like share button or embed tweets.
Just look for the things that you are interested in. That’s how i accumulated many of my followed accounts over time as well as subscribed subreddits over time.
You can also look for users under the same name on Mastodon and (hopefully) find them.
Please note that if you find an account you also followed on twitter and it ends with @bird.makeup, it’s a bot mirroring tweets on Mastodon without mirroring your answers on Mastodon back to Twitter.
Finding people to follow in Mastodon mostly happens by:
There are instances for different interests like game development, art, information security, foss etc so there’s a lot of places to dig for good content.
Hashtags are your friend. It also helps if you have some active posters for the tag. I get good content from following #sciencefiction #coffee and #python.
Ok. What’s next? There’s a tweet, there’s an icon that it has 16 comments, but I can’t read those. When I click on that icon I have the ui to write a comment.
click on the post itself, not the icon. it’ll load the entire thread that way.
What’s the reason for mastodon to gain so many new users now suddenly? Didn’t Elon Musk start wrecking it quite a while ago?
I mean, each time he’s messed it up more, another group of people migrates off twitter over to alternatives. I also think more people in general are becoming aware of the fediverse in general thanks to what’s going on w/ reddit, but that’s speculation on my part.
Seriously, it feels like established social medias are trying to kill themselves lol
They were already killing themselves by running at a loss. Now they’re enshittifying to try and make any profit.
But switching costs were lower than they had hoped, so there’s no profit to be made. Their business model was flawed.
The Boomers were right about (federated) email all along and now the rest of the internet is figuring it out.
A lot of people left due to it not being morally sound for them to support Musk and his actions.
But now there are paywalled features that are ruining the functional experience of Twitter. You can’t look at the site for more than half an hour before getting restricted on a free account
Plus Mastodon has had time to polish instances, apps and gain a userbase so it is a little easier to transition
The Twitter panic and lock down. You can’t read tweets without being logged in
To be honest - Lemmy migration made me an active Mastodon user.
I joined Mastodon right after Musk took over Twitter. I was never big on Twitter but wanted to try mastodon.
But never became active. Because I was not a tweeter. I was also not a tooter.
The Reddit exodus was a wake up call for me and I committed to become a user and supporter in fediverse. So the migration to Lemmy/Kbin activated me as a Mastodon active users.
Yay! I still don’t know how to use anything that looks like twitter tho
WHITE WHALE HOLY GRAIL 🎵
Heckin’ yeah!
Everything is going according to the plan!
‘There is broad consensus among experts that the early 2020s shifts in social media populations were what has come to be called asshole-driven.’
Scraping Assholes-A History of Social Media from 2006-2056
R. McDonald (2069), published by McDonald’s Textbook Division, Schaumburg, IL, USA
McDonald’s diversifying into higher education publishing is a scary, and not as far-fetched as it should be, reality.
Chad citation… the future looks bright, time traveler!
Mastodon is where the intelligent people are filtered to from Twitter. The idiots end up on Threads.
I’d love to use mastadon but I use twitter for sport/politics journalists and none of them are on mastadon.
There is quite a bunch of journalists on Mastodon though.
Yeh I still use reddit to repost sports twitter
Can’t you just use a rss reader to see their articles?
It’s not just articles though. A lot of commentary happens on twitter that never makes it to a long form article
No matter how much FaceMeta disgusts me, at least Threads has some semblance of moderation to keep the MAGA fascists under control. I rather have to deal with idiots than with the far-right cesspool that Twitter is turning into.
Thankfully, we have Mastodon, so I don’t have to deal with either. They’re both blocked on my PiHole, so I just get a DNS error when I accidentally click on links.
Good sugestion
Always a bit of a sobering experience in the rare instance that I end up in Twitter. The fact that some of them are willing to be so blatant about being a PoS is a little concerning to say the least.
When the owner themself doesn’t hide what kind of PoS they are, this is what you get. I have no love for Zuckerberg, but if I can criticize him based on what he does and how he does it and the effects his decisions have on society, any one with brains could without having to resort to low brow insults of measuring contests. That’s basically the difference, one service is managed by someone who, despite all his flaws, is an adult, the other isn’t.
BTW, I used neutral pronouns for the “chief twitt” and not for Zuck just to spite him and make the point that one doesn’t have to lower the level bellow a certain threshold to provoke, all considering how they hate “woke” stuff…
take your meds
Very cool, I am one of the 8800 😸
A great win for decentralization and censorship resistant networks!
I joined recently! I gotta admit, I’m not sure what to do exactly…I’ve never been very good at social media. But I got one!
https://press.coop/directory helps for following news feeds 👍
Can I subscribe to that on Mastodon?
No one I’m really interested in following is on there yet so my feed there is essentially empty.
That instance hosts news feeds copied from Twitter. I found it useful to replace what I used Twitter for mostly. I’ve since found other mastodon users to follow, you just need to lurk about a bit and look at what’s trending.
Good tips here:
https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-find-accounts-to-follow-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-how-do-i-find-my-friends/
Thanks!! This has some really good stuff. I think following hashtags will help. I never really used Twitter so this is all kinda new
What’s the occasion?
Wednesday!
This is great! But generally can’t see Mastadon overtaking any other major social platforms until it introduces an equivalent of For you feed from Twitter. The days of following specific people and hashtags is over, it’s tedious and I don’t give a shit about 3/4s of the feed.
2017-2020 Twitter was absolutely peak Twitter algorithm wise and thousands of users want that exact experience back, yet nobody will provide it.
luckily it doesn’t need to overtake anyone, it’s doing its own thing and it works just fine.
So true
Mastodon adding their version of Tweekdeck was what set me to completely abandon Twitter.
Just saw that on fedidb, Hooray! Hehe
I’m really happy that this is happening, it’s amazing to have this collaborative power to ditch those abusive plattforms and make our own rules. 👏 Congratulations