It's crazy how many people will just click accept on security warning them that an app will access literally everything on their phone.
It's also crazy how many people don't even know that Threads is Meta... where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
They've been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn't visible affected them negatively.
Of course it will eventually and they'll Pikachu face then but that's hardly comforting.
Will it? Why? It won't affect most people personally ever, hence why most people don't really care.
I fear you are right. While I do believe that further policital abuse of that data is inevitable (Trump or the Malaysian civil war were at least partial results of campaigns of Cambridge Analytica, for example), people probably won't see the impact data analysis had and how they've been manipulated.
I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
It's just another form of notification fatigue.
What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it's always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don't click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.
There's no point in reading the EULA, because it's not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It's always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.
It doesn't even matter if you're smart enough to wade through the agreement, it's still take it or leave it, and the dummies don't even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn't the right word. Coercion. That's the one.
Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
No, it's mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there's a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it's easier.
I've been trying to hammer this point home.
I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click "advanced sign-up" if you choose to do so.
The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
How?
Well, like asking users what their preferences are and select the servers based on the criteria users have chosen?
Hmm actually yeah this is a good idea, but the problem is that there's so many servers that I feel that after choosing criteria there'd still be a bunch of servers in the list and the problem remains, right? Just bouncing ideas. I quite like this idea though.
Then the algo recommends the one with the lowest load and hides the others behind a ... icon or something.
Mm this could be a problem because server load is too unpredictable. I would actually say just randomize the list, so that it kinda does its own "load balancing" by incentivizing to pick whatever random top one it selected?
Yeah, whatever metric. Could also use a mix of number of users, some form of reputation measurement, uptime, etc.
I mostly meant that the system should pick a "best server" and recommend that. Smarter people than me can come up with the best metric.
But swamping the user with >100 servers to pick from is counterproductive.
Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
How is it difficult to find a server? Just pick whatever server you come across first and create an account.
You tell the average dude about how servers exist and the first instinct is that it matters, so they stop, fret about the importance, look for a second, then just drop it because they dont give enough hoots yet to invest more effort versus using a centralized service.
Want ppl to join, don't even tell them about servers. No choice paralysis, no fear of being wrong, nada
I've said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon's use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a "trending" tab, cause that's what users want to see.
That’s not what I want to see.
Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.
Funny, that's exactly the reason I like Mastodon's feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I'm following and the posts they make.
But twitter people love bullshit!
No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.
You're fired
You can't fire me I quit
You can't quit I'm leaving!
You can't leave you're a frog!
You're saying this... On Lemmy. You do know we have three different "trending" settings here, right?
I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that's what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.
The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you've got your sea legs
The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.
Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.
Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I'm a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Yeah, it's unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That's a massive number of people who could be easily informed "hey, wanna try our new product?" As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads' numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
There was a time - when facebook/ig didn't exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn't make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
I've been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
It's one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
We'll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we'll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the 'cool' thing around.
Until then, it will be much much better.
The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won't sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads' algorithm is pretty bad, but it's still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I'm not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don't have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
I'm curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.
Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.
I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I'm into photography, but I don't want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.
Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.
The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn't it for me, and won't be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.
I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.
Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn't blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances' rules against advertising.
I truly do not get it. I hate everything lizard boy touches :(