This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
Bluesky is very barebones and has even less functionality than Mastodon. Beside having a similar look to Twitter I don't understand why people choose it.
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain, I had to try 3/4 time before I felt like I had enough info to make the correct choice, and then finding other users from my previous twitter gang was a pain, the barrier to entry is much higher than some other options.
Unfortunately marketing matters a lot. One single brand is easier to understand than the many federated servers of mastodon.
I wanted to check out where this reddit community migrated to some server with something lemmy. It said something about mastadon so I made an account to try to participate. It wasn't really clear to me lemmy isn't another mastodon instance, but a different protocol with some federated synergy. My fault, but the marketing is a bit confusing.
Same as me, I have tried to join mastodon like 4 times since it launched. To me it's still a ghost town with very little of value.
I've built a place I find comfortable, took a couple tries. But I have found decent content, found some of my friends from twitter, found replication bots for people I used to follow but not really interact with.
It's not twitter, but it took me 5+ years to build out my twitter. I think over time, enough people will join defederated social media that it can be a pretty good experience if a little too much work for many. But it will take a little time.
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain
What was there to figure out in your case?
Well, every instance has different mix of people interest and moderation. Which maybe I was over thinking it but it took a while to figure out where I wanted to be. And my initial experience wasn't great. My server was way out of date, had caching issues, was slow lots of defederation and perhaps arbitrary blocking that I didn't know was going on so I didn't understand why it didn't work.
I gave up and came back to a different server and it's been good since. But, no one is switching from threads or Instagram for that experience. Or at least going to stick with it long enough to find a home.
That's true.
Step 1. Make people feel "excited" about joining by creating false exclusivity. (Facebook was originally only for college campuses)
Step 2. Drop the false exclusivity.
Step 3. Profit?
I honestly don't know either...
Bluesky wasn't as confusing as Mastodon
I'm so tired of this bullshit. I went to the mastodon.social; clicked the big button labeled "create an account"; read and accepted the rules; filled out a form asking for my email address, a username and password; confirmed my email; and could immediately post.
How the fuck is that confusing, that's standard fucking practice. Jesus fucked on a pike.
Federation of a service is confusing because it is a difficult problem to conceptualize. There's no way to easily explain how to use federated services to non techies.
For me? That's fine. I can use federated stuff.
For my mom? Nope. But she needs to get off the internet in general so that's probably a bad example.
It's true. And people try to jump on to similar things. "It's just like how email works!", or "It's just like how international phone calls work!"
Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.
I mean, that's fair, but it's not relevant to usage. I go to mastodon.social, I sign up, I use. At no point is the concept of federation necessary in that process, that's for the owners/operators/maintainers to figure out.
If people want to know more, they will seek out that arcane knowledge, but it's not something someone who's just there to satisfy their FOMO ever needs to know.
Maybe ask the people what they find confusing about Mastodon, and listen.
I'll give you example. Say I want to sign up , but mastodon.social has currently closed sign-ups. People tell me I can just sign up on any instance, but there's dozens of them and they all appear to be the same. As someone who's not familiar with federated services, I don't know what to base my instance decision on.
How would you help me overcome this choice paralysis?
Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.
As someone who’s not familiar with federated services, I don’t know what to base my instance decision on.
As I said elsewhere, many people just want a place they can go to share memes, news, opinions and misinformation. But on the other hand, there are plenty affiliated with interests/hobbies/identities/ideologies where you can to share topical memes, topical news, topical opinions, and misinformation (as long as it's on topic).
Snark aside, I'm on two instances: one for socializing, and another for my interest in cybersecurity. So I'd start with: do you want an experience that's more typical of social media with a more general pool of people, or do you want to focus on a specific interest but with the understanding that entails a smaller userbase and a slower feed?
If the latter sounds best to you, what communities do you find yourself most active in on other platforms (e.g. reddit, lemmy, facebook, twitter)? If not, we can find a relatively well-populated instance that's likely to have staying power.
It wasn't a {Join with Facebook]or a {Join with Google] button
I'm the opposite though. I could create an account but I still don't understand how to be logged into other mastodon instances automatically and follow content
You don't get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you'd send an email. The server does the rest.
If your question is about finding people to follow, that's another matter. Folks on other instances won't show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that's usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just... follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don't have to "log in" anywhere else; that's the "federated" part of the fediverse.
What's most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It's as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that's the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in "World" can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.
Thx for the very clear explanation
I don't get Mastodon
It's like if Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky all were the same behind the scenes and gave you access to read the posts and follower the on the other sites. "Mastodon" is just the collective term for all those sites that are linked together.
Also you can have a lot more control over what you see and who you interact with, but you don't have to if you just want to login and look at memes. You can also run your own site ti have even more control, but, once again, you don't have to.
If you mean you just don't get the appeal of the "microblogging" format, or the culture that arose online surrounding it, I can't explain that. It's not everybody's cup of tea.
Going from one billionaire's platform to another (Twitter/Musk > Bluesky/Dorsey) is not a smart move. There's a vast segment of the population that learns nothing and keeps making the same mistakes.
Dorsey doesn't own bluesky, it's a public interest company and it runs on the AT protocol, which is defederated and open source... like lemmy or mastodon
Jack doesn't own bluesky but he is on the board [0] and even working for a public benefit company, is supposed to [1]:
... operate the business with the same authority and behavior as in a traditional corporation
It does go on to state they're required to consider the impact of their decisions not only for shareholders but also employees, customers, community, etc, but there's no mechanism that forces them to do "the right thing". A public benefit company is basically a way to protect decisions made if they were to not align with the concept of "shareholder primacy" [2]. On the other hand, if Bluesky had registered as a certified B Corp [3], that would have more weight to it as they not only have to state their intentions but also provide evidence.
In regards to being federated - are they actually federating with anyone yet? Genuine question, I haven't kept up.
In regards to being open source, it's a good start, but like the Chromium project, the company's needs will drive it forward and the interest of the company will come first, good or bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
There's a vast majority of the population that doesn't care.
Not really interested myself: Never liked the Twitter-esque platforms to begin with, plus I'm pretty happy with Lemmy and Kbin.
Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.
Lemmy is great in the same ways (and better in some) in principle, it's just a scale thing that makes it more difficult to obtain that "build your own experience" effect like Reddit has. There just aren't enough people right now to support the super idiosyncratic stream of content that you can curate with Reddit.
My advice is to just lean into it. Start with Ubuntu or Mint, queue up The Next Generation season 1 on your Jellyfin server, and keep contributing.
I prefer Stargate on Plex and praising the Lord with TempleOS.
See? There's something for everybody on Lemmy!
Yeah, I'm looking forward to Lemmy having more niche places: That was, hands down, my favorite thing about reddit. I don't really care much about following people, I prefer to follow subjects..
Speaking of niche communities, I'd like to take this opportunity to plug !micromobility@lemmy.world
I feel the same, microblogging sites such as twitter never really felt cool to use because there was too much noise between the content I actually wanted. But as a photographer and a musician, I might join bsky to spread my art, which is definetly harder to do atm on mastodon imo
Agreed
I just don't think I know how I'm supposed to "properly" use Mastodon. I just see 80% US political discussion, which is fine, but my broken zoomer brain just gets worn down by it very easily.
With Lemmy/KBin if I get bored with a topic, I can just switch over to a different community/magazine.
Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.
Eventually I realized that the whole concept of "microblogging" is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)
They could have opened themselves when twitter went downhill. They missed this opportunity window Threads took advantage of.
Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.
OTOH, having said that, I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you're not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.
I just realized
BS = Bull... ehrm BlueSky
Blue Shit
Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.
I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.
Lots of reasons:
A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.
I think I'll stick with Lemmy, Kbin, and a bit of reddit, never cared for the Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky style of website
Reddit is so shitty to use. My desktop doesn't let.me get to because it says they don't allow VPN. Which I don't have on. I think there's an option to make an account to get access...
And the website on mobile is so slow and unintuitive.
Every search I used to make was with site:reddit.com but I just stopped because I can't make it in the site.
I didn't expect it to get that bad.
I see no reason to expect it to get any better.
For whatever reason it has been more successful attracting Arabic speakers than the fediverse.
I'd wager invite-only versus network effect. Early adopters have more opportunity to shape the emerging community. There was no rush of standard American dorks to homogenize the place.
Why is everything called blue sky all of a sudden? I see blue sky everywhere - blue sky plumbing, blue sky builders, blue sky bar, blue sky physical therapy, blue sky cbd… even Mt Evans was renamed to Mt Blue Sky.
Software devs for a long time would discuss "green field" development, which is a metaphor from constructing a building in an empty field: you start from nothing, and build all new. Most software devs prefer to write new code rather than try to learn the quirks and nuances of a large, already-existing pile of code, so "green field" is considered both desirable and often practically unattainable.
"Blue sky" is a similar concept but loftier. It isn't just that you have an empty field waiting for you, you've got the infitie expanse of the clear blue sky: endless possibilities, unlimited creativity, etc. "Blue sky development" as a metaphor I think comes from designers, product managers, and other software-dev adjacent fields. It means thinking of ideas that are out of the box and unconstrained by historical limits.
That's why everything is named that: execs and marketers love that kind of hollow promise. That anything is possible even though actually they're almost always just clones of existing things whose greatest innovation is to loudly proclaim how new and innovative you are.