• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it’s sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don’t like twitter (because it’s too “toxic”). This means that you can’t really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that’s largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.

    I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don’t imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it’s own kind of different thing.


  • It’s gonna go public eventually, this is like a closed beta kind of thing. The purpose seems to be more to get people curious about it and foster a certain culture which I must say that they’ve been pretty effective at. They strategically handed out invites to a lot of black twitter users for example, which is smart since black twitter has historically been an important cultural force on the internet



  • Depends on in what way you’re looking for a youtube alternative!

    I think peertube might be fine if you’re looking for a way to host your own videos, but it’s propably not a good place to just browse for video content the way you might with youtube. I think the most solid alternative for that is Nebula. It costs like a dollar a month IIRC and has a couple big name video easayist kind of types. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the fediverse or anything, but a majority of it is owned by the creators and from what I understand it is more generous per view than youtube, plus it has a buissiness model that doesn’t rely on serving you adds and selling your data.



  • One thing that I like about kbin is that it’s not trying to be “x, but federated” like lemmy or mastodon for example. It’s more exiting to try to make something new! I think it’s very apparent how some parts of lemmy are full of redditisms on purpose which I disslike.

    That said, I do have a lemmy account that I use for posting about other stuff. There are a tons of website sprouting up as contenders for a space in the new internet landscape and I’m having a lot of fun trying them out without really binding myself to one too tightly





  • I think reddit will remain in a sort of zombified form for quite some time. I don’t know if there will be any more outright migrations of subreddits for a while, but hopefully kbin (and lemmy) will become interesting places to post and read all on their own and maybe eventually take the place on the internet reddit had. Reddit started out as a small place dominated by tech nerds and eventually grew to the place it is today, so it’s possible that kbin/lemmy do something similar. I don’t know if this means an outright takeover, and I don’t know if that’s what I’m hoping for either to be honest. I would rather see kbin become it’s own thing on it’s own terms.



  • While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn’t currently a serious competitor to facebook, it’s possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there’s a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that’s not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it’s a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.





  • Hey, glad to hear that we’re mostly on the same page!

    I should clarify that I’m just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they’re both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it’s not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.


  • I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.

    Hey, I think that was my comment!

    What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn’t otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).

    I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn’t come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can’t expect everyone to share my connotations.

    What I think is important isn’t the exact wording (if I hadn’t written “normie” I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn’t otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn’t contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don’t have those associations with that word so that doesn’t ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.




  • Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can’t be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I’m including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I’m gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.

    I get your point and I largely agree but it isn’t that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don’t think it’s gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.