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?
Living with influencers in their feeds.
ugh. influencers are the worst. old man grumble
I’ve never cared for influencers, but they also never effected me personally. Until last summer… I was blueberry picking one morning with my mom. We picked 3 very full buckets and called it a day and headed for the checkout hut. We’re hot sweaty and tired and just wanted to checkout and go home, but we were suddenly blocked in the middle of a row of blueberries with no way to get out! Why? Because someone was photographing a lady in a sundress and hat caressing the blueberry bushes. We ended up walking through the photo and I’ve never felt such “get off my lawn” sentiment before.
Lol for real though, ruining an influencer’s shot - or even better, a live broadcast - when they’re being an obnoxious asshole gives me no small degree of pleasure.
When my wife and I got a chance to go to musee d’orsey in Paris there was a beautiful manual clock on show. There was this annoying influencer standing about 15 ft in front of it and not letting anybody get closer. She would constantly whine that they were in her shot.
I walked right up to the mechanisms of the clock to inspect it while she just yapped at me and my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Best experience in Paris by far.
Lmao that honestly sounds delightful! Hope you guys enjoyed the rest of your trip too!
Tangentially, did you get a chance to catch a performance of the string quartet that plays in Sainte-Chapelle cathedral? If you’re at all into that style of music, it’s one of the coolest experiences I have seen like that, and I cannot recommend it enough. The cathedral itself is gorgeous, the acoustics are absolutely breathtaking, and the quartet is like crazy talented. Can’t recommend that enough.
We sadly did not get to take that in. But the second chapter of the story is how two canadians visiting paris brought covid to basel switzerland, and caused a whole company campus to close. All while ending up trapped in .ch for ten months with only two suitcases…
But that chapter is for another post.
I just wonder what they are all going to be doing for a living in 15 years…
caressing the blueberry bushes
oh my lord. lolz
[ shaking fist at clouds ]
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.
EULA sucks when these companies touch him
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.
You expect a lot from vegetables.
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.
My worry is once this becomes the “cool thing”, then the corpos will come in with dollar signs in their eyes. Yes, I think lemmy will be harder to mess with given its nature, but I never count big corps out when there’s money to be made.
Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
Great opportunity to educate them, and then have them host your own instance :)
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.
I wish the devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for creating a web site. The web will never catch on with all this complicated stuff.
Honestly I like the fact that there is some difficulty in the sign up. I think it brings a better quality of people to the Fediverse.
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 haven’t used Mastodon, but on Lemmy the instance you are on totally matters.
For example, beehaw.org is pretty happy to defederate. It tries to give you a more moderated and curated environment. Feddit.de is slow, laggy and often outdated, and they just deactivated federation in general (at least they said so, to me federation seems to be still working) to avoid that session stealing vulnerability.
In general, federation is pretty buggy right now, with federated posts/comments having a decent chance of not being replicated.
So the choice of instance really does make a difference. But there is no help at all up front to choose the correct instance.
And just hopping over to another instance is also not a great solution, since people are used to build their social media account. It’s not some anonymous throw-away thing.
I the case of lemmy, i feel like it’s definitely some anonymous throw-away thing. We’re not here to build a follower base are we?
Much less than on other platforms, that’s true, but after a while you do start recognizing usernames again.
Sure there’s exceptions like SrGrafo on Reddit but most are here to lurk around or engage in random discussions
you could also simply recommend them an instance
The average dude who can’t figure out how to sign up for an account on a website can go fuck off back to Facebook, where SOMEHOW they managed to create an account.
It looks like most people don’t have enough braincells to do such a simple task. Isn’t it just nice to live in a world like this?
At least this is one thing that’s not as bad as decades ago. Just remembering how computer illiterate most of the developed world used to be.
Most people weren’t ever taught about this shit and had no reason to spend time learning about it on their own. Most of us are either professional or amateur nerds, figuring this out wasn’t really that hard because of our circumstances rather than our ~superior brains~
They have just as many braincells as you, throw that attitude away.
Centralization is the core problem of social media though. It allows a single entity control over the data and as soon as you have that, you have Zuck.
Centralization isn’t the problem, privatization is. If the single entity that controlled the data was democraticly controlled and not run for profitability it’d be the best of all worlds.
In 2023, there is very little democratically controlled anything left that has not been tainted by the ‘capitalist gains mindset’ - most democratic social programs that are far more fundamental than a social network have either been corrupted and impaired by corporate greed or have had enough legislative protections or funding sources cut out that they can no longer operate properly, allowing the argument for ‘privatisation’ - a one way ticket back to corporate greed. They operate at the whims of corporations and no longer serve the people.
While I believe what you say is true, it’s not something we’re capable of in the current state of civilisation.
Everything you said is true, democracy does not exist under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. I’m just saying, centralization isn’t the problem. Furthermore you can’t escape capitalism by decentralizing.
True, but it makes it possible to breakaway from an instance or leaders that are toxic/circumventing your privacy for profit without having to find a new tool or network. You can just hop to another instance.
It’s possible as long as competition exists, but every market trends towards monopolization. EEE is real.
I think it’s a good thing honestly. It brings a better quality of people here in my opinion.
Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If they can’t manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.Tbh, this is not a good solution.
It dumps you in front of a wall of 22 pages of servers on my laptop (equivalent to 4.35 meters).
Most of which have completely nonsensical descriptions.
If I look at e.g. the first page (top 6 servers) I get these:
- mastodon.social: The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
- mstdn.jp: Mastodon日本鯖です． よろしくお願いいたします。 (Maintained by Sujitech, LLC)
- mstdn.social: A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.
- mastodon.world: Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.
- mas.to: Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.
- mastodon.online: A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
Ok, so of these I can only rule out mstdn.jp, because I don’t speak Japanese.
mastodon.social and mastodon.official are, I guess, the “official” instances, with one of them being newer, for some reason. What does that mean? No idea. Is mastodon.social running out dated software? If not, why fork the instances at all?
mstdn.social and mastodon.world mention that they are general purpose. Without (and even with) Fediverse experience, I would expect any social media platform to be general purpose unless otherwise stated. So they basically have no description.
mas.to mentions only that it’s “fast, up-to-date and fun”. That basically has no meaning, except all other instances are slow, outdated and boring. So now I am worried.
mstdn.social says it has a 500 character limit. Without googleing a new user would have no idea what the regular character limits are. And I have no idea whether that will cause issues when interacting with other instances.
This page is like getting to a used car dealership without a clue about cars and you ask the car dealer to help you choose a car, and the dealer is like “Yeah, so I’m gonna help you. The right car for you is any car on the property of the dealership.”
Yeah but, it sounds like you can read and retain information long enough to make decisions on your own.
Most people can’t even grasp scrolling past the ads in a Google search. If they even get to Google in the first place.
Exactly, I downloaded Mastodon and deleted it in one day. It was too complicated (in an annoying way) to use. I’m very IT literate, but I don’t want to learn to use a platform, or do research. I want it to work out of the box, and I want it to be easy and the content to be accessible. Now think about all the non-IT literate people out there, of course Threads will do well because it’s just create an account and you’re good to go… If Mastodon was like that I would use it.
I’ve seen people lose their shit over having to “sign up for another app” and honestly I don’t want people who have no respect for their data, privacy and have the personality of a wet cardboard right-wing conservative on the fediverse. That’s why Fb exists. We are here as users because we chose to, as other people chose what best suits them.
An alternative to Twitter with an Instagram flavor.
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.
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.
You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?
Which are optional so what’s your point?
That’s not what I want to see.
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
Counterpoint: This tiny little hurdle keeps out the lazy and ignorant.
That’s how I feel right now. I don’t need the Fediverse to replace reddit and Twitter, I want it to be a refuge from the commercialized crap! The people who can’t be bothered to figure out Lemmy or Mastodon can stay right where they are!
Exactly. Why would I want anyone else in my community when I can just talk to myself! !league@lemmy.ml
But people using those platforms is not good for our society. Of course if they cared about freedom a little bit of extra difficulty wouldn’t really bother them. But the goal should be to make the switch as easy as possible.
I really dont get this “Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for”. I’m a barely technoliterate 30 something who’s closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.
Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.
not that hard, yes
but not simple enough to sign up without using your brain cells.
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
The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
I think that’s why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, “here’s some stuff the community was into recently”
Did you mistake threads for mastodon?
What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything about Threads or Mastodon. I’m talking about Kbin and Lemmy
You can’t just make up your own lingo and expect everyone else to know what you’re talking about.
My mistake. I should have known when you said threadiverse you weren’t talking about threads. How silly of me.
Now excuse me while get a glass of Pepsi. (I’m obviously talking about getting a plate of olives)
Yeah, most people aren’t on social media to see “what their friends are up to,” they’re there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest “thing” is. Mastodon doesn’t have any of that, or at least it’s very hard to find.
The biggest L is watching porn artists try to move to Threads when the platform doesn’t even allow their content.
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?
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.
Custom algorithms like community plugins is actually such an incredible good idea I wonder why we don’t have it already on mastodon
That’s my other issue with Mastodon, it’s development doesn’t seem that open, it feels like the head dude isn’t really open to change. When asked about fixing search, he said it was “intentional” and he wanted people to search less. Seems weird, let the users have the choice, right?
Heck, even Bluesky, which is VC funded feels more open than Mastodon at times.
I particularly like Mastodon’s chronological and weak search. You won’t be easily found unless you wanted to, and your timeline is well-ordered and never will it be disturbed by some algorithms. To me these are its advantages.
I don’t like it because my feed gets flooded with low quality content that’s only there because the poster used that particular hashtag. It needs sorting like Reddit, so that I can keep the good quality content on top, but also have a chronological option if I ever get bored.
It makes no sense to choose chronological when you can make it optional. Bluesky is much, much better in this regard.
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 used the Lists feature like this on Twitter. One of my most popular ones is the “Official Xbox Feed” list that had Xbox employees, developers, and official accounts all in one place. I made it for personal use but it now has 100+ followers.
Oddly, I thought that was one of the worst parts about Google+. I get your point though and I respect your opinion, I just thought it was interesting how we disagree 😄
I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.
I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.
I love combing through the federated timeline and randomly finding someone new to follow or maybe just interact with that day. It’s my choice, it’s happenstance (based on chronological feeds and when I take time to look) and it feels like running into new people in the real world in a way.
Algorithms tend to funnel people into partisan views of the world. They find people that think like you and follow the same topics as you and eventually without realising it you become partisan and unwilling to talk or compromise with someone with different views. It’s this part of social media that has made political situations hot and compromise seem impossible… I am digressing in my ramble though.
I curate people in my follow list based on looking for things I know I like at first and people/celebs I know I follow elsewhere. 10-15 minutes a day I spend looking through the federated timeline (not the local timeline which is the only one available in the official Mastodon app) and I will interact with or find new people to follow at random. And then occasionally I go to people I am following and see who they are following to find new things as well.
All my posts are chronological in my feeds, which means I can actually find them again.
And one other thing I’ve noticed on sites with algorithms like Twitter… eventually you’re just seeing the same people over and over again from the algorithm. There are thousands and thousands you’ll never see because it will never think they are important enough to show you. Chronological feeds are unbiased and give everyone and equal platform… for better or worse… but after years of Facebook and Twitter algorithms, I strongly feel that’s for the better.
I’m really digging the simplicity at Lemmy.world, though I haven’t gotten mastodon yet. Still not up to speed on “instances” & the federated timeline (?).
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.
The watch what you see with your own eyes now
oh wow, fucking lol
wait, isn’t that for their shitty VR headset?
Exactly, they’re advanced, you know 🤮 It’s getting ‘really’ disgusting, not just viirtually
No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.
Federation is so confusing! Why can’t I just sign up at facebook.com where the rest of the internet is? You guys and your cryptofederatedarkweb.
yes, that is exactly what the Internet should be, with full VR…
Instructions unclear; dick in toaster.
(BEEP!)
Are threads federated?
Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.
Same. Glad to see not everyone wants rid of it
I was also on your boat, until I read this… Take into account this was published before Threads was official. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I don’t really agree with the article’s premise about what happened to XMPP.
XMPP was a niche thing before Google appeared, and it remained a niche thing after Google left. That said, it would have been much better had Google continued to support it!
Threads is federated afaik, yeah. It’s just that many Fediverse instanced blocked Meta.
They haven’t federated yet but they say they will eventually. I’m going to change instances to ones that don’t want to join them if/when it happens.
Tumblr said that too but never did it actually. It’s not so easy to join a network where the skills of any single “kid” could be compared to your 1000+ employees company.
They said they still figuring out how to handle the federated posts into its content recommendation algorithm and moderation tools. So not yet.
(Sauce: https://www.timothychambers.net/2023/07/08/threads-and-activtypub.html )
Yes, but hardly anyone is willing to federate with it.
it can interact with mastodon yeah.
but afaik it’s a one-way integration currently. (mastodon users can see threads users but not vise versa)
The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user’s perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta’s not telling us…
I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.
To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn’t anything fishy in there, but that’s part of the reason.
Just different tech used most likely. Mastodon is a native app and Threads probably something like React Native, so it has a JS runtime inside and a bunch of dependencies.
Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.
Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.
But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it’s own. Multiple of them will take much more.
Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread’s version’s APK and unpacked it.
It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.
The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.
Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.
As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it’s not even worth talking about - it’d be like 100kb at worst.
The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are “jack of all trades” type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.
When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that’s been added over time and it’s easier to just “copy/paste” most stuff they’ve ever written than to start over.
If they want people to use Mastodon, then make it user-friendly and easy for the general public. I downloaded it, tried it, and was lost/confused on the whole server/instance thing and finding communities etc. Whereas Threads is pretty straight forward, it’s just a Twitter clone. User experience is more important than privacy to the general public and developers need to realise you can’t compromise user experience/ease of use/accessibility.
Ribbit
I’m genuinely curious - what do people find confusing about Mastodon? What could be improved?
I was a little confused by Lemmy at first, but downloading and setting up the Mastodon app seemed super simple and straightforward. I’ve never been interested in short form text content like this, and couldn’t find anything I thought was interesting on the platform, but I didn’t feel confused.
Would love to hear what people find annoying/confusing as I’d love to be able to help create content etc for anything that’s holding people up. Twitter owns too much social/mental weight for people and Meta is no better - would love to find a way to help move people towards something like the Fediverse.
User experience is more important than privacy to the general public
This is, ultimately, a sad truth that, in my bleaker moments, makes things feel hopeless. However, it can be addressed by improving UX, I suppose, in a pareto-efficient way that hopefully doesn’t simultaneously compromise privacy, which does seem possible.
It seems this was meant to be a response to the parent comment. Or maybe you’ve done that intentionally to highlight the need for improved UX 😅
Tbh I don’t think it matters all that much. Exclusivity is cool. Plus reddits idea of UX is literally just plastering advertisements all over your feed. Seems pretty easy to beat that out in the long run, it’ll just take some time to catch up. They had a 15 year head start
It seems this was meant to be a response to the parent comment.
Lol yup, true… definitely unintentional. I’m used to RES and being able to collapse / navigate comment chains with keyboard shortcuts
I wonder if there’s anything analogous for Lemmy 🤔 I suppose the analogous thing would be to just directly add these as features to the frontend
Not sure but there’s like 20 different apps and web apps in various states of development, along with Lemmy itself. I’m sure it’ll come sooner rather than later.
Somebody recommended Alexandrite to me recently
Woah, didn’t know there was even one web app in development as I would have thought they’d just modify the Lemmy source code directly. I suppose that would take way longer to merge and be more controversial, too, than just writing one’s own front end
Nifty
I’ve never tried it. Is it really more confusing than Lemmy?
Nah, Mastodon is a lot slicker and more robust in my experience so far (been on there less than a year, but still).
I think the “confusion” is just from having to pick an instance although iirc they made mastodon.social the “default” one for people who didn’t want to choose, so maybe that hurdle is gone now, not sure.
I thought mastodon.social was closed to new accounts for aaages now
Still looks like it’s the default when you sign up from the mobile app, but both my accounts are on tiny servers so I’m far from an expert here 😅
Might’ve just been around when I started. I think they were struggling with everyone signing up there at the time. I went to mas.to instead
I don’t use it either, but I guess someone from your instance has to follow someone on another instance before you see content from there…? Maybe someone else can chime in. I just get this stuff third-hand from reading things other people say and listening to nerdy podcasts.
If you use the official Mastodon app, or an instance that has disabled it - you are unable to see the Federated timeline, which is why you would only see the Local timeline - IE things the people on your instance are sharing or following.
The federated timeline is a chronological stream of everything. A bit fast, but kinda magical in a way because I discover so many people just by spending 10-15 minutes combing through it during my visit each day.
I’ve also started following the same celebs/orgs that I used to follow on other social media.
And most importantly, I control what I see - not some algorithm funneling me into a partisan view of the world, which is a massive part of the issue with Twitter and Facebook and their relationship to current political situations.
Thanks for clarifying!
It suits them though
Nice meme but pls.
Or!
My favourite new format, thanks
No worries! It was shared with me (on here I think) so I’m just spreading the love 😁
Most of the alt templates suck and the og is still good. Why change?
Having an alleged pedo as a template always bothered me. We can do better here surely.
That otter is no pedo!
No, seriously though, who is the guy in the OP’s template?
Drake, another person who likely fucked around with underaged girls when he got a bit of fame https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2019/01/06/drake-seen-kissing-fondling-17-year-old-girl-2010-concert-video/2495634002/
He pled guilty to ‘child endangerment’ for some texts.
Never heard of him, doesn’t look like a nice guy. Thanks for the background
That LaForge one is pretty slick though. I’d like to see more of that. If there’s a Data version I propose they duke it out.
I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic
All public content on the web is heavily surveillanced through crawling bots by Google and alike.
Do you mean the bots they use to index stuff for their search engine? Isn’t that how all modern search engines function?
Yes, of course but a very large chunk of the super vocal crowd demanding that everyone defederate from Threads is claiming that federation somehow transfers private data to Meta.
I mean, as soon as Threads starts federating, Meta will be pulling shit-tons of data from those instances. I guess it’s all publically available anyhow? But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads, so that when it inevitably stops federating those users will essentially have been poached into yet another Facebook walled garden.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising. Threads exists explicitly to make money off advertising (and selling users’ data). That’s a conflict of interest that all but guarantees eventual rule violations.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation. They’ve gotten away with a lot of shit. If I ran my own instance, I’d sure as shit defederate from them.
But federation will definitely be handing it to them on a silver platter.
Not really because all those big web companies already have crawlers already anyway. It’s literally more work for them to support open standards than it is not.
Plus they already have 100 million Threads users. They don’t care about the 2mil Mastodon users.
The real concern is that federating with Threads might create network effects that pull Fediverse users more and more into just using Threads
“I can’t follow all the cool entertainment accounts from here, so I follow them on Threads instead.” <-- more likely.
Another concern I’ve seen mentioned is, a lot of instances have rules against advertising.
Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
And finally, Facebook is just a garbage corporation.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software. I can say with 100% confidence that you’ve used software by Facebook even if you never ever visited any Facebook/Meta service. Just because parts of a big corp suck bad, doesn’t mean that everything they make sucks.
I find it so hilarious that so many freak out about stupid Facebook, yet fucking Truth Social by Trump (which is literally a Mastodon instance full of neo-nazis) is barely blocked by anyone.
Facebook is one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap and makes lots of open source software.
I’d like to know more about this.
I’d like to know more about this.
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https://github.com/facebook (which includes the zsdt compression algorithm and the React web framework)
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https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities/Meta
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Threads cannot make other instances run ads.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation. What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse? Oh, it’s defederation.
I stopped here because you just showed how little you know about the situation.
Well, unlike you I’ve actually read the announcement by the LW admins about Threads.
What’s to stop them posting paid advertisements as posts on their platform, boosted by millions of their users engagement, to the top of feeds in the fediverse?
Simply not following accounts you don’t like, duh.
I’m on lemmy, I don’t follow any accounts. Good job showing how limited your knowledge of the fediverse is and confirming you’re as dumb as I thought in one fell swoop.
I’m less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.
This is true, but I think that this meme refers to the app though. The regular mastodon app doesn’t require as many data.
Talk to the “Defederate from Threads because it will steal all the Fediverse data” crowd about that even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers.
even though a federated instance sees as much as Google’s crawlers
Federated instances can track which users have upvoted & downvoted on all federated content, which crawlers can’t see (unless they’re crawling Kbin which specifically shows this data in the UI).
In the early Websocket version of Lemmy’s UI you could see all this data for yourself, it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta especially if they’re able to link it back to your ad profile. They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
Knowing Meta’s addiction to data, they can infer a list of your subscribed communities by looking at which ones you are active in the most (using these to then identify your interests), and identify what timezone you’re in based on when you’re active on Lemmy. There’s a lot more they can do with the federated data though, some of which admittedly can be done using your public data.
Scraping a public profile is one thing, but presumably stalking users en masse with pseudoprivate vote data is a bit far IMO, especially with the likelihood of Facebook using this data for building ad profiles
it would be a treasure trove for Facebook/Meta
Given the tiny user base compared to Threads: No.
They’d be able to monitor real time activity of users outside the platform just by subscribing to communities, and wouldn’t need to waste time developing scrapers.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
stalking users en masse
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
Given the tiny user base compared to Threads: No.
True.
In my opinion though, the majority of these are just Instagram accounts - that originally signed up for an image sharing social network. While a lot of them are going to try Threads, a lot of them are likely to just lurk.
They’re “wasting time” developing ActivityPub support when they could just as well deploy a Mastodon Docker image on an inconspicuous domain name.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
To me this sounds like a whataboutism IMO. You don’t need much to create an ActivityPub data ingest program - you quite literally ask the server to always send you updates. Facebook has probably already got something like this set up on Mastodon anyway, and used the NDA’d instance owner meetings to keep it whitelisted.
Maybe all Fediverse instances should block every single Chrome and Edge user. Also every instance hosted on AWS should be blocked. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are every bit as stalkery if not more.
Just because online tracking is normalised does not mean you should just accept it IMO. Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Facebook is literally doing everything they can to stay intrusive and relevant, even if those things are kinda shitty, while just giving everyone “we care about your privacy” lip service and empty “we’re sorry” apologies in Congress.
My issues with FB specifically:
- Access to your contacts via WhatsApp, and their real names if they’re saved as such
- Run social experiments on users without prior consent, such as filling feeds with negative content
- Swallowed the low end VR market with the affordable Oculus headset, having a negative effect on VR game quality for users with high end headsets (see “Onward”). The community has coined the term Questification for this
- Cambridge Analytica 🙄
- Copying Snapchat’s stories and ephemeral image messages into both Instagram and WhatsApp after Snap Inc turned down their purchase offer
- So many data breaches & leaks that people have stopped caring
There’s a bunch more but you probably are already aware of them. It boils down to Facebook not being a company that I believe is worth trusting.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm), and they’ve kept user data safe. Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments. They’re kind of irrelevant as a company outside of Azure cloud, Xbox and Windows computers. There’s ADO but that feeds back into the work environment thing.
If you are interested in continuing the conversation, I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is? I don’t really have any other response so just interested in hearing your perspective.
And be on the hook for releasing the source code a la Truth Social?
No modifications to the upstream source means that no modified sources need to be released. Lemmy also just points to the Github in the footer.
Although looking at your response, I’m assuming you just don’t care about it 🤷♂️ which is fine if that works for you.
Tracking is not fine for me but it’s also something that each user should decide for themself. One should be aware that public content is really public and anyone can see it. If I don’t want to accidentally like something in Threads, Mastodon allows me to block entire domains. The instance does not need to pretend to be my parent and protect me.
My issues with FB specifically
And nothing is about blocking federation with Threads.
Google is the closest analog to FB, but they’re not running social experiments on you without your consent (unless you want to speculate on YouTube’s algorithm)
As someone who recently got very funky stuff on YouTube which disappeared on a private tab: There are experiments going on.
Not sure what experiments on Facebooks have to do with federation but this underlines my thought that people just look up for excuses because blocking Threads feels right to them even if there is little technological reason for this, especially considering that ActivityPub support is not even there and nobody can make an informed decision about the effect of Threads on the network.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not like Google either.
So blocking all Chrome users then?
Amazon’s antics are mainly confined to online retail, same goes for their ads service if that still exists.
And everything hosted on AWS.
Microsoft is very, very easily avoided, with the obvious exception of work environments.
Threads accounts can also be easily avoided on Mastodon because users can just block entire domains, therefore the instances don’t need to patronize its users.
If I were a Chrome or Edge user and synced all my history to Google/MS, this is literally tracking.
I’m curious as to what your opinion of Facebook is?
facebook.com is lame. The Meta corporation is run by a soulless robot but there are some smart engineers employed there who do good work on open source projects. My workplace wants me to use WhatsApp so I have it on my work phone only, I decided on my own not to install it on my private phone but would not want an Android ROM where the maintainer decided for me that I must not ever install WhatsApp because people should be able to decide for themselves which content they consume. Their VR products look interesting but AFAIK they mandate an account which is against my conviction to not be patronized by I product I paid for.
That’s one thing and it is hard to be free of, but here I think it is also relevant that the website/client apps surveil you too.
iOS and Android as well as modern browsers actually limit a lot what an app or a website can gather and if Mastodon instances were to federate with Threads, Facebook would not even be able to see anything beyond public data which actually makes federation with Threads a privacy tool.
