cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/372863
cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/61363
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
It’s a good start but we gotta pump those numbers up.
The rest are bots and Russian troll farms.
remember 80% of instagram is bots according to a study reported by german media.
so X id even say it could be more giving the vast hatred increase and content change over the last years. so basically they lost 90%
EDIT/additional bit: funk’s german post referenced this Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024
It’s not just X; American social media has been gradually turning into such a shit show for the last 10 years: censorship, misinformation, consensus manufacture and creeping enshitification. I jumped ship to the fediverse and never looked back!
Don’t go to BlueSky !!! They’re not better than X. They obey to the same leaders… MONEY, GREED, AND POWER. A few weeks ago they restricted 72 Turkish protesters the access to their BlueSky accounts on simple request of the Turkish Government. So, BlueSky cannot be trusted they will secure the accounts of their customers. If Trump would ask BlueSky to block all accounts of members who are against him, they’ll do it right away.
Make mastodon more accessible then.
Which accessibility standards does Mastodon break?
Oh boy, where do I even begin:
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Federation. People have no idea what it is, which means that they have to familiarize themselves with all these technical concepts just to create an account.
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Servers. Most mastodon servers are locked, and you have to petition the admins to let you in, which often implies waiting more than a day. In other sites, you can create an account in 5 seconds, so mastodon is at a disadvantage.
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Lack of an algorithm. This implies people won’t see the content they like, which means they have to go and actively look for content. Most people don’t want to spend time doing that, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes ans look at pretty pictures.
3 is a feature to me. The “algorithms” seem to create bubbles, and I want to decide myself.
Some people want to make social media account to browse illustration or photography.
Unfortunately, that’s not doable on fediverse. You follow anyone, and suddenly your feed filled with content that you are not interested in. Example: your favourite artist also post a lot of game screenshoot, but you’re not interested in the games. You just want to see the illustration.
You can follow hashtags and also block them.
Not everything is under hashtag. Most of artist I follow never put hashtag. Hashtag also not useful in multilanguage situation, where a hashtag can mean different think between communities and languages.
I’m pretty sure Mastodon is made of algorithms, mate
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The same is true for Bsky but people don’t complain about it there. It asks you what server you want when you sign up, etc., which is what people complain about in the Mastodon journey.
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Most people aren’t on locked servers. By which, I mean the majority of mastodon users are on the .social instance which is the default when you sign up on the official app/site and is open to anyone.
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Not an accessibility issue.
Are we sure that the people that complains about “what’s an instance?” don’t have an agenda?
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- So what?
- Damn straight they are locked. Other wise you get Nicole spam on all of them, instead of just a few.
- So what?
This is exactly the dismissive attitude that has shaped Mastodon development, and why it will never have broad appeal to replace any traditional social media.
The much, much bigger issue is people just flocking to where there’s the capital for marketing. The feature sets/philosophy could be precisely 1:1 swapped and people would still end up on the platform with all of the money to throw around.
So, you don’t know what accessibility standards are. You’re just using a term, “accessibility”, to mean “the way that I want it to work”.
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BlueSky may not be ideal, but anything is better than X.
X is just a machine for turning billionaire cash into political domination.
bluesky is just early twitter, and it wont stay that way for long. they’ve already removed people from there that the Turkish govt doesn’t like and there is nothing at all stopping some billionaire like musk from swooping in and buying it all up.
So “you don’t have to eat shit. Only drink piss”?
I mean that’s a pretty easy choice for me
It is humanities responsibility to make the rest of this man’s life miserable
What’s the quality like of the people who are still on Twitter in 2025? Does the fediverse want them? (These are real questions, I have no idea if there’s still any decent people on Twitter.)
There likely are (I quit Twitter over a year ago), just because it does unique coverage on many topics.
Every massive influx from Twitter has brought a deluge of people I want nothing to do with in any way shape or form, and a small sprinkling of cool ones. Fortunately like 4/5ths of the crappy ones leave again, but that other 1/5th is a big number when you’re talking an influx of hundreds of thousands.
ik some good people that are still there because some of their friends are.
They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.
For most people it’s unfortunately just “is it like Twitter” - both in terms of accessibility and algorithmic content suggestion.
I think a sad part of this is due to people wanting that vapid dopamagic response the algorithm provides.
Is it bad for us? Yes.
But addicts are going to addict 🫤
I know lots of people who made a fediverse account easy enough, but just end up back on the algorithm platforms as there’s no effort required for discovery.
For the longest time there just wasn’t enough activity so you’d get bored and stop checking back. There’s enough people now that this isn’t an issue anymore.
I think it’s more going to be more like twitter than they’re bargaining for.
personally i prefer bluesky just because the interface is more natural to me (and it’s just easier - but also because aew twitter is there and there’s more fandoms over on it) but i wish more people would embrace bridgyfed so that we don’t have to choose.
I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?
Have you tried using elk.zone? It mimics Twitter’s interface and has some great additional features (like zen mode)
oh i do like elk.zone and i do use fediverse, i just find myself more active on bsky just because i follow lots more. i have accounts on both and share on both for different reasons.
Fedi is doing fine whether or not Nazi platforms crumble.
Abandon anything this Nazi touches.
I forgot that people are still using Twitter. WTF!?
They are not - he X/cancelled it.:-P
What about his children that hate him but are still his children?
He’s gonna keep pumping them out till one of them likes him.
Remove the word “out” and that’s how I initially read this and went D:
;]
Can you imagine getting pumped by musk? 🤮
I bet he has cold damp hands
D:
Small chances for now, but let’s keep growing small communities here. People need to get tired of Instagram and centralized algorithms to switch to fediverse
I try to convince people to do “+1”. Like, keep X/insta/reddit or whatever, but every time you feel you have something to post, do the same at mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy. Those platforms are nothing without the network effects, and the network effects will diminish the more people do this.
I’d love it if the fediverse could have its own algoithms as long as theyre open sourced and made ethically, like they shouldn’t mess with peoples mental health or cause social media addictions
Yes. People don’t realize algorithms are one of the main reasons decentralized sited haven’t taken off. Most people don’t want to spend time looking for their content, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes and look at pretty art
You are the algorithm. It’s like going out decades ago. You didn’t have an app to tell you which restaurant, bar or pub was good. You had to go and see it for yourself. Here is the same. You see people and you decide if it’s good enough to follow them. The same with communities.
Just a reminder that politico is owned by the Axel Springer group which is a real force of bad for Germany and Europe. Their media campaigns often try to push the public opinion in a right wing conservative direction.
Their biggest shareholder (35%) is KKR (an American global private-equity and investment company) that use the might of the media group to sway the public opinion against climate friendly actions/policies.
Thanks for that, I will be making sure to avoid them.
A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.
The fediverse is about options. If you don’t like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It’s awesome because you don’t get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what “normal people” are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.
I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.
I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.
But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.
I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something.
This sounds like PieFed
Haven’t heard of that and will look into that. Thank you.
Instance admins have crashed out before and things keep working
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.
I mean, Mastodon is German, so they’re probably moving here. The federated fork of Dorsey’s Twitter is second.
BlueSky is not federated. Also German users have outsized representation on Mastodon but most of the network is outside Germany.
“federated”
Might have to also let people know the Fediverse exists?
Biggest problem with twitter/X is so many companies mess you around until you call them out on it, then things tend to get resolved how they should have been.
I truthfully have always seen that as Twitter/X’s only use
It was the same on the municipal level for me. I can call 311 or write to them, but it was kind of nice to be able to tweet at my neighbourhood and have people interacting with them and me on local issues.
