In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
The problem is that #10 in this article is why 99% of people won’t leave Xitter for Mastodon. Most of the people with lots of followers on X aren’t on Mastodon. It’s really that simple. Some “influencers” need to be convinced to open up Mastodon accounts and advertise exclusive content on there for their followers. Until then, we will be stuck with a handful of journalists, Flipboard, and Stephen Fry.
This is how I feel about Bluesky. It’s so good, but really needs more people.
Here’s an alternative question: Do we really want the fediverse to take off like big tech did?
I sort of like that this little corner of the Internet isn’t filled with a bunch of megacorporations and political bot farms trying to fiddle with our opinions to their benefit. Once it gets too big, it’s going to lose something really important. Also, I fear that it could become impossible for a little operator to run an instance anymore.
Solid point. Kind of goes back to what we want out of our social media. If we want to follow the celebrities we like, we’re probably stuck with Xitter & other data harvesters (outside of the enlightened folks like Mr. Fry). I honestly use Mastodon slightly more than I use(ed) Twitter. Barely more than not at all.
I really don’t think that Mastodon needs influencers. It’s just normal people talking about normal stuff. Don’t need any “I‘m so glorious, and here’s my product that will make you think you’re glorious, too” kind of influencers there, thanks!
This, very much this. I’ve been having more pleasant discussions with random people replying to Mastodon posts compared to the brain parasites victim making their nest on xitter.
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Please, just no. Keep those scum influencers away. It would immediately ruin the platform.
LOL, my brain read that as “shitter” and I found that pretty fitting.
I mean, you guys are stuck with me as your only real celebrity for a while… (and the Debian logo design person.)
Wow. Finally got a reply from her! Big fan of what you’re doing (you know, the Barbie movie and whatnot).
I remember back in 2000s 2 or 3 guys were so misinformed that Bruce Wills himself joined the comments and explained the movie industry doesn’t work that way. Of course they didn’t believe it was him and they ended up being video called by him to “prove” it is really him. I will find that page one day. In the 90s it was common that a famous actor/producer discuss ongoing things with the fans.