“No corporate bullshit! It’s ruined twitter!”
“OK maybe some corporate bullshit, I’m sure Facebook will be better.”
I think Musk’s individual recklessness ruined Twitter a lot more than any corporatism.
Fair enough. But if we’re comparing CEOs, Zuckerberg isn’t better though.
I think Zuckerberg is the better CEO. He doesn’t shoot his mouth off as much as Musk, and his supervillain plans make more sense. That Tesla tunnel in Vegas is the next OceanGate.
I just hate the way that Elongated Muskrat makes us autistic people look terrible.
I feel like an incompetent POS does less real harm than a competent POS. Musk is unintentionally driving users off Twitter, Zuck is deliberately priming users to be exploited, and has been deliberately exploiting them.
Nah, Twitter users stay where they are. That’s Instagram users seeing what Twitter is like.
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.
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.
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They are about comparable, once you understand the instances it’s pretty straightforward. But I’m ngl, I was confused at first. I’d made my first Mastodon account in 2018! And didn’t use it till recently because I didn’t understand it for the longest.
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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
Ribbit
Don’t forget the amount of data you’ll be sharing, including health records
Seriously question, how do they get access to your health data, short of reading emails or sms?
It means data that has been recorded to your health app - steps per day/hour, sleep hours/analysis, heart rate readings if you have a watch or device that does that, estimated calories burned, etc.
Useful data for you to know and control, but incredibly creepy for a corporation like Meta to take for no reason other than to build an intrusive ad profile.
Ah gotcha, now I’m glad I haven’t set my phone up to monitor any of that
I’m guessing they record if you’ve been viewing a lot of, say, heartburn-related content, or once said “I suffer from heartburn”.
I’m guessing there’s no direct place for it there without reading email ( but even then your doctor should not be emailing you directly without a layer of encryption).
Probably it’s more of a “hey if we stumble on it it’s ours now”. Like if you subscribe to a lot of parkinson’s info they probably can safely assume you or someone you know has Parkinson’s. And they’ll use that to shove ads in your face.
Can’t they read sensor data and infer certain conditions from that? For example if you have a limp or something?
These are primarily the data stored by your health apps and sos information.
If you’ve Android health info stored for emergency cases, some apps with right permission can access it. You know to save your life.
Likewise, your health record on your health apps like Google/Apple/Samsung health store a lot of information about you like steps, sleep trends, heart rate, diabetes, water intake, and even period regularity.
In normal cases these records should only be known to you or shared with apps you approve.
Threads has no business normally to request these data, but if they want go serve you relevant ads, these become quite useful information.
They can show you sanitary products when you’re on period, or show ads for meds when you’ve high blood pressure. None of these should be monetised, but they can very well will be.
Dang you weren’t kidding. I know everyone here fucking hates all things social media but I was actually enjoying the content on Threads.
However they seem to be collecting literally everything about me even down to my workout routines and sleeping habits…this really gives me pause.
ikr! Like I’m so confused like, just get on mastodon and don’t deal with threads like ???
A lot of people use social media to follow celebrities, brands, politicians, etc., and Mastodon doesn’t have that (yet at least).
I prefer Mastodon, my feed consists of the people I decided to follow, instead of an algorithmic one. But one have to accept that Mastodon lacks the kind of users that most people want to follow.
Hopefully, if Meta ends up delivering on their promise to add support for the Fediverse, I will be able to follow the kind of people that otherwise would’ve never joined Mastodon (ie brands that would offer support for their products), from my Mastodon client of choice.
I know a lot of people disagree with Meta joining the Fediverse, but I prefer to be optimistic about it. Also, Mastodon supports blocking domains at a user level, so if you really don’t want to interact with @threads.net users, you can do it yourself.
Worst case scenario, we get back to the current status quo, so there’s nothing to lose.
That’s pretty much why I’ve been reluctant to join either Mastodon or Threads, compared to Lemmy. On Reddit/Lemmy, it doesn’t really matter who I talk with, as long as a community exists for the topics I’m interested in. But on Twitter, I pretty much exclusively follow content creators and don’t care to interact with anyone else. Until those streamers/youtubers/artists jump ship, I’m pretty much stuck on Twitter with them. When they do, I can only hope they pick Mastodon over Threads, so I can actually filter my feed to those I choose to follow, but ultimately I gotta go where they are.
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY. I’m so glad to see someone else say this.
It blows my mind how anyone is being able to create something worse than twitter, truly fascinting.
Back to business as usual. The reality is that the majority of people can’t be bothered with privacy and other scandals from GAFAM.
The silver lining of the whole Reddit and Twitter fiasco is that more people are interested in and participating in a decentralized network. That’s a good thing for the community.
Except they have thoroughly infiltrated the fediverse to the point where the simple idea of not federating with FACEBOOK of all companies is somehow controversial now.
That’s how I got here. I realized how many hours I was spending on Reddit and, once Slide stopped working I really just stopped using Reddit for the most part.
And now there’s Slide for Lemmy
Lol, I got hyped about Threads until I saw who runs it… meta… yeah no thanks!
I should try Mastodon
Good luck. Hope you like it. I never really used Twitter because I felt like it was hard to figure out how to use it to see interesting stuff in your feed. Then I tried Mastodon and had about the same experience. Not sure how it is now, but I tried a few months ago (maybe January or something) and there wasn’t a ton of activity so it was stale after a few wks using it and I gave it up.
I’ve like Lemmy a lot better but I think that’s because I always liked Reddit better.
The thing I liked about Twitter was following:
- Writers
- Academics and scientists
- Artists
Basically, following INTERESTING content creators was my jam. As someone who never made it all the way through college, but is basically a big nerd anyhow, Twitter was basically my only exposure to academic nerds who had a lot of interesting things to talk about. YouTube makes you sit through videos (which is nice sometimes, but too long other times for a fast reader like me), and people’s websites are never updated, and science papers I may or may not have the background to follow, but on Twitter, even academics had to learn how to convey their ideas in an understandable concise way. It was able to expose me to knowledge and social circles I never would have crossed in real life.
Reddit (now Lemmy) gives the same fix, but from anonymous people who contribute knowledge to a general pool instead of being a singular person to follow for a given topic.
Same here. Forum-like, message board like communication is more my style.
There are dozens of us I say! Dozens!
When you first start do a search on hashtags for subjects that you like, and subscribe to them. That’ll quickly build up a feed for you to scroll through.
Then you can add people after that once your feed is established.
They’ll tell you to sign up to small instances. Honestly ignore that advice. There’s a bug nobody’s fixed since 2016 that makes smaller instances nonviable imo. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34
Corporatewantsyoutotellthedifferencebetweenthosetwopictures.jpg
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the equivalent of suspecting one of two books to be containing Nazi propaganda because it has more pages in it.
I’m not saying you should not be suspicious of the content of Threads but using size as a metric for it seems nonsensical to a software dev.
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.
let them take baby steps
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?
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.
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 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.
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 (?).
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.
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.
In it for the long haul, its going to bathtub but we’ll get there eventually
I’m using the Thunder app to access my lemmy.world account. Is Mastodon also Lemmy? Can I browse lemmy.world and mastodon at the same time? I’m so new and vv confused.
Not really.
They’re both fediverse, but one is designed to follow communities, and the other is designed to follow people. A Mastodon user sees a community as a user, and can thus subscribe to it. There’s not really a way for a Lemmy user to do the inverse and subscribe to a user.
If you want a platform that does both (can subscribe to both communities and users), check out Kbin.
