Technology

Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion.

No they won't, Reddit killed Internet Forums, Threads has over 200 million active monthly users, and BlueSky already has double the number of users of Mastadon and is adding 10 new ones PER SECOND . Mastadon will be entirely irrelevant by the end of Q1 2025.

What we're watching right now is the exact same fight that the chat platforms had back in the early 2000s. AOL chat vs IRC vs Yahoo Chat vs Microsoft Messenger. That was temporarily addressed by using multi-service clients like Trillian...and then Facebook rolled in and squashed them all. BTW there are several multi-platform clients out there right now that will allow you to interact with Xitter, Threads, BlueSky, and Mastadon simultaneously just like the Trillian of old.

I've been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can't think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with "normal" users.

That is the only likely future ahead. BS is growing so fast that there's no way they can sustain this growth even if they add ads. The only path forward is selling out. I think Microsoft might be interested in finally owning a popular social media site.

I like the idea of the local feed, especially for smaller, less generalized instances, but the default should definitely be federated and the wording could also be changed if only because the word "federated" would probably be confusing to non-technical people. Replacing it with something like "All" might be a better idea

How many does Threads have?

Threads is honestly terrible. There are these asinine little widgets on Instagram that show you threads that people have posted and don't show you the full one so you click see more and it brings you to the app store. But no one really uses it much, so you see a lot of things being posted with no interaction at all

I think "leave" is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.

I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, "The creatives have moved to Bluesky."

You underestimate the news cycle hitting regular folk who so far didn't know alternatives existed to twitter.

Yeah I don't know why it took people so fucking long to realize that being on Twitter does nothing other than help the oligarchs, but here we are...

I think a lot of the future of social media is going to be determined by ease of use/beginner-friendliness.

The issue (and strength) with Lemmy is there's multiple instances. You're not gonna be able to explain it to non-technical people, even as an experienced programmer myself I sometimes find myself getting confused by Lemmy. People don't want to learn, they just want to use something that works.

Then again, KBin only had the one instance pretty much I think, and yet that died out anyway. So I think part of it is people just want to go where everyone else is, and that did end up being Lemmy and not KBin (although the maintainer of KBin also refused outside contributions which helped seal its fate lol)

If Bluesky has the one instance, and you literally just go to bsky.app and sign up, that's going to be a lot easier than trying to sell people on Mastodon or Lemmy when they Google those. Then again, I just googled Mastodon and it took me right to Mastodon.social so maybe I am mistaken.

Exactly. They're abusive assoles. Fuck them. We're outa there.

Why do people of different political leanings need to be in the same entertainmart platform?