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.
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, 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.
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
Nice meme but pls.
Or!
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.
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.
The biggest L is watching porn artists try to move to Threads when the platform doesn’t even allow their content.
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.
Don’t forget the amount of data you’ll be sharing, including health records
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.
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
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’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
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.
Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
