Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person@instance) and groups (!group@instance), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren’t any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
I have no idea why Mastodon does what it does, but I also have no idea why anyone would build a weird auto reposting group thing for Mastodon. I honestly don’t understand how I’m supposed to use it, or preview what a group is. The listing I saw doesn’t tell me anything. Very odd.
- Completely agree about mastodon’s responsibilities. I like to put it differently though. The question is whether they are a good citizen of the fediverse. At the moment, they are not IMO. They’re obviously free to do what they want and enjoy their success, but acting in a way that supports the fediverse is a real objective standard and they don’t meet it I think.
- As many have said elsewhere, this is the reality with mastodon. It is its own thing. Relatively self-interested with a single leader that isn’t particularly concerned with being a community driven organisation. Which means it’s one guys pet project that just so happens to be the biggest thing on the fediverse. An example is that they have plans to do groups, but in their own way that the lemmy devs have said will be incompatible with lemmy. Yay!🎉
- Which means, if you care about the fediverse, you need to care about diversifying away from mastodon. It’s that simple unfortunately.
I hear you, kinda, but… Is it Mastodon’s job to promote other services? Mastodon doesn’t even implement ActivityPub to specification, so why would you expect them to hold hands and sing kumbaya?
I will say this though, a.gup.pe and chirp.social both should’ve probably switched and became Lemmy instances. As someone that follows [email protected] from my mastodon, I can tell you the user experience for the two kinds of groups wouldn’t get worse, but only better. Especially with 0.19.x and the changes made to Markdown support. Users would be able to access the groups via both Mastodon and Lemmy and not be limited to the Mastodon UI seems a no brainer to me, especially since it’s a drop in replacement.
Edit: I will add that dickheads are dickheads. That has nothing to do with how active somewhere is. Also it takes time for a community to grow. Things will go up and down, but the general direction remains that there’s more users here than a year ago.
Excellent point about aguppe!
One could go further and say it’s kinda anti-fediverse to not leverage the platforms already out there and instead focus on being mastodon-centric.
If they were to run a lemmy or kbin instance and focus on adding features for better interop with microblogs, that could be quite awesome.
@maegul kbin supports those groups btw ;)
https://kbin.social/magazines?query=a.gup.pe+&fields=names&federation=all&adult=hide
https://kbin.social/magazines?query=chirp.social&fields=names&federation=all&adult=hide@feditips @FediFollows @masimatutu @sabreW4K3
Nice!
From what I can tell kbin is registering a.gup.pe as a microblog. Does that mean you had to do something particular to get a.gup.pe working well with kbin so that it registers as a magazine?
I ask in part because lemmy I think registered a.gup.pe groups as communities for like a moment … but it never worked, so since then I’ve figured a.gup.pe are doing something weird in their AP implementation … ?
So … if I can lure you into a politically controversial topic … do you think a.gup.pe would benefit from running on kbin?
What has mastodon implemented wrong?
I don’t know the specifics of it, but I was reading some of the Lemmy pull requests conversations and it was mentioned there
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
