By the by, many people on BlueSky are mentioning how Mastodon didn’t feel welcoming and was very confusing.
Especially people from marginalized communities like Black Twitter.
By the by, many people on BlueSky are mentioning how Mastodon didn’t feel welcoming and was very confusing.
Especially people from marginalized communities like Black Twitter.
Meanwhile, tons of people on Mastodon are valuing abstract “purity” over being welcoming to new people.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the upside it should be possible to bridge any open protocol social network (in this case ActivityPub and the AT Protocol); so hopefully at some point in the future you’ll be able to use a single account to interact with people from BlueSky.
@emmah oh there’s many issues with it, but also some good lessons to be learned
@thomasfuchs BlueSky still has a considerable problem in that Jack Dorsey is involved with it.
@emmah because the user experience is better
@thomasfuchs I still don't understand why people want to flock to a centralized environment run by a white billionaire.
@emmah As in the two main social features people use, replies and quoting, are either broken or not available on Mastodon.
@JonathanTreffler people don’t give a fuck about the technical implementation; they do about working replies, threading and quoting
@thomasfuchs And BlueSky fixed the being confusing problem by being a federated network with exactly one node ?
I have seen a lot of talk of how BlueSky will fix problems of ActivityPub, but always with an asterisk *Not yet implemented, not even technical details on how they want to do it available.
I am by no means rooting for BlueSky to fail, it is theoretically federated afterall, but so far I have seen big talk and little to show for it on a technical level 🤷♂️.
@emmah Those reasons came from a privileged position from people who use social media just for fun, anyone—especially marginalized communities—using it for real discussions that are often very serious need to be able to add context; which is not possible without quoting posts. (Also, harrassment happens mainly in replies on Twitter, but that’s another story.)
The other thing is that replies have to work. They don’t always work across instances on Mastodon and are not even eventually consistent.
@thomasfuchs and there are well documented reasons it was not implemented here.
@emmah In this is why so many people aren’t here. They know what they want and like and don’t want other people to lecture them.
@thomasfuchs in all seriousness, maybe they need a Matrix instance instead of a twitter clone?
@thomasfuchs agreed! And said it before myself. Starting fresh and feeling like your building something new was taken away from Twitter migrants to masto. And while mastodon people shouldn’t have been required to hand over the keys, a truly thriving federation should have found a way to give the migrants their own space to grow. Now competitors can provide this fresh experience and fracture the field and rest some fediverse lunch.
@thomasfuchs i had hoped to give a chance to bluesky, still beta right?
@EricMEagan more like alpha, it’s very early
@torb @maegul @emmah People shouldn't have to care about the implementation details of software they use.
As experts we should strive to provide software that's well-made, usable, useful and doesn't have any dirty hidden secrets.
@maegul @emmah @thomasfuchs To be clear, it’s anecdotal based on my personal experience, so I’m not claiming to have hard statistical data here!
I don’t think it’s not seeing the point as maybe not understand the basic concept. I think us techies sometimes underestimate how much less understanding of technical issues non-techies often have (for a variety of reasons). For example, to a lot of them Facebook Messenger is like email, but like, much easier to use, and that’s the extent of what they think of it. Federation is a fairly complex thing after all.
My hope is that a lot more of them is starting to care now, enough to put in the effort to get what federation is!
@torb @emmah @thomasfuchs so I’m curious (as a majority cis-straight etc) as to what extent this is true. Like, for example, are there trans or queer communities out there made up of non-techie people that just don’t see the point of the fediverse or see the dynamic you state here and happily don’t care about it?
Please feel free to rebuff me if the question is onerous or or annoying in anyway. It’s just that you imply an interesting division for the fediverse.
@emmah @thomasfuchs I think both can be true.
Mastodon and fediverse seem to work great for a lot minorities as long as they’re also techies. Espescially white neurodivergent and/or queer people. Idk why. Less so from other minorities.
But not all marginalized people are techies! For a lot of them Twitter (despite it issues) provides them with a importabt support network that Mastodon just haven’t been able to provide them for a variety of reasons. We need to be sensetive to that too.
That’s where I maybe see some promise from Bluesky and the AT protocol. I want federated social for all, not only techies.
On the other hand: maybe we just need more userfriendly ActivityPub instances. Will be interesting to see happens Tumblr implements ActivityPub.
@thomasfuchs and conversely people don't want to be told they need to risk harm so someone else can have a pet feature.
And the group speaking out about the risks around quote tweets is also a marginalized group.
@torb @maegul @emmah Completely agree. I’m fed up because I care about Mastodon being a tool for, you know, interesting conversations.
At least some people are honest and outright say “I care more about open source than it being useful for conversations” etc.
@thomasfuchs @maegul @emmah Agreed.
Frankly I find people make excuses for some of Mastodon’s defacto technica elitism by hiding behind lofty ideals.
Said ideals truly are great, but don’t seem to include concern for less technical users and I frankly find it to imply a mild disdain for non-technical users around here.
It’s the same reason I got really fed up with the Linux on desktop community a decade ago.
(I’m generalising here of course, not everyone in these communities are bad, and many truly are doing great work!)
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.