It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
It won’t last unless Mastadon gets some serious improvements. It’s buggy, glitchy, feature-poor, and confusing to use. There’s no way in its current state it’s going to compete with the big guys for the average person’s attention.
Do you remember the early days of social media? IMHO, as the new hotness I’ve seen a rapid pace of improvements that I honestly expect to ramp up further as more utilization comes. Pure speculation but I’m basing it on my grey beard and the refreshing experience I’m having here.
I mean, they need to ramp it way faster. It’s pretty garbage right now and there’s really no excuse. Compare it to Lemmy and it’s very obvious. Lemmy still has problems, but it’s much easier to use and has way fewer bugs and glitches. If you’re used to Reddit, then switching to Lemmy is pretty easy to do, and I can see average users making that jump. But Mastadon isn’t even close to the user experience that Twitter/X offered, and I cannot see the average Twitter user sticking around and waiting for all the issue to be fixed.
I switched from Reddit to Lemmy today and I fully condone your comment. I decided to not use any microblogging service before using mastodon after Twitter. The switch from Reddit to Lemmy was a bliss.
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I’m missing something about how the app works.
I’d recommend following the hashtags you want to see. It’s sort of a build-your-own algorithm
This is a huge thing about the fediverse.
Users are used to being told what they want (algorithms) without any choice (centralised and only platform).
Whereas Lemmy and Mastodon require users to curate their stuff.
Perhaps some “meta fedi” sites would be useful. Things that generate lists of hashtags, instances and users “shake up” your experienceI found fishing for (and following) hashtags on Mastodon effective but Mastodon was also in much better shape to receive the waves of Twitter exoduses.
Lemmy lacks effective tools to organize a feed. I think many people recreated their favorite subreddits as communities but the userbase was too small to support them. Being able to create “multi-reddits” to group related micro-communities together to help mitigate the ghost town feeling as you raise the probably of at least one of them having something new to talk about.
Re-reading your post before I hit submit… I think I am just repeating what you are saying!
What I was saying:
I think the solution is “meta instances” or “meta communities” or “meta aggregators”.
A community or instance that aggregates the smaller communities.
And some way for smaller communities to submit content to that aggregator.
Like, I’m browsing my instance’s “all”. I find a good meme that suits my “programming memes” interest. So, I submit that post to the aggregator.Essentially like cross posting, but a community of all crossposts and everything is treated like it’s on the original instance.
But as a primary feature. Where it’s easy to “submit to aggregate subscription” or whatever.But then we would get every instance with their own meta-community, and it’s just a complication on top of communities and instances.
Putting a list of similar instances and communities in the sidebar would help a ton. Yes, there is a list of communities on every instance, but I’m not scrolling through a hundred rows trying to determine which I might like based on the names.
Any android app recommendations? I’m yet to use Mastodon.
Tusky, Fedilab
I’ve been trying to stick to Mastodon and ditch Twitter, but honestly, even though I’ve gotten into the habit of using Mastodon every day, it’s pretty hard for me to resist accepting information from Twitter.
My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.
