It has the same kind of infrastructure as email but for social media.
Done. 13 words for the average schmuck.
Comment on A New Study Investigates 'The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter' To Mastodon
davehtaylor@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Because federation is a mess, and doesn’t really solve the problem. There’s no quick elevator pitch that non-technical people can understand, on-boarding is painful, and even if you as the publisher understand it, your audience may not.
Yearly1845@reddthat.com 5 months ago
thingsiplay@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Kind of the same problem with Linux desktop in general and all other sub categories. Freedom equals to mess. I’m fine with that, but most people are not. Most people don’t care about freedom, as the cost is too high for them (not in terms of price), which shows in results like these.
reka@beehaw.org 5 months ago
From a UX perspective federation has been absolutely bungled. Twitters greatest trick was to cause an exodus before the alternatives had reached maturity, though I imagine the demand has pushed them further than they would be otherwise.
IMO BlueSky is by far the best Twitter replacement, insofar as you can just use it like Twitter but it is built on an open protocol, allowing you to run your own server if you wish but with zero interoperability friction or worrying about servers on the actual client. Also it has already started basic bridging between threads and mastadon, its custom feeds in place of algorithms is genius and stackable moderation is the most compelling solution I’ve seen to the core complaints and concerns over modern social media.
And it’s independent, transparent and run by intelligent, passionate people. And, very importantly, Jack Doesey has nothing to do with it!
davehtaylor@beehaw.org 5 months ago
I definitely agree Bluesky is the best alternative right now. It feels like twitter used to, but with much better moderation and no Dorsey (or Musk). And I love things like Aegis, and Feeds.
Threads’ algorithm is extremely aggressive and just viewing a single post will send your entire feed into reccs for that kind of thing. It constantly refreshes, making discovery and finding things extremely difficult. And it’s just Instagram-y. It’s not about building community, it’s just there for throwaway “content.”
But I do agree that Bluesky is doing federation in a way that simplifies it for the users. Non-tech users can just be there and don’t even have to think about it. In fact, most people there (at least across my feeds) have no idea what Federation even is or means. If others want to federate or hang somewhere else and have the knowledge to do that, they can. So they make it much more frictionless.
Domiku@beehaw.org 5 months ago
I think the biggest problem that Mastodon et. al need to solve is changing servers/accounts. There needs to be an easy way to move servers while retaining past posts, etc.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
But does there?
This comes back to what federation and “the fediverse” is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.
No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they’re different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.
But because it’s framed as “Mastodon” and not “social.website.com” the expectations are different.
Domiku@beehaw.org 5 months ago
No but when I tried to change Mastodon servers, I was frustrated to learn that I could carry over my followers but nothing else. The platform highlighted “easy mobility,” but I found that to be misleading.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Yeah, there’s plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That “easy mobility” requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Federation isn’t a mess, it’s just… messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they’re perfect drop-in replacements.
It results in a lot of questions about “Why can’t I ____?” and answers of the “Because this doesn’t work that way” variety.
Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn’t as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.
This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which… I mean, at that point, you’re just abandoning the central concept.