His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
I heard of Mastodon a couple of years ago. I was still on Twitter and Facebook. I am not really tech savvy, so I didn’t bother to go over to Mastodon. It was until just recent, I thought I would give it a try.
Long story short, I am on Mastodon, and I decided to ditch both Twitter and Facebook. Because, I like the layout and the format much better than the two. I even joined Friendica (open source platform like Facebook). So, as I started getting used to these open source social media platforms. They are much better and I would support Mastodon with some donations from time to time.
I mean, why pay $8 to Elon Musk, when you can do pretty much the same things on Mastodon? I wasn’t going to throw in my 8 bucks just to get a stupid tweetdeck. Mastodon has its own deck, and it’s totally free!
I am still investigating other various social media (open source) sites. I may even join Pixelfeed (alternative to Instagram).
I know you have to make money…but for a guy like Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, Space X, and a few others…why does he really need to charge people money to use his platform? I mean, I know he can do whatever he wants…but he has the money to keep the site going…without charging people 8 bucks to get “Premium” service.
The only thing Mastodon doesn’t have that X (Formerly Twitter) has, is the fact that you can watch (or upload) live streaming.
Maybe, in the future Mastodon will do that?
I think it’s unlikely that Mastodon (or other federated short form blogging platforms e.g. Pelorama) will integrate live-streaming as it’s pretty far outside of the normal content they are built for. There is a project that does support live streaming and is federated though: Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/
WebRTC could be used to provide peer-to-peer streaming. The load on the servers would be very minimal since the feeds would be sent directly from the host to the viewers. A lot of live streaming and video conferencing apps already use it to keep their hosting costs down.
The downside is that the IP address of the viewers will be exposed, even over a VPN unless precautions are taken by the user or the application.
And HTTP/2 can be used to provide video steaming, but that doesn’t mean that nginx will be the next YouTube. This isn’t a question of technical feasibility, but project focus. Though, I must admit, I don’t follow the development of fediverse software all that closely, so maybe it is on the roadmap.
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on… That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.
I think it is because Bluesky is simpler and easier to understand, as well as more familiar to use than mastodon. My favorite streamer said he is reluctant to move to the fediverse because of how different it is and the learning curve it has to it. I’m also, like, EXTREMELY new here and understand but once you start to get used to it, its easy to see how the fediverse and this “New Social” wave is far superior; the only hard part is getting “normies” to try it long enough to build enough familiarity to see that.
Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
That and finding relevant things or anything at all sometimes; also I hear that people want to see everything like a friendica environment but don’t like the differences from the social medias they know already. I’m not sure if it is all valid or relevant because I am extremely new to the fediverse in general myself.
I guess I don’t understand. Why would someone want to “find” microblogs of people they don’t already know about from elsewhere? It’s like wanting to find someone’s email to me.
Not sure; I guess as a new person, I’d like to find micro blogs about topics and things that I might agree with? I was never really into twitter or micro-blogging; I don’t really understand the appeal but I figure since it is a social media, you might want to find similar people with like-minded blogs or whatever? Like I found a new up-coming political streamer that I like from another. Maybe that isn’t what micro-blogging is for and I’m off base.
I see microblogging as a way of following the thoughts of someone you’re already interested in. Maybe a friend, maybe a famous person. But it’s not a way to get deeper understanding. Nothing profound has ever been conveyed in a tweet. So I don’t know why I would look for the tweets of strangers. It’s more of a event tracking or relationship-maintaining kind of communication tool.
Fair enough, I just figured that as a social network, part of the goal is to connect new people together. You can look at Facebook in the same way you described it. That’s what its original purpose was. To just connect with people you already know, but I feel like social networking in general has since evolved from this. We can look at things like Facebook groups for example where it is more on the lines of what I’m thinking, people join groups that interest them and interact with like minded people that they have likely never met before.
I find the idea of using hashtags as the same.
Like it, like Bluesky too, uninstall Twitter after using these apps for several days.
Reject any app that has an forced automated recommendation system
I do wonder what prevents BlueSky from going the way Twitter did, though.
It’s open-source and has a public protocol.
You still have to go through the central hub. You can’t spin up your own, wholly independent Bluesky. You can only make your own node.
Yes, it’s not a full web3 app, but I like that these apps are heading in the right direction.
However it’s better than Twitter/Instagram. I can control my feed!
Twitter also looked great until it didn’t, it even comes from the same guy.
While at this moment BlueSky looks good, we will end up the same way sooner or later. Muskov et. al. figured out how to monetize social media. Now Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others are tools to manufacture opinion. And certain opinions are worth a lot to certain people.
