The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture. I'm not judging, I have guilty pleasures too, but for my tastes: good riddance!
I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens.
Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them.
But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it.
Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.
nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum.
On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.
RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter.
And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing).
Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue.
RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0]
>Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics
The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform.
But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this.
EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437
I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.
I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.
My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.
There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...
and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.
The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.
I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.
lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.
I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.
we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.
Are you paying for it? I've been using omg.lol for some time and I'm not concerned about that mastodon instance disappearing anytime soon.
I've been donating to the instance, yes. Although the reason this time is to do with UK's new laws on social media sites.
This will keep happening until people realize that:
- there is a significant cost to properly manage an instance
- there is a significant cost to develop sustainably the software
- there is a significant cost to deal with moderation
and that these costs can not be covered by donations from a small minority.
I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.
And why is your instance shutting down?
-----
from link:
>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people
I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.
>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.
Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.
To allow others to see your posts, yes.
But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).
Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.
> And why is your instance shutting down?
This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.
> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.
I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.
> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.
I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.
Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.