> are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
The fediverse is a viable alternative. But most non-tech people don't know about it.
But that's not the end results. Senators have youtube channels, representative posts tweets and even tiktoks to update people, and emergency broadcasts post on Facebook. I'm not opposed to the expanded reach, but when that's their only official channel, it feels like something failed.
Recent years have only now made some non-US entities be pushed to start building away from this dependency, but it's a shame it had to get this far ingrained to begin with.
That's not necessarily the endorsement you think it is.
(Also, they sign up for mailing lists all the time, often whether they want to or not because everybody wants you to be on their damn mailing list. Email is absolutely still a viable broadcast medium, despite all the pundits declaring "email is dead" before they go back to, you know, checking their email.)
Yes exactly. The difference is that you live in the us where you grew up with the concept of an information superhighway in the 90s. In most of the world the internet as websites never existed, it arrived with smartphones and thus social media apps and by extension some other apps. The things you mention were all done in person or via messaging apps until other apps were introduced. Actually most of the world still does those things in person or via WhatsApp. Well of course not Facebook, LinkedIn or online banking because they arrived with smartphones too.
Bluesky attracted socialist progressives, furries, and kink-positive folks early on.
I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
A lot of people are turned off by that when they see it as their first experience with the platform. Or they're actively turned away upon interaction. That's not how you build a big social network.
Mastodon is the exact same.
These platforms are also not winning people over by calling them "toots" and "skeets".
It's like Gimp refusing to adopt a Photoshop style UI for years and not changing their name.
Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream. If they wanted to grow big, they'd behave much differently. They'd try to get the Kardashians and would welcome posts about handbags and guns and sports.
I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.
Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.
Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.
I'd say Mastodon at this point is mostly people talking in a vacuum (even more than BlueSky)
No mainstream discussion or debate comes from Mastodon, you don't see screenshots around (and you do see skeets around)
As much as SpaceXAi lost audience, there's a lot of discussion still going around there
> I'm not making any value statements, and there's nothing wrong with the userbase, but this is what dominates the feed for new users.
As someone who's never joined Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc., I find it weird that this would be the case. If I join as a new user, why would my feed not be empty, until I choose who to follow? If I don't want to see furries and kink, I'll never follow such users, so I'd expect that content will never show up the first place. But if these services pre-populate new users' feeds with random people's posts, well, that's just bizarre to me.
socialists yes. progressive ones not even close.
Firefighters who deal with forest fires, police, governments, rescue services (here in Spain) are all posting their updates on X - because, like the users, they have no choice, because no alternative exists.
For comparison, I have NINA installed on my phone, a German government app for exactly this category: https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Warn-App-NINA/wa...
Number of users? Google play story says "10M+", same as the Bluesky app.
90% of an app like this (broadcast, one-way, no comments, no need for moderation system because only governments get to push content) was already for the most part a piece of piss to write before LLMs came along. The 10% part that's hard is going to be backup infrastructure that X also won't help much with, because the first two items in the list of hazards icons is "Attack on IT systems" then "Attack with nuclear weapons". (4 is "IT system outage", 6 is "Telephone line outage").