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I think this is an excellent summation of the state of thinking on the Twitter alternatives out there. Nevertheless, they make me profoundly disappointed. Bein

I think this is an excellent summation of the state of thinking on the Twitter alternatives out there. Nevertheless, they make me profoundly disappointed. Being inconvenienced by having to build up the contact list and therefore staying locked in with X seems to meet to fundamentally misunderstand, well, everything. All of the motivations for moving which are centered on seizing the benefits of federation for social media and preventing companies from locking in, to me those are at a different order of magnitude in terms of their importance. It's like not accepting the cure to your cancer because it comes in a green pill and green isn't your favorite color. All of that said I do accept and embrace the criticisms especially of blue sky because it does seem to have weird loopholes, seems to have a preference for centralization built into the protocol which kind of misses the point, and generally is contributing to the squandering of what could have been a grand fediverse moment, all due to some idiosyncratic squabbles over things like how to handle usernames.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
It's more than just that inconvenience (which is not a small one) it's that Mastodon is just a bunch of silos by interest in the end. You lose so much of the network effect for discoverability, both inwards and outwards. We've gotten used to having access to a whole world of networks via one centralized thing. I like the algorithm (with finessing). I want the 'suggested' posts of interest. With a good selection of follows, some amazing content gets surfaced/sent your way. I totally get the need/desire to break free of the company lock in, but Mastodon repeatedly shows how it is not it. The silos. The defederation risks. The missing community/participation unless you're really into only certain niches etc (still 'waiting' for more of the community to migrate over from twitter, waiting for engagement to pick up etc...). Might as well be on forums for interests again, which I have that already (HN for example). Anyways, lots of gripes. The fragmentation of the social network space has killed huge chunks of its value and the boat sailed on the 'grand fediverse moment' because it isn't grand in the end. Twitter has been a slow death losing a bunch of its value (but not really all of it, still huge amount of major posting, news, current happenings on there), which in many spaces has caused a growth in other centralized things like Instagram and Tik Tok. But we're talking 'microblogging' and putting the effort in to a platform like Mastodon, or even Bluesky when it's still figuring things out that are well established elsewhere, it's a tough sell.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

It's more than just that inconvenience (which is not a small one) it's that Mastodon is just a bunch of silos by interest in the end. You lose so much of the network effect for discoverability, both inwards and outwards. We've gotten used to having access to a whole world of networks via one centralized thing. I like the algorithm (with finessing). I want the 'suggested' posts of interest. With a good selection of follows, some amazing content gets surfaced/sent your way. I totally get the need/desire to break free of the company lock in, but Mastodon repeatedly shows how it is not it. The silos. The defederation risks. The missing community/participation unless you're really into only certain niches etc (still 'waiting' for more of the community to migrate over from twitter, waiting for engagement to pick up etc...). Might as well be on forums for interests again, which I have that already (HN for example). Anyways, lots of gripes. The fragmentation of the social network space has killed huge chunks of its value and the boat sailed on the 'grand fediverse moment' because it isn't grand in the end. Twitter has been a slow death losing a bunch of its value (but not really all of it, still huge amount of major posting, news, current happenings on there), which in many spaces has caused a growth in other centralized things like Instagram and Tik Tok. But we're talking 'microblogging' and putting the effort in to a platform like Mastodon, or even Bluesky when it's still figuring things out that are well established elsewhere, it's a tough sell.