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After 3 years on Mastodon and some lurking on bsky, I believe the main issue is not technical but getting and keeping interesting content on a platform. This is

by rmoriz 1y ago

After 3 years on Mastodon and some lurking on bsky, I believe the main issue is not technical but getting and keeping interesting content on a platform. This is a social issue as bubbles ruin everything over time. OTOH using algorithms to mix some „foreign“ content into the feeds causes outrages. Sure we can all go web3 and self-hosted but nobody will read. Mastodon is the posterchild of a failed experiment. I‘m interested in the creative, productive, inspiring long-tail content on all platforms instead of migrating the peer group over to a new platform every couple of years. I know them already, I have better ways to communicate with my direct peers and the rest is like having 500 contacts on LinkedIn: A social illusion. I appreciate and respect the technical efforts behind atproto, but yet I can‘t see that it solves the problem described above.

zoul 1y ago
In what way is Mastodon a failed experiment? Low number of active users or something else?
- rmoriz 1y ago
  Mastodon never had a good amount of orginal content to explore, only very few creators produced and shared. Topics I followed were mainly infosec, programming, biking but content and interaction faded dramatically over the last 6 months. You won’t get anything back, no reach, no constructive feedback, no real life contacts. Twitter was a place to get inspired and learn new things, find OC memes, code snippets, niche insight, etc. Mastodon lately just went full anticapitalist, anti-tech, anti AI. Nothing insightful. Irrationality. Depression. Reddit is still a better place to discover and discuss things, if you find active subs covering a topic.
numpad0 1y ago
Yeah it's solving a wrong problem. What's needed is means to get enough bandwidth of data, not giving yet another blog site you can post to. The kind of content that wins the Internet is never the kind that'll be "popular", despite all objective data, so whoever to run the platform has to "algorithm" the system to prefer "popular" contents which destroys the community as well as greater society in matters of decades. We just needed an RSS with a local algorithm.
verdverm 1y ago
> keeping interesting content on a platform > instead of migrating the peer group over to a new platform every couple of years > I appreciate and respect the technical efforts behind atproto, but yet I can‘t see that it solves the problem described above. If I am correctly reading backwards from "does atproto solve this core problem I see" ... ATProto is a fabric where your data lives and Bluesky is just one app that sits on top of this. Your network and data stays with you if you move platforms or try out completely different apps. Same account, same data, same social graph (if you want to reuse it for other apps or not). Similarly, other apps can access all or some of your data (if you let them), so you don't have to start from scratch and they can provide more interesting content for new to them users (but not new to atproto) In this sense, as people try out and move around different apps, they don't lose things. Users can even be on different apps, but using the same underlying data, transparent to them. This is called the "credible exit" around the atmosphere (atproto ecosystem nickname) and means (1) you can leave a bad company without them preventing you from taking your data (2) enables real competition in social apps, re: the aforementioned features.

by rmoriz 1y ago

zoul 1y ago

In what way is Mastodon a failed experiment? Low number of active users or something else?

rmoriz 1y ago
Mastodon never had a good amount of orginal content to explore, only very few creators produced and shared. Topics I followed were mainly infosec, programming, biking but content and interaction faded dramatically over the last 6 months. You won’t get anything back, no reach, no constructive feedback, no real life contacts. Twitter was a place to get inspired and learn new things, find OC memes, code snippets, niche insight, etc. Mastodon lately just went full anticapitalist, anti-tech, anti AI. Nothing insightful. Irrationality. Depression. Reddit is still a better place to discover and discuss things, if you find active subs covering a topic.

numpad0 1y ago

Yeah it's solving a wrong problem. What's needed is means to get enough bandwidth of data, not giving yet another blog site you can post to. The kind of content that wins the Internet is never the kind that'll be "popular", despite all objective data, so whoever to run the platform has to "algorithm" the system to prefer "popular" contents which destroys the community as well as greater society in matters of decades. We just needed an RSS with a local algorithm.

verdverm 1y ago

> keeping interesting content on a platform > instead of migrating the peer group over to a new platform every couple of years > I appreciate and respect the technical efforts behind atproto, but yet I can‘t see that it solves the problem described above. If I am correctly reading backwards from "does atproto solve this core problem I see" ... ATProto is a fabric where your data lives and Bluesky is just one app that sits on top of this. Your network and data stays with you if you move platforms or try out completely different apps. Same account, same data, same social graph (if you want to reuse it for other apps or not). Similarly, other apps can access all or some of your data (if you let them), so you don't have to start from scratch and they can provide more interesting content for new to them users (but not new to atproto) In this sense, as people try out and move around different apps, they don't lose things. Users can even be on different apps, but using the same underlying data, transparent to them. This is called the "credible exit" around the atmosphere (atproto ecosystem nickname) and means (1) you can leave a bad company without them preventing you from taking your data (2) enables real competition in social apps, re: the aforementioned features.