It‘s like Twitter basically, but since it‘s also in the fediverse there is a bit of overlap where Mastodon people can comment on Lemmy/kbin stuff too anyway. Usually they have something like @LostCause and hashtags like #mastodon and so on in their comments, that‘s how I typically spot them.
So their growth is relevant for us, but you don‘t need to make an account there.
Just like twitter except what you see on your feed is reliant on what #’s or people you follow. So you essentially have more control over what you see and you wont get any posts from some rando like twitter does
Mastodon is hard to get into because at first you only really see what is coming from your own instance. You have to really look around and find the people and topics you want to see in your feed. It's a much more carefully curated set of content than you get from Twitter, which just bombards you with hot takes and garbage all the time.
It's really interesting.. i gave it a shot a few days back. You've to follow stuff or hashtags you're interested in for things to show up.. after that take it slow and follow more things.. I've found some really good music playlists, art, programming discussions on there. There's also an explore section which shows trending topics and posts. I can recommend it as the users are mature and in my experience not toxic.
It's not like here at all. No shitposts. Only people who use their real name and work for some non profit sharing their highly intelligent news bulletins. I haven't found any memes
I don't think there's any advertising budget being spent on these fedi platforms, which makes it impressive they've grown so much from media exposure and word of mouth.
The fediverse isn't driven by profit, so growth for the sake of growth isn't necessary. Word of mouth will let the fediverse platforms grow naturally and sustainably
It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.
Personally, I'd like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it's a slippery slope.
Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.
But quantity drives quality. Many big names join platforms specifically for the outreach they provide. That's by far the biggest reason that there's still so many big names on Twitter and co that haven't migrated.
Especially for the many people who need to make a living and thus need that outreach. The vast, vast majority of viewers will never pay for a picture they see on the internet or a streamer who makes them laugh. For a platform to be financially viable for creative types to make a living, they need a ton of viewers.
I spent some time on Threads to see how it was and it's a fucking cesspool of like-mongering and look at me oneupsmanship bullshit that was so fucking tiring to look at that I deleted the app after 4 days.
Well, it would best to compare apples to apples, there are 8M total Mastodon accounts to 108M Threads accounts.
For active users if we assume the same active ratio (probably not, but I couldn't find any data for Threads on that from a 1 minute search), then it would be 2 million to 27 million, which is small but it wouldn't "completely" drown out Mastodon.
And our communities will remain strong. The people growing and caring for a free and open Internet will always be here as the minority to large corporations and lowest common denominators of society.
I believe it was the official mastodon blog that compared Meta advising xmpp the way they'll abuse the fediverse but we will stand strong.
Threads created a shadow account for every user on Instagram, so, I dunno. I'm guessing most of those are just dummy accounts that will remain forever inactive.
That number obviously doesn't include those, because Instagram has over 2 BILLION users. It's also easy to see how Threads can quickly get to 100M when that means you just have to convince 5% of your users to try your new platform that they don't even have to sign up for.
Again, that's billion with a B. Instagram is unfathomably huge. They only needed 0.1% of their users to rival all of Mastodon.
If i remember correctly, Threads just uses your pre-existing Instagram account so 108 million is a veeeery theoretical number. We will see how many users actually move to Threads and whether our instances don't block Threads instances.
You still need to sign up to/log into Threads (via Instagram) to have a Threads account or be active on there though, so what makes it theoretical? If they counted all Instagram accounts as Threads accounts it'd instantly be in the billions surely.
This is great! But generally can't see Mastadon overtaking any other major social platforms until it introduces an equivalent of For you feed from Twitter. The days of following specific people and hashtags is over, it's tedious and I don't give a shit about 3/4s of the feed.
2017-2020 Twitter was absolutely peak Twitter algorithm wise and thousands of users want that exact experience back, yet nobody will provide it.
You gotta follow some people, and also hashtags. Following hashtags made a huge difference populating my feed. There's no algorithm so you get to/have to choose what you want to see.
I also use the ice cubes app for mastodon, which has a trending option also for when I want to see what's gaining traction outside of my follows.
Also don't be afraid to use filters to block keywords if you need a break from certain topics. It's amazing how calm and actually interesting the feed is if you block all mentions of Twitter and Threads and US politics
Follow your friends, check out your instance's federated feed and follow some people there (if you aren't self hosting), follow some tags, and follow a trending bot like @[email protected]
Finding people to follow in Mastodon mostly happens by:
Search topics using hashtags
Randomly browsing local feeds of different instances
Randomly browsing the federated feed
Randomly browsing local feed
There are instances for different interests like game development, art, information security, foss etc so there's a lot of places to dig for good content.
Hashtags are your friend. It also helps if you have some active posters for the tag. I get good content from following #sciencefiction #coffee and #python.
Ok. What’s next? There’s a tweet, there’s an icon that it has 16 comments, but I can’t read those. When I click on that icon I have the ui to write a comment.
Thats likely due to lack of algorithms with goal to keep you browsing forever. Twitter likely harvests all the data it can get from you when you browse twitter. They can also track your browsing habits using your IP (among many other things) and sites that have embed twitter content like share button or embed tweets.
Just look for the things that you are interested in. That's how i accumulated many of my followed accounts over time as well as subscribed subreddits over time.
You can also look for users under the same name on Mastodon and (hopefully) find them.
Please note that if you find an account you also followed on twitter and it ends with @bird.makeup, it's a bot mirroring tweets on Mastodon without mirroring your answers on Mastodon back to Twitter.
Is it recommended to create an account specifically for Mastodon or just use your Lemmy-account? Will it fuck up my feeds/subs in some way if I only use one account for both? (I'm new to the whole fediverse thing)
Stay away from advertising money , if you need money to keep a server up then start a gofundme or a patreon or something ... make it community based so that your instance stays community based .
To be honest - Lemmy migration made me an active Mastodon user.
I joined Mastodon right after Musk took over Twitter. I was never big on Twitter but wanted to try mastodon.
But never became active. Because I was not a tweeter. I was also not a tooter.
The Reddit exodus was a wake up call for me and I committed to become a user and supporter in fediverse. So the migration to Lemmy/Kbin activated me as a Mastodon active users.
A lot of people left due to it not being morally sound for them to support Musk and his actions.
But now there are paywalled features that are ruining the functional experience of Twitter. You can’t look at the site for more than half an hour before getting restricted on a free account
Plus Mastodon has had time to polish instances, apps and gain a userbase so it is a little easier to transition
I mean, each time he's messed it up more, another group of people migrates off twitter over to alternatives. I also think more people in general are becoming aware of the fediverse in general thanks to what's going on w/ reddit, but that's speculation on my part.