Living with influencers in their feeds.

where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?

They've been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn't visible affected them negatively.

Of course it will eventually and they'll Pikachu face then but that's hardly comforting.

I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.

You expect a lot from vegetables.

How do you know that people don't know that Threads is Meta?

Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.

Funny, that's exactly the reason I like Mastodon's feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I'm following and the posts they make.

The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you've got your sea legs

The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.

Yeah, most people aren't on social media to see "what their friends are up to," they're there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest "thing" is. Mastodon doesn't have any of that, or at least it's very hard to find.

Mastodon’s own app is kind of trash. Mastodon confused the shit out of me until I tried Ivory.

That’s not what I want to see.

It also doesn't really show a like count which I kinda get but it's really annoying

I've been trying to hammer this point home.

I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click "advanced sign-up" if you choose to do so.

The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.

Centralization is the core problem of social media though. It allows a single entity control over the data and as soon as you have that, you have Zuck.

Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If they can't manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.

Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/...

And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.

I've seen people lose their shit over having to "sign up for another app" and honestly I don't want people who have no respect for their data, privacy and have the personality of a wet cardboard right-wing conservative on the fediverse. That's why Fb exists. We are here as users because we chose to, as other people chose what best suits them.

I think it's a good thing honestly. It brings a better quality of people here in my opinion.

Exactly, I downloaded Mastodon and deleted it in one day. It was too complicated (in an annoying way) to use. I'm very IT literate, but I don't want to learn to use a platform, or do research. I want it to work out of the box, and I want it to be easy and the content to be accessible. Now think about all the non-IT literate people out there, of course Threads will do well because it's just create an account and you're good to go... If Mastodon was like that I would use it.

Yeah, it's unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That's a massive number of people who could be easily informed "hey, wanna try our new product?" As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.

I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads' numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.

Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue

Or!

Most of the alt templates suck and the og is still good. Why change?

I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.

To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn't anything fishy in there, but that's part of the reason.

Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.

Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.

But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it's own. Multiple of them will take much more.

Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread's version's APK and unpacked it.

It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.

The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.

Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.

Just different tech used most likely. Mastodon is a native app and Threads probably something like React Native, so it has a JS runtime inside and a bunch of dependencies.

As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it's not even worth talking about - it'd be like 100kb at worst.

The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are "jack of all trades" type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.

When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that's been added over time and it's easier to just "copy/paste" most stuff they've ever written than to start over.

This is the equivalent of suspecting one of two books to be containing Nazi propaganda because it has more pages in it.

I'm not saying you should not be suspicious of the content of Threads but using size as a metric for it seems nonsensical to a software dev.

I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I'm not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don't have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.

I'm curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?

Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn't blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances' rules against advertising.

Dang you weren’t kidding. I know everyone here fucking hates all things social media but I was actually enjoying the content on Threads.

However they seem to be collecting literally everything about me even down to my workout routines and sleeping habits…this really gives me pause.

Seriously question, how do they get access to your health data, short of reading emails or sms?

Die average Twitter user doesn't even care about not knowing what it is.

yes, that is exactly what the Internet should be, with full VR...

What's wrong with Bluesky? 🤔

Bluesky is at least federated, no?

The only thing I liked about bluesky was that i could use my domain as my handle...seemed cool.

Except they have thoroughly infiltrated the fediverse to the point where the simple idea of not federating with FACEBOOK of all companies is somehow controversial now.

That's how I got here. I realized how many hours I was spending on Reddit and, once Slide stopped working I really just stopped using Reddit for the most part.

I mean Zuck is not batshit crazy like the Musketeer. Not like he won't sell you out but atleast his platforms are stable. Apparently that's enough for people.

It's shill. Like the shilling (old currency) which has nothing to do with being cool headed.

What is Twitter then?

What OS is Twitter?

Hasn't it already been established that threads would most likely deathhug most of the fediverse? It's content would be overwhelming and nothing could keep up with it. I'd rather have the fediverse be a more small scale, cozy and niche place*.

I feel you.

But considering that the majority of instances have already blocked threads, there would not be much of a fediverse to federate with anyway once/if they do.

I got downvoted for saying that over in !unpopularopinion so I guess that makes it either a popular opinion or a really unpopular opinion

Unfortunately Facebook will most likely pursue their usual goals of mass user attraction, followed by user domestication and enshittification. They'll try to attract as many Fediverse users to Threads as possible, then slowly make it a shittier and shittier experience to use Threads unless you have an account there or something, and their federation will get worse and worse until they'll just split off, but this time taking a shit-ton of Fediverse people with them (who will now likely have higher switching costs due to the network effects exploited by Facebook). Not to mention that Threads will be trying to collect as much data about everyone as possible (including those who just have an account on a federated instance), and will probably try to send out ads to federated instances.

It's possible that Threads will attract more people to the Fediverse. It's at least as likely that Threads will end up pulling people from the Fediverse, and into an eventual walled garden.

I agree with you. Lemmy is way too aggressive about this.

People using threads wont make their instances and will fill the fediverse with low quality content.

Ribbit

I've never tried it. Is it really more confusing than Lemmy?

I'm genuinely curious - what do people find confusing about Mastodon? What could be improved?

I was a little confused by Lemmy at first, but downloading and setting up the Mastodon app seemed super simple and straightforward. I've never been interested in short form text content like this, and couldn't find anything I thought was interesting on the platform, but I didn't feel confused.

Would love to hear what people find annoying/confusing as I'd love to be able to help create content etc for anything that's holding people up. Twitter owns too much social/mental weight for people and Meta is no better - would love to find a way to help move people towards something like the Fediverse.

I'm less concerned about my public facing profile (I intended it to be public after all), more worried about them fingerprinting my browser and correlating it to my personal life and personal browsing, and then selling that entire dataset. It would be really hard for Lemmy to do that, really easy for Facebook.

That's one thing and it is hard to be free of, but here I think it is also relevant that the website/client apps surveil you too.

This is true, but I think that this meme refers to the app though. The regular mastodon app doesn't require as many data.

Do you mean the bots they use to index stuff for their search engine? Isn't that how all modern search engines function?

Good luck. Hope you like it. I never really used Twitter because I felt like it was hard to figure out how to use it to see interesting stuff in your feed. Then I tried Mastodon and had about the same experience. Not sure how it is now, but I tried a few months ago (maybe January or something) and there wasn't a ton of activity so it was stale after a few wks using it and I gave it up.

I've like Lemmy a lot better but I think that's because I always liked Reddit better.

When you first start do a search on hashtags for subjects that you like, and subscribe to them. That'll quickly build up a feed for you to scroll through.

Then you can add people after that once your feed is established.

They'll tell you to sign up to small instances. Honestly ignore that advice. There's a bug nobody's fixed since 2016 that makes smaller instances nonviable imo. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34

Lemmy isn't a lot better, tbh.

Why? They're like elephants but even more badass!

Also, Threads is a super generic name which IMO is worse. Honestly sounds like a computer science student's proof of concept social media they made for class.

Yup. And seconded.

A lot of people use social media to follow celebrities, brands, politicians, etc., and Mastodon doesn’t have that (yet at least).

I prefer Mastodon, my feed consists of the people I decided to follow, instead of an algorithmic one. But one have to accept that Mastodon lacks the kind of users that most people want to follow.

Hopefully, if Meta ends up delivering on their promise to add support for the Fediverse, I will be able to follow the kind of people that otherwise would’ve never joined Mastodon (ie brands that would offer support for their products), from my Mastodon client of choice.

I know a lot of people disagree with Meta joining the Fediverse, but I prefer to be optimistic about it. Also, Mastodon supports blocking domains at a user level, so if you really don’t want to interact with @threads.net users, you can do it yourself.

Worst case scenario, we get back to the current status quo, so there’s nothing to lose.

Garbage that's designed to alter my mood to keep me longer on the platform. Please, give me more of that!

Nerds, geeks and general outsiders like and look for things like Mastodon and the fediverse, the majority of people just want convenience and ease of access and things like Twitter and Threads have that. Until celebrities and companies join the fediverse you won't get normal people and at that point it won't be any different from Twitter. I like Mastodon but it has nothing on the ease and just general amount of everything that Twitter has which is what brings in users.

I mean it's not hard to get. A social platform lives or dies by its user base. Threads has a huge user base with big names people care about. You could have a platform that's 100x better, but if the right people aren't on it, it will die.

Not yet, but they’ve said it will be. Personally I’m excited to see “mainstream” social media using ActivityPub, but you’ll find that it’s quite a divisive issue.

Threads is federated afaik, yeah. It's just that many Fediverse instanced blocked Meta.

They said they still figuring out how to handle the federated posts into its content recommendation algorithm and moderation tools. So not yet.

(Sauce: https://www.timothychambers.net/... )

it can interact with mastodon yeah.
but afaik it's a one-way integration currently. (mastodon users can see threads users but not vise versa)

Yes, but hardly anyone is willing to federate with it.

dw it started its decline as soon as you left it… just took a while

Momentum is one hell of pain, Twitter and Facebook are like mile long freight trains that stopped putting power to the wheels. They'll stop, it'll just take a long time.

It feels like at least 50%-60% of it are bots, same with Reddit.

Many are, unfortunately.

Is this a bit? It's an @ sign with the weird lowercase a most fonts use.

It's an @.
Pretty easy to figure out. Everyone only uses it for everything.

Not really.

They're both fediverse, but one is designed to follow communities, and the other is designed to follow people. A Mastodon user sees a community as a user, and can thus subscribe to it. There's not really a way for a Lemmy user to do the inverse and subscribe to a user.

If you want a platform that does both (can subscribe to both communities and users), check out Kbin.

If that's the choice, the furries... But I think there's starting to be a lot of legit people on Mastodon, no? I just can't get into the whole following people thing though, it's just all so....public..... [Shuffles back into the dark anonymous safety of Lemmy]

I wonder if you even know you're on Mastodon right now

I think Musk's individual recklessness ruined Twitter a lot more than any corporatism.

I agree, but also, I was never really able to figure out Twitter so I kept bouncing off. Whereas I found mastodon really easy to get into and find my communities.

I figured it out, but after nearly giving up on it. There's basically no algorithm to suggest you content like on other sites, so you gotta search for hashtags for stuff you're interested in and follow them. You basically create your own content pushing algorithm by scratch.

I like it, but considering the average twitter user isn't going to get it after having content and people pushed to them by twitter's algorithm, I can see why so many people gave up on it. Then again the people who are actually there seem cool enough, and it's nice to have a microblog and drip feed that isn't drowning in drama and sponsorships. I think I kinda prefer if Masto stays small.

In what way?