I wonder if an archivist-oriented Fediverse instance would gain traction - maybe it could be coordinated with an organization like Wikimedia
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Bluesky might be better than X I’ if all you want is SMS length microblogging, but I’d like to see scientific types embrace a more federated system.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 days ago
If only Mastodon would spend time making the platform more usable, perhaps they would. e.g. the impersonation issue, which is much less of a problem on a non-federated platform, plus Bluesky takes a highly aggressive stance against it.
Also the enormous discoverability issue on Mastodon has lead people to say that “Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability.” This article seems very worth reading btw, as many of the same issues plague the Threadiverse as well - hostility to non-technical normies, hostility towards anyone less ideologically pure than oneself, hostility towards… wait, am I sensing a pattern here!?!:-P Early adoptors (who are proficient in using Arch Linux btw) are quite a very different crowd and while yes scientists are smart, they are also smart enough to realize that moving from a place where their work can be seen to a place where it will not be is not a very productive endeavor, in the short-term, for themselves.
arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I think one of the biggest problems is that upvotes or whatever they’re called don’t federate. Every time I’ve played around with using a smaller instance, it felt incredibly empty because posts would have almost no upvotes. Even instances of like middling sizes can feel empty depending on who you follow.
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 days ago
Also as I understand it, searching for content is really poor. e.g. docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/ says:
PieFed + Lemmy + Mbin has the same problem: someone must first join a community before it can be “discovered” by others on that same instance. Which typically means that someone must know about it - somehow? - via other means, and then go hunting specifically for it. I have tried to be the one who braved this trail for many a community on smaller instances such as Discuss.Online and PieFed.social (back when both were smaller than now), but not everyone - even scientists - are as technically minded as to want to deal with such complexities.
So if let’s say some University decides to set up their own Mastodon instance, by default it will not know most of what is available out there in the wider Fediverse, and anyone using that instance will get frustrated when it seems so very empty to them.
And the voting thing. And the impersonation issues. And so very, Very, VERY many other issues as well. I am not trying to criticize Mastodon here so much as I am advocating that will people please open their eyes and have some EMPATHY: mainstream normies do not enjoy using Mastodon. This is what is driving them to BlueSky where they say that it is FUN to use. We can cry about it, whine about it, do all the purity testing that we want and downvote me for saying this, but at the end of the day these people will either remain on X/Reddit or else move to BlueSky, but they will not, they will not, THEY WILL NOT move to Mastodon. They do not want it, and at the end of the day their consent is actually required if it were to happen.
Eww gross, I just looked up what programming language Mastodon uses: it is Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript front-end. No wonder it is so slow to be developed!! (not so many people use those languages) PieFed in contrast is written using the extremely popular Python language (+ more pure HTML, some CSS, and JavaScript), so at this point I wonder if (a modified?) PieFed would be used more by scientists sooner than Mastodon if the latter will not be able to catch up to the former’s pace of development? :-P
arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I think the development speed issue is less the languages it’s using and more that the devs spend way too long hashing things out and trying to get everything perfect rather than settling for “good enough” due to Mastodon effectively being the reference design for fediverse stuff. Misskey for instance has way more features than Mastodon.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 4 days ago
The only reason mastodon isn’t as popular as bluesky is because famous people got told to go there and not on mastodon.
The ceo of twitter is a pedophile who advertise for political parties on a daily basis. The average normie use whatever platform is popular and it’s not mastodon because nobody is being paid or told to use it.
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 days ago
Celebrities are told by some people to go to Mastodon though? Perhaps they think that Bluesky being a more centralized server will not be prey to the issue of impersonation as Mastodon is? I do also think that the call to go to Bluesky is being received better. If you read articles espousing that call they are like “come check it out, it’s so fantastic!” whereas the calls to Mastodon were like the calls to vote for the not-Right party in the USA each time that Donald Trump ran: "hey, Mastodon sucks, and let me list all the reasons why, but here’s why you need to eat your vegetables even though you don’t want to: X is so much worse (except it feels so good but… we really should do the moral choice, I/we don’t want to but we should…).
People basically laid down the line saying: fix this handful of things and then I will join (perhaps that has just 2 items on it - the impersonation and discoverability issues - or perhaps there is more). But then Mastodon ignored that demand, and now here people are saying “can’t you see what a nice man we are?” as if consent does/should not matter but it does! If we really want people to use Mastodon, teach yourself Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript and get busy making the implementation better to use - it’s the only way, or else people are just going to use what (they think) already works: Bluesky.
Ask yourself why people all flock to the same platform. The network effect is real yo, and not to be brushed aside lightly.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 3 days ago
Governments spend billions on propaganda, world politicians use twitter because there are agreements and the platform is trusted.
Stop saying that mastodon suck, it doesn’t and it’s much better than twitter or bluesky.
Because someone they know or they are following use that platform.
JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
We need a “Lemmy for normies” instance that doesn’t federate with any of the weird instances
OpenStars@discuss.online 3 days ago
Ikr? However that is not politically expedient hence major pushback exists to even do much as diagnose that issue much less deal with it. Even so, I (successfully);petitioned Discuss.Online to defederate from Hexbear.net, although in that I also asked for this instance to be removed from lemmy.ml as well, but that portion was rejected. Lemmy.ml is STRONGLY anti-Western, so whether its philosophies are correct or wrong (they are wrong imho:-P) either way it is a barrier for specially Western people who check us out and then nope out back to Reddit.
Even after that partial success though I basically gave up that idea since Lemmy does not allow for true blocking of all users on an instance, so nowadays use PieFed (which does offer that ability, as well as SO MANY other additional features) 99% of the time and only occasionally check my old Discuss.Online Lemmy alt. So at this point I’ve lost any hope whatsoever for “Lemmy” to become mainstream, but if there is even a sliver of hope left for that then I am putting it all in on PieFed rather than Lemmy. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt it.
But it too moves slowly to catch up to being something that mainstream normies will want to use. I am making codeberg requests to try to help it along, even if I cannot contribute code directly. I understand the position of a mainstream person though: we here are fairly (and sometimes even extremely) toxic, especially to newcomers, and all the more so if they are non-techical. It would require much more extensive moderation to kick out people being mean to newcomers, which actually PieFed offers some great tools for that, and yet at the same time a level of traffic that makes coming to the Threadiverse worthwhile. Those two goals seem incompatible though, so realistically I don’t expect it will ever happen. Still we have to try!?
JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
Unfortunately sdf is still federated with Hexbear. The other day I asked a user not to use language dating back to the Roman Empire which has been used as a justification for two thousand years of imperialism, and I got dozens of replies from Hexbear users angry that I asked them to actually behave like leftists, and quite a bit of racism, and a picture of a pig pooping on its testicles. This is a brand new account I made to spread the good word of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ (who was black), so I don’t know how anyone who’s new to the Fediverse is supposed to put up with those people. I guess they just go back to Reddit.
m532@lemmygrad.ml 3 days ago
Lemmy.ml?