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.

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.

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.

Edit: also, when the tools go for years and years and years and years without ever getting any better at solving the issues that matter most to them, it sends a signal that they aren’t welcomed. I will state that again, unequivocally: mainstream normies are not really welcomed onto the Fediverse. … … … am I wrong there? Do we welcome them even here, on the Threadiverse, or are there a myriad of rules that are nowhere written down, must be discovered by each new person, all the while people talk down to them, criticize and even laugh at them, plus also laugh at them behind their backs when they go back to Reddit and share their experiences here, warning others not to come? From what I read at r/RedditAlternatives, this usually is b/c of facing “leftist” toxicity, which I put in quotes b/c it’s not actually leftist, but it just seemed that way to them, since e.g. Hexbear makes no distinction b/c facts and reality, only what works inside their echo chambers that are then exported everywhere else they - and their alts - are allowed to go. But please feel free to visit that subreddit and verify all of this for yourself.

Here is some additional evidence: (1) at https://mander.xyz/c/science, the top-most link points to a lemmy.ml community. Is lemmy.ml known at all for its stance on “facts” vs. “alternative facts”, and in particular which facts are allowed to be shared or not? This is a choice by mander.xyz to feature that particular link though. (2) look at https://join-lemmy.org/, and pay close attention to the very first image on the screen. “Landlord Love”, “Tankie…” - yes this is a screenshot from lemmy.ml. Does that instance make people in the Western world feel comfortable when they visit it - especially mainstream normies… or even scientists, who often trend toward liberal but even more aim to stay out of politics altogether, in order to more closely focus on science? The words on that page also are things like “mod tools” and “host your own server”, not things like “a place to discuss topics of interest”. That site helps people who want to become admins more than those who want to become a casual user - i.e. an early-adopter, Linux-using, config-file-editing crowd, not a bench scientist grad student who just wants to chat about science.

This is the part where you say “but mander.xyz does not itself espouse tankie beliefs and philosophy - I mean yes in truth it actually does promote that e.g. by putting in those links, but it does not PROMOTE promote that, not REALLY!? ~(not~ ~directly~ ~at~ ~least)~” In which case bam, now you understand why scientists continue to use X rather than spend time learning how to make use of Mastodon. Everyone does what is easiest and they feel is best for them. We do not really reach out to make them feel welcomed, so they find it easier to simply stay where they already are.

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.

Also as I understand it, searching for content is really poor. e.g. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/ says:

To allow you to discover potentially interesting content, Mastodon provides a way to browse all public posts. There is no global shared state between all servers, so there is no way to browse all public posts. When you browse Live Feeds > Other Servers, you see public posts from across the fediverse. Your server shows posts it knows about through various methods. Most posts come from accounts that other users on your server follow.

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?

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.

Here’s a thought: no microblogging platform is suitable for professional use. Cut it out, stop it.

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.

Edit: also, when the tools go for years and years and years and years without ever getting any better at solving the issues that matter most to them, it sends a signal that they aren’t welcomed. I will state that again, unequivocally: mainstream normies are not really welcomed onto the Fediverse. … … … am I wrong there? Do we welcome them even here, on the Threadiverse, or are there a myriad of rules that are nowhere written down, must be discovered by each new person, all the while people talk down to them, criticize and even laugh at them, plus also laugh at them behind their backs when they go back to Reddit and share their experiences here, warning others not to come? From what I read at r/RedditAlternatives, this usually is b/c of facing “leftist” toxicity, which I put in quotes b/c it’s not actually leftist, but it just seemed that way to them, since e.g. Hexbear makes no distinction b/c facts and reality, only what works inside their echo chambers that are then exported everywhere else they - and their alts - are allowed to go. But please feel free to visit that subreddit and verify all of this for yourself.

Here is some additional evidence: (1) at https://mander.xyz/c/science, the top-most link points to a lemmy.ml community. Is lemmy.ml known at all for its stance on “facts” vs. “alternative facts”, and in particular which facts are allowed to be shared or not? This is a choice by mander.xyz to feature that particular link though. (2) look at https://join-lemmy.org/, and pay close attention to the very first image on the screen. “Landlord Love”, “Tankie…” - yes this is a screenshot from lemmy.ml. Does that instance make people in the Western world feel comfortable when they visit it - especially mainstream normies… or even scientists, who often trend toward liberal but even more aim to stay out of politics altogether, in order to more closely focus on science? The words on that page also are things like “mod tools” and “host your own server”, not things like “a place to discuss topics of interest”. That site helps people who want to become admins more than those who want to become a casual user - i.e. an early-adopter, Linux-using, config-file-editing crowd, not a bench scientist grad student who just wants to chat about science.

This is the part where you say “but mander.xyz does not itself espouse tankie beliefs and philosophy - I mean yes in truth it actually does promote that e.g. by putting in those links, but it does not PROMOTE promote that, not REALLY!? ~(not~ ~directly~ ~at~ ~least)~” In which case bam, now you understand why scientists continue to use X rather than spend time learning how to make use of Mastodon. Everyone does what is easiest and they feel is best for them. We do not really reach out to make them feel welcomed, so they find it easier to simply stay where they already are.

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.

Edit: also, when the tools go for years and years and years and years without ever getting any better at solving the issues that matter most to them, it sends a signal that they aren’t welcomed. I will state that again, unequivocally: mainstream normies are not really welcomed onto the Fediverse. … … … am I wrong there? Do we welcome them even here, on the Threadiverse, or are there a myriad of rules that are nowhere written down, must be discovered by each new person, all the while people talk down to them, criticize and even laugh at them, plus also laugh at them behind their backs when they go back to Reddit and share their experiences here, warning others not to come? From what I read at r/RedditAlternatives, this usually is b/c of facing “leftist” toxicity, which I put in quotes b/c it’s not actually leftist, but it just seemed that way to them, since e.g. Hexbear makes no distinction b/c facts and reality, only what works inside their echo chambers that are then exported everywhere else they - and their alts - are allowed to go. But please feel free to visit that subreddit and verify all of this for yourself.

Here is some additional evidence: (1) at https://mander.xyz/c/science, the top-most link points to a lemmy.ml community. Is lemmy.ml known at all for its stance on “facts” vs. “alternative facts”, and in particular which facts are allowed to be shared or not? This is a choice by mander.xyz to feature that particular link though. (2) look at https://join-lemmy.org/, and pay close attention to the very first image on the screen. “Landlord Love”, “Tankie…” - yes this is a screenshot from lemmy.ml. Does that instance make people in the Western world feel comfortable when they visit it - especially mainstream normies… or even scientists, who often trend toward liberal but even more aim to stay out of politics altogether, in order to more closely focus on science? The words on that page also are things like “mod tools” and “host your own server”, not things like “a place to discuss topics of interest”. That site helps people who want to become admins more than those who want to become a casual user - i.e. an early-adopter, Linux-using, config-file-editing crowd, not a bench scientist grad student who just wants to chat about science.

This is the part where you say “but mander.xyz does not itself espouse tankie beliefs and philosophy - I mean yes in truth it actually does promote that e.g. by putting in those links, but it does not PROMOTE promote that, not REALLY!? ~(not~ ~directly~ ~at~ ~least)~” In which case bam, now you understand why scientists continue to use X rather than spend time learning how to make use of Mastodon. Everyone does what is easiest and they feel is best for them. We do not really reach out to make them feel welcomed, so they find it easier to simply stay where they already are.

The only reason mastodon isn’t as popular as bluesky is because famous people got told to go there and not on mastodon.

Does that instance make people in the Western world feel comfortable when they visit it - especially mainstream normies… or even scientists

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.

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.

We need a “Lemmy for normies” instance that doesn’t federate with any of the weird instances