cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/372863
cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/61363
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
It is humanities responsibility to make the rest of this man’s life miserable
Fedi is doing fine whether or not Nazi platforms crumble.
Europeans don’t like Nazis.
Americans, well…
The Americans inspired them after all.
AfD Is Now Germany’s Most Popular Party For The First Time Ever.
I wish the ‘Europeans don’t like Nazis.’, would be true, but we maybe just lagging behind.
Europeans don’t like Nazis.
I wish this was true.
Greetings from Austria, where a far right party is the strongest, although not ruling (yet)
What’s the quality like of the people who are still on Twitter in 2025? Does the fediverse want them? (These are real questions, I have no idea if there’s still any decent people on Twitter.)
There likely are (I quit Twitter over a year ago), just because it does unique coverage on many topics.
ik some good people that are still there because some of their friends are.
Every massive influx from Twitter has brought a deluge of people I want nothing to do with in any way shape or form, and a small sprinkling of cool ones. Fortunately like 4/5ths of the crappy ones leave again, but that other 1/5th is a big number when you’re talking an influx of hundreds of thousands.
A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.
More people = more people that can moderate
The fediverse is about options. If you don’t like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It’s awesome because you don’t get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what “normal people” are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.
I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.
I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.
But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.
I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something.
This sounds like PieFed
Haven’t heard of that and will look into that. Thank you.
Instance admins have crashed out before and things keep working
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.
Biggest problem with twitter/X is so many companies mess you around until you call them out on it, then things tend to get resolved how they should have been.
I truthfully have always seen that as Twitter/X’s only use
It was the same on the municipal level for me. I can call 311 or write to them, but it was kind of nice to be able to tweet at my neighbourhood and have people interacting with them and me on local issues.
I hate X but I also dislike echo chambers
I also hate when people think an echo chamber is something inherently bad. Everything is an echo chamber. Your family, your friends, your local gaming community, your workplace. An echo chamber only becomes a problem when bad actors take control.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
Echo chambers are okay, no even necessary to stay mentally sane, as long as people share their honest takes without large scale agendas and manipulation.
You’re using a different definition of “echo chamber” than I’ve ever heard of. What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion. If differing views are being introduced its, by definition, not an echo chamber.
An echo chamber is when only one set of opinions are voiced, and all responses are in support of that opinion, hence the “echo” portion of the term.
What you’re describing is groups of people sharing opinions that can differ with one another in good faith discussion.
The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts. For example, people having good-faith debates are “liberal” echo chambers, because not toeing the alt-right fascist line is never considered to be good faith.
The problem is, this is what fashies consider an “echo chamber”. The definition itself is not applied in good faith by certain cohorts.
Fashies also have vastly different perverted definitions for all kinds of things like “freedom” and “peace”, but I’m not adopting their definitions of those either. I’m not sure where you’re going with this unless you’re saying @[email protected] is a fascist, but I don’t think you are saying that.
If we are throwing around big words, we have to be precise though.
Echo chambers always existed and we are in them all the time. A few hundreds or thousands years ago, we lived in small groups. Those definitely had different opinions, but overall had the same values. Those were echo chambers. Now, where those bad? No, you want people to be in line on foundational topics.
But if you start to manipulate these opinions on the ground level, you’re going to divide people.
Global warming? Is it really that bad? Migrants? Aren’t the stealing our jobs? LGBTQ+? Aren’t they just harassing our kids and women? Hitler? Was he really that bad???
Do you get what I mean? Echo chambers aren’t the problem. They always existed. It’s bad influence that turns everything to shit.
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or even Google. They give a shit about your wellbeing, as long as they profit.
That’s delusional. The try to cater to what will keep you engaged, so that as much of the data you can generate can be milked. That’s like saying that agrobusiness cares about livestock’s wellbeing.
Abandon anything this Nazi touches.
What about his children that hate him but are still his children?
He’s gonna keep pumping them out till one of them likes him.
Remove the word “out” and that’s how I initially read this and went D:
;]
Can you imagine getting pumped by musk? 🤮
I bet he has cold damp hands
D:
I forgot that people are still using Twitter. WTF!?
They are not - he X/cancelled it.:-P
I mean, Mastodon is German, so they’re probably moving here. The federated fork of Dorsey’s Twitter is second.
BlueSky is not federated. Also German users have outsized representation on Mastodon but most of the network is outside Germany.
“federated”
There is always that one comment saying “b-but its technically kinda federated”. It doesnt fucking matter if its federated if 99.999% of all users are on one instance. The entire concept of a long lived, enshittification resistant fediverse relies entirely on being decentralized with a reasonably evenly distributed userbase. You fucking bet lemmy would already be completely worthless right now if people hadnt stopped lemmy.world from grabbing more communities and users.
I agree with your overall sentiment but also literally 100% of BlueSky users are on one instance.
Let me guess, they’re moving to Bluesky?
I tried moving to Mastadon first a few years ago and it was a pretty shit experience, Bluesky however has stuck in my app rotation pretty well.
Because Bluesky is centralised. You went from one serial killer’s house to another. You don’t know which serial killer owns your new house, but you’re hoping they’ll be nicer than the previous one. But at least their house is nearly as nice as the old serial killer’s house.
Dunno why you’re being down voted so hard. Didn’t Bluesky literally cede to Turkish demands of censorship or some shit?
Yep. That’s exactly why I’m saying it’s centralised.
Because Bluesky is centralised.
You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.
The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.
I mean, I don’t even think it’s a matter of privacy, and moreso a matter of spreading out the amount of influence that one person can have as a whole on a public platform. If it’s more spread out, there is less direct control that billionaires and corpos will have on these platforms that have basically become very important in terms of public discourse and public opinion.
I’m not saying it “like” anything. I’m stating that they are not escaping anything but moving from problem to future problem.
Isn’t email easy to use? Do people know that it’s federated? Probably not, but it’s easy to understand because they have been exposed to it for so long that it’s natural to them without knowing how it works. Why do you assume the same cannot happen for the fediverse? It’s basically social media built on top of email.
The major mistake people make is trying to explain technical stuff to people who don’t give a fuck. “Look at your email account, it’s YOURNAME@WEBSITE, well, that’s the same for lemmy and mastodon, pick a website you like, create an account, and that’s it”. Everyone knows what a website is, everyone knows what email is, everyone knows (but probably hasn’t realised) that they can send emails to SOMEBODYELSE@OTHERWEBSITE, that’s it.
General advice regarding open source: even if you tried something out years ago and didn’t like it, it may be well worth giving it another shot. Open source projects often need some time to mature and take their time to improve, but only get better over time.
Unfortunately until they implement a For you algorithm across all instances and abandoned their archaic hashtag following system I will not be re-attempting
Do you need someone holding your hand while you cross the street too?
Which is incidentally the opposite of proprietary products, where if you give it another go in a few years it either doesn’t exist or is enshittified.
Or meta because its better? Like getting run over by a small car instead of a bus.
Ewww people actually use Threads? Last time I saw it, it was like LinkedIn 2.0 filled with sigma grindset “chase that bag” crap.
I’m.on Lemmy and mastodon. Anything else is pure sarcasm. I sarcastically browse for TV’s on Amazon. But will I buy? No. All have spyware on them, so no. I wouldn’t touch meta with a 300ft pole.
This is not a particularly relevant comment, but you reminded me of when I was a kid and a friend had a TV on a stand opposite her bunk-bed. She didn’t have a remote control, but she did have a long stick, and she was amazing at pressing the buttons from like 2m away. Proper life skill.
In my day you had to turn the knob. I made a geared motor adapter to change the channel remotely. DIY when I was 10.
Threads sucks compared to bsky don’t know what you’re talking about there. Bluesky has way more features and posting quality.
Unironically yes sadly :(
That’s were the marketing dollars are
Ayyy, gotta have that monaaaay!
Might have to also let people know the Fediverse exists?
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
It’s a good start but we gotta pump those numbers up.
The rest are bots and Russian troll farms.
remember 80% of instagram is bots according to a study reported by german media.
so X id even say it could be more giving the vast hatred increase and content change over the last years. so basically they lost 90%
EDIT/additional bit: funk’s german post referenced this Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024
They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.
For most people it’s unfortunately just " is it like Twitter" - both in terms of accessibility and algorithmic content suggestion.
I think a sad part of this is due to people wanting that vapid dopamagic response the algorithm provides.
Is it bad for us? Yes.
But addicts are going to addict 🫤
I know lots of people who made a fediverse account easy enough, but just end up back on the algorithm platforms as there’s no effort required for discovery.
For the longest time there just wasn’t enough activity so you’d get bored and stop checking back. There’s enough people now that this isn’t an issue anymore.
I think it’s more going to be more like twitter than they’re bargaining for.
Except for the fact that most people dont like jumping through multiple hoops to register an account / need to do research beforehand to do it.
If you Google “sign up for mastodon” the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we’re all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.
What is instance? There are two buttons - sign up for mastodon or choose another instance, I just want to register etc etc.
People dont care for decentralization, they want to sign up and share a link.
Listen I just don’t have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.
Cool. Doesn’t change the fact that for a regular joe, “sign up” is what they want to click and then share a link or follow some guy. Not do research on what platform to join, what instance, what’s an instance, what happens if you join a wrong one. The fediverse is a gimmick that most people don’t need.
Trump’s gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion
Loves this fact. Fify
People don’t like to read.
You said multiple, so name three hoops
I already said them down the chain. Also I am not your monkey to be doing tricks for you.
Maybe they just don’t like your pattern, huu-man
What, the VC funded tech firm makes lots of noise about not being evil before eventually just becoming evil yet again pattern? Yeah I don’t like it either.
Let the pessimism flow through you
Kind of like how I’d be pessimistic about sticking my fingers in the closing boot of a cybertruck yeah.
personally i prefer bluesky just because the interface is more natural to me (and it’s just easier - but also because aew twitter is there and there’s more fandoms over on it) but i wish more people would embrace bridgyfed so that we don’t have to choose.
Have you tried using elk.zone? It mimics Twitter’s interface and has some great additional features (like zen mode)
oh i do like elk.zone and i do use fediverse, i just find myself more active on bsky just because i follow lots more. i have accounts on both and share on both for different reasons.
I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?
Those are rookie numbers, euros, get on that shit.
