Sure, but I think that’s far less important than in a walled garden situation…
I guess this is why a lot of people insist on the focus being on the fediverse, with mastodon as just one flagship. That means if the brand goes to shit the ecosystem can just keep operating.
I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.
I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.
I think you’re making a much bigger deal of the federation issue than it actually matters in practice.
Yes, some users who run their own server with very few other users do face this issue, but it can usually be dealt with without much effort. If they go and follow 200 users on 20 different instances, then they’ll most likely get followed back by someone on 90% of those instances. It’s not that much effort. I now and then you see one of these users making a “please boost and follow for federation” post to get them kick started.
But also, that situation is for techy nerds anyway. Normy users are not going to be setting up their own instance, 99% of them will be joining a populous instance, and so will have good federation with most of the network immediately.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how did you choose an email provider, or a phone service? How do you block spam? Those are basically identical questions, and yeah, they can be annoying, but I don’t think anyone finds them that hard to comprehend.
Yeah, Lemmy is good because of the topic and threading focus. Mastodon seems better for exploring lots of issues. I’m finding them fairly complementary, they cover different bases.
Still need something I can pull my IRL friends in with though. Pixelfed might work for people who are used to Instagram, but I think it’s probably still a bit sparse content wise.
17 bugs detected including 4 security threats, and we still don’t even know what the programming is supposed to do
The asteroid would have wiped us out before you guys finished this long ass conversation
The app is 4 years behind schedule, and the endgame asteroid is still approaching.
Mastodon could definitely do with some more discovery methods. Hopefully something like bluesky’s starter packs get implemented eventually (but I understand why they aren’t rushing it, there are abuse risks).
Best approach for now on mastodon is to follow all the hash tags you’re interested in, and then follow everyone in your feed who posts anything interesting. Takes a few weeks to ramp up, I guess. My feed got good once I was following around 1k users. You can always unfollow if someone’s annoying.
Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.
I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won’t see that for another couple of years… Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.
Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out…
But also I don’t really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is “nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to”.
In as much as FOSS can be forked, it’s not really completely controlled (and there are a number of active mastodon forks that federate fine with standard mastodon servers)
Is it just the choosing-a-home-server thing, or something else?
Is this actually true? The UIs don’t seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon’s design that’s bad?
You realise “LLMs can quote verbatim” is not a contractdiction of “LLMs can create brand new sentences”, right?
They only take from the statistical distributions of words in the context of preceding words (which is why they never say “the the” etc, why the grammar is nearly always correct). But that doesn’t mean that whole sentences are lifted from the source material. There are near infinite paths through those word distributions, and many have never been produced by humans, so LLMs do produce sentences that have never been uttered before.
They couldn’t produce new conceptual context spaces in the way that humans can sometimes, but they can produce new combinations within existing context spaces.
Not sure why you’re being down voted, it’s a fair point.
That’s not really true though… They come up with brand new sentences all the time.
True to some extent, and I do this, but some aspects are unavoidable. For example the GTK save/open dialogue is used by Firefox, and it sucks (why can’t I type the fucking path in?). There aren’t good and popular alternative browsers that use Qt or any other toolkit with a decent dialogue.
You might be right. I’m not a lurker. I’m not a heavy poster either though.
It sounds like you should just try it out, and find out if your assumptions are true