In this searing investigative report on #Bluesky @davetroy asks how are the users flocking to there safe from EXACTLY THE SAME THING that happened at Twitter/X.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Dave Troy :toad: last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @hildabast @yacc143 @clive @peterbrown
Excellent point. It is important to distinguish Mastodon gGmbH the non-profit company that developed and maintains the Mastodon application from the underlying Activity Pub protocol, the open source software that powers the Fediverse. There are many engineers involved with the AP protocol. Also there are many third party apps for Mastodon and there are other Fediverse applications like Pixelfed. So, many excellent engineers involved.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @hildabast @yacc143 @clive @peterbrown
Also, there are the many IT systems folks that maintain Mastodon server instances as well as people who do the painstaking work on instance moderation. So altogether a big enterprise.
That said, it would be great if Mastodon gGmbH had more development resources given the enormous importance of this technology to open social media worldwide.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Dave Troy :toad: last edited by
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
Agreed. Wrote a longer post to answer this, but the bottom line is this kind of knee jerk criticism is really unfounded, but typical of the public's perception of Mastodon.
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Dave Troy :toad:replied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
@mastodonmigration @deskJet95 @mbrailer I think having an app named “Mastodon” and suggesting it’s the best experience out there has been a mistake also. There are a lot of clients and most people don’t know about them.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
Would like to clarify something here. There is a difference between initial user perception and the actual long term utility of a user interface. People may be put off because Mastodon does not look like Twitter, but Mastodon has a lot of rich features that make it better for users once they become familiar with it. Things like lists, search, import & export and post editing are great features, that necessarily require a more complex interface.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Dave Troy :toad: last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
You are right. People equate 'Mastodon' with the Fediverse. Or more precisely 'Mastodon' obscures perception of the Fediverse. It is hard for people to understand 1) that Mastodon writ large is lots of Mastodon servers interconnect via the Fediverse, and 2) the Fediverse also interconnects other great applications, and 3) the applications can all talk to each other.
People recoil from this. Throw up their hands, and conclude it's all too complicated.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
The analogy that seems to work best is email. There are a lot of email clients that don't look like each other, but share data just fine.
The problem from a public perception POV is that the general designator is 'email', analogous to 'Fediverse' and things like 'Gmail' and 'Outlook' are email clients. We should be leading with Fediverse and talking about Fediverse clients like Mastodon.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
Unfortunately, "Fediverse" is kind of a mouthful and "Mastodon" is the brand people recognize, and "Mastodon" is kind of confusing because it refers to both the user application client and the distributed network of Mastodon servers over the Fediverse.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
The problem with Fediverse is also linguistically it refers to an infrastructure not a service. Email is a service. If instead of Fediverse the global was 'esocial' it would all make sense. Mastodon would be an esocial client, as would Pixelfed. Misskey would be an alternative esocial microbloging client. It all makes sense. Substitute Fediverse in the above sentences and you see the problem. It's not a small problem because it creates user uptake friction.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
@davetroy @deskJet95 @mbrailer
Just one more... continuing the email/esocial analogy, it becomes important to have an element. For email it is a 'message'. People can refer to an email message. They send and receive messages. For esocial it's a 'post'. Replies are also a type of post. Once you conceptually have an element that can be exchanged among all clients the whole thing comes into focus. For example, "a WordPress blog can now transmit and receive esocial posts." Clear as a bell.
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Hilda Bastianreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
@mastodonmigration @davetroy @yacc143 @clive @peterbrown For me, a priority is community structure and distributing the risk in the Fediverse outside Mastodon, not centralizing more resources in the current structure of Mastodon. (Though I'm at a central Mastodon instance, and do my little monthly contribution - so I really am hoping for Mastodon gmbh to thrive: I just hope it moves away from benevolent dictator for life, especially since both benevolence and life can't be counted on for sure.)
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@mastodonmigration @davetroy Well, it's simple, isn't it. Close the account should that happen. Unfortunately many of the musical colleagues I've just rediscovered on there were VERY slow to do that on Xitter.
