Am I the only one who can’t get used to Fediverse?
Am I the only one who can’t get used to Fediverse?
I’m fairly new to the Fediverse, and I'd like to share my onboarding experience. Personally, I appreciate the concept of decentralization and the community-driven aspect of Fediverse. I’ve used Mastodon and Lemmy, based on ActivityPub, for a while:
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I find it difficult to get all the updates I need on a particular instance, and except for a few very large instances, most others appear quite quiet and like the Internet ten years ago.
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The content and style of each instance tend to be quite diverse. To find someone to follow, I must switch between different instances with lengthy domains.
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Fediverse isn't truly decentralized; instances operate under the will of server owners, who can ban and remove content as they please.
These reasons prompted me to explore more decentralized networks, I mean truly decentralized networks, such as Nostr.
However, creating a Nostr account and saving the Recovery Phrases is challenging (I lost my first Nostr account due to the loss of Recovery Phrases). And generally speaking, the user experience on Nostr is much worse than Mastodon, full of scam and ads.
I believe people should leave Twitter due to shadowbans and robots and Facebook due to privacy concerns, but I'm struggling to choose a platform to migrate to. Each has its drawbacks, making it difficult to decide.
I'd love to hear your opinions on this.
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People complain about the algorithms on other social media but you can see here exactly why they have them.
Without them it becomes hard to get connected to things that interest you.
For Lemmy I've managed to build a decent feed by browsing all and subscribing to communities I like.
You just have to do the algorithms job now.
As for the big communities it's exactly what happened to the old internet. It used to be a large collection of individual sites but discovery was hard. So the front pages of the internet started popping up.
I expect the same thing will happen to the fediverse eventually. It's just a better user experience sadly.
Right, but the algorithms that other social media sites use are designed to drive engagement, NOT to help you find things you like.
They want you angry and/or scared and/or jealous so you post, rage argue.
I know it may feel worse, but less content, less clickbait is better for us and our mental health.
I didn't even realise how much raging I was doing on reddit. And for what? To argue with right wing dipshits or bots or trolls, so reddit's numbers can go up and they can sell more ads.
Fuck algorithms and fuck rage bait.
100 percent. I still use reddit but comment very infrequently. If I open a thread and see vile comments I leave, most times I don't open the comments at all. I am glad reddit bo longer has a strong hold over me.
Lemmy still uses algorithms, but they do not use personal information. When you sort by “Hot”, “Active” etc. you are using an algorithm.
Hot, Active, Time Sort, are open algorithms that we can see exactly how they work. Unlike closed social media algorithms which I think is the point that he is making.
Exactly. Everyone can see how and why an algorithm on Lemmy shows what it show.
All computer code is algorithms.
The point is without that personalisation it's much less likely to show things you are interested in.
Algorithm in this case refers to a personalization algorithm, something that Lemmy does not offer.
What we actually need is topics/tags per community, so we can individually subscribe to anything "knitting" but block everything "sports" or whatever your interests are.