Mastodon is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media — in a Good Way
Mastodon is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media — in a Good Way
A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…
In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
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The problem is that #10 in this article is why 99% of people won’t leave Xitter for Mastodon. Most of the people with lots of followers on X aren’t on Mastodon. It’s really that simple. Some “influencers” need to be convinced to open up Mastodon accounts and advertise exclusive content on there for their followers. Until then, we will be stuck with a handful of journalists, Flipboard, and Stephen Fry.
I really don’t think that Mastodon needs influencers. It’s just normal people talking about normal stuff. Don’t need any “I‘m so glorious, and here’s my product that will make you think you’re glorious, too” kind of influencers there, thanks!
This, very much this. I've been having more pleasant discussions with random people replying to Mastodon posts compared to the brain parasites victim making their nest on xitter.
"Influencer" is just a word to describe a phenomenon that will naturally arise on any platform where following someone doesn't require a follow back: some people will have a lot of followers, for whatever reason. They've existed as authors and columnists, radio personalities, television and film celebrities, podcast hosts, etc.
Some grow followers organically on the specific platform, while others bring their followers on from being independently famous outside the platform. And it doesn't matter if they don't start off as famous - all it takes is for a post or comment to go viral and then the attention is there, whether the creator wanted it or not.
I mean, you guys are stuck with me as your only real celebrity for a while... (and the Debian logo design person.)
Wow. Finally got a reply from her! Big fan of what you’re doing (you know, the Barbie movie and whatnot).
Big fan of what you’re doing.
You mean striking against the studios and shitposting on Lemmy?
Someone has to fight the good fight
Two of the most glorious goals in life, striking to shit head corporations for a better future and shit posting.
Why Lemmy, but no public account on Threads?
I don't like Twitter...
It became a very serious risk for celebrities as Musk now wants biometric data from blue ticks. That guy will try to micromanage that too and some huge RL issues will happen.
I remember back in 2000s 2 or 3 guys were so misinformed that Bruce Wills himself joined the comments and explained the movie industry doesn't work that way. Of course they didn't believe it was him and they ended up being video called by him to "prove" it is really him. I will find that page one day. In the 90s it was common that a famous actor/producer discuss ongoing things with the fans.
Please, just no. Keep those scum influencers away. It would immediately ruin the platform.
Xitter
LOL, my brain read that as "shitter" and I found that pretty fitting.
Permanently Deleted
Here's an alternative question: Do we really want the fediverse to take off like big tech did?
I sort of like that this little corner of the Internet isn't filled with a bunch of megacorporations and political bot farms trying to fiddle with our opinions to their benefit. Once it gets too big, it's going to lose something really important. Also, I fear that it could become impossible for a little operator to run an instance anymore.
Solid point. Kind of goes back to what we want out of our social media. If we want to follow the celebrities we like, we’re probably stuck with Xitter & other data harvesters (outside of the enlightened folks like Mr. Fry). I honestly use Mastodon slightly more than I use(ed) Twitter. Barely more than not at all.
There's a part of me that legitimately wonders how far Twitter could go as an influncer bubble. Granted this is unlikely to happen but if everyone who's not an influencer just left for Mastodon and Twitter just became a hollow shell of influencers trying to sell products to customers who just aren't there, how far would Twitter's inerta carry it before anyone realized?
Jeri Ryan is on mastodon. I'm ok with that too.
Stephen Fry is there? Well shit, guess I have a reason to check it out after all.
This is how I feel about Bluesky. It's so good, but really needs more people.