Fudrucker
Josh "cortex" MillardI’m a cranky old-web person but I’m just genuinely fucking mystified that the reaction to either Jack’s or Zuck’s new corporate social media landgrab isn’t a loud unanimous laughing “no, get fucked”. Twitter and Facebook were a warning, not an instruction manual.
Derek Powazek 🐐@joshmillard so say we all
Jon Bell@joshmillard Also old-web person but there's a clear human need/desire here: people enjoy talking to their friends/strangers online in this format.
"Just don't do that" isn't going to get very far. "Use Mastodon, once you figure out how to work it, it's kind of good sometimes!" isn't either.
I used to work at Twitter. I saw all the data for what helped people genuinely enjoy themselves and find their people online. Musk is getting it all wrong, but ... so are the old-web types on Mastodon.
John Harris@jbell @joshmillard People change. Data can be misinterpreted. Having access to secret knowledge causes one to think everyone who doesn't have it is stupid.
spaduf@jbell @joshmillard Let's not forget, Threads TOS explicitly states that they will monetize Mastodon (nonthreads) users.
Grinning Cat 
🚫👑@spaduf @jbell @joshmillard A reason for Mastodon servers to block threads.net and whatever else they use.
Once more, with feeling: https://fedipact.online/
Stryder Notavi@jbell @joshmillard This is the biggest thing - people are too focused on Twitter/Threads/Bluesky and don't put nearly enough thought into what we can do to make Mastodon better.
We really should be thinking less about what they're up to and more about what we can do to make this place better.
Cal@StryderNotavi @jbell @joshmillard I guess people will only go after other people they follow. Celebs, journalists, gamers etc. Mastodon is fine if you’re looking for community of people with similar interests, but if you want something like news feed with things from people you follow, then you probably won’t find it here. Most accounts that were created here few months ago are dead so people are going back to Twitter and now Threads.
gh0s1@cal @StryderNotavi @jbell @joshmillard honestly all I see is lefty and techy stuff here. Like I like that kind of stuff but I've been on and off Threads all day because people outside of the lefty and techy community are there. I might come to Mastodon once a week? Also why are we just cloning successful social media sites? Like are there no other social media designs that we can be putting on the fediverse. You'd think we would do more than make decentralized clones.
@cal @jbell @joshmillard Celebs are probably going to be a tough nut to crack, especially since so many of them are amenable to platforms *paying* for their presence, which isn't really an option for Mastodon.
We'd probably be better served by focusing on where Mastodon excels - creating communities that can thrive and interact without a lot of the attention seeking behaviours that are so common elsewhere on social media.
AGTMADCAT 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🇵🇸@StryderNotavi @jbell @joshmillard We need a good user onboarding system including some kind of discovery system. Doesn't necessarily have to be algorithmic, each server could manually curate a list of 10-20 high quality accounts which represent that server, so people from outside could "browse". New users could get a curated list of recommended servers to browse, something like that.
Thomas E. Gladwin@AGTMADCAT @StryderNotavi @jbell @joshmillard I'd guess, at least from the Twitter-analogue mindset of a subjectively singular feed perhaps, that it's more about having lists of people to follow (server-agnostically), than picking a server? If those could be made more user-friendly and integrated with joining up I think it could help a lot (or, could have helped al not :/).
Automatic suggestions for people to follow might be good too.
@TEG @StryderNotavi @jbell @joshmillard That could work too, definitely. A "starter pack" of 50 accounts to follow, maybe generated from user-selected interests (a checklist for please include some tech, some gaming, some international news, and some US politics, for example) might be a neat way to do it.
@AGTMADCAT @TEG @jbell @joshmillard Another option would be to emphasise hashtags as a way of finding people, perhaps even incorporating them into instance descriptions as well to help people find the right place.
@StryderNotavi @TEG @jbell @joshmillard You'd need to push those out though, rather than just let people stumble across them. Whatever the solution is, it needs to be more proactive than what we have now.
@AGTMADCAT @TEG @jbell @joshmillard That's true.
Although another angle would be to include writing an introduction post as part of the actual onboarding flow. Those often tend to bring people to you and help people find each other.
You could even follow that with asking if they want to follow any of the hashtags they included in the post as a way of helping prime their feed.
Monika Viktorova
Marc "ACAB" Godin@jbell @joshmillard I'm happy here.
Hans Gerwitz@jbell @joshmillard I don’t see what the risk is for “laypeople”. I mean, as a crusty old-web I fret about the opportunity cost of not building something more open, the decline of digital autonomy under surveillance capitalism, and the loss of our historic record to oligarchical bitrot. But most people don’t share these concerns and ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Kat Tiidenberg@jbell @joshmillard fair, I'm with you on the need. But Threads isn't a good answer either. How could allowing for even more platform power to concentrate into the hands of Meta, who has a proven track record of being a bad actor possibly be a good idea even if it seemingly serves the need for conversation/debate/infromation/news/affective solidarity etc that Twitter served?
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard Hello, and nice to meet you! Let me start by saying I know I’m not going to change your mind and you represent the point of view of many people on Mastodon. So I know I’m facing an uphill battle here. I considered and reconsidered if I should even respond for the reasons above, but I’ll give it a shot.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard I think there are two buckets of problems. Bucket one is what happens when your product scales to millions or billions of people.
Bucket two is stuff that Meta can do to harm things on Mastodon.
Bucket one, in my view, was always the goal and was always going to happen. Mastodon was never going to stay as a fringe idea, and any system struggles as it scales. More people, more problems. Mastodon already had to handle this. (See: the Wil Wheaton moderation debacle)
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard The whole point was to provide a viable option that removed control from a single entity, with a single blackbox algorithm, with a single app, that wouldn’t let you leave and take your followers with you.
We did it! Mastodon proved the concept!
But the idea that we proved it too well, and we didn’t really mean it is odd to me. It’s like we wanted our band to be as big as possible, it’s playing at Coachella, and now we’re mad for selling out.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard Bucket two is things Meta can do. Easy fix: block Meta if it’s important to you.
But outside the hipster/activist/supernerd/fuck capitalism crowd, people welcome having their friends to talk to. And brands. And celebrities. They just do. Sorry they’re such dummies and so disappointing, but people also eat meat and love reality TV. People like what they like.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard So I feel like Mastodon can do one of two things: wait and see and block if/when Meta does something out of line, or move the goalposts. Admit that the goal of Mastodon wasn’t growth or a good experience. It was an elitist club who never wanted a fediverse at all. It wanted something anti-corporate, even if it’s worse for the vast majority of users.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard I didn’t join Mastodon because “at least it’s not owned by a billionaire.”
I joined to join a fediverse, which will naturally include people I disagree with, and services/apps with different moderation protocols, and the hope was that one day maybe the big companies would join in too. I wanted a decentralised network, and I wanted it to get as big as possible.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard So far, the Threads experience is far superior. Discovery of new content, moderation tools, onboarding, UI, and so forth. It’s just better, objectively, on many metrics normies care about.
To me, this is great news. Mastodon will get the benefits of ActivityPub’s explosion of popularity, but there’s always an option to block. The concept was validated, which is awesome, and if it backfires then people can make a decision on a server by server basis.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard I agree with the many think pieces about this, including from the Mastodon guy.
And that’s my version of those think pieces.
@jbell @joshmillard hi, nice to meet you! And thanks for explaining even though you didn't think it would work. I actually don't have an entrenched view that if Threads uses Activity Pub and federates it will ruin everything it federates to (which I think was the position you were speaking against, yes?) Not because I am sure it won't either, more just because I don't feel entirely equipped to formulate a strong position yet. So my initial barging into your thread was about the step before ...
@jbell @joshmillard .. which is the place we are at now, so my whole whinge is just a hopeless social media researcher one where I perfectly understand why people went on Threads, but I wish they hadn't and I wish they cared about consolidating all of their data, the power to govern what they can talk about etc into the hands of one provenly bad company.
@jbell @joshmillard In general I think fragmented (in terms of who owns and governs), but federated (so we can all talk to each other) and ideally interoperable is the best possible future for social media. So I think we rather agree. But how that practically works, is of course complicated and confusing (eg if two spaces with different norms and moderation principles federate, what happens etc).
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard Good chat, and I agree with much of what you’re saying. Internet stranger high five!
I wrote a comic about some of these issues in 2019 and have a soft spot for researchers because this was my Actual
job at Twitter. https://jonbell.medium.com/blue-sky-1-a8fbc449c88
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard My main disagreement is with the assertion that Meta is provably bad and evil and nothing can possibly be done ever. I’d say the same in the criminal justice system.
Regulation matters. Engagement matters. The way I prefer to handle problems in the system is to increase regulation and scrutiny, not shrug and say “nope, pure evil, don’t trust them” because then you’re left with hoping people agree with you. There’s no teeth to that strategy.
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard “They’re evil billionaires” is fine, I guess, but it doesn’t really lead to much positive change other then wondering why the rest of the internet doesn’t agree with our Super Amazing Opinion.
People trying to actually change the system were all around me at Twitter. And the conversations had to go a lot deeper then “surveillance capitalism is a literal cancer, shut it down.”
@ktiidenberg @joshmillard Again, thanks for the nice chat and the work you’re doing in this space!
@jbell @ktiidenberg at the risk of sticking to my guns in my own replies: you can both recognize the necessity of working within the bounds of the system to try and produce incremental internal change within corporate behemoths, AND think that, yeah, surveillance capitalism is actually very bad and should in fact be dismantled. There’s a degree to which the compromise necessary to get to “yeah, it’s bad, BUT…” is ceding ground to a side that will never think of ceding any back.
@jbell @ktiidenberg I appreciate people inside of Twitter, FB, et al trying to accomplish sone good and sone progress, but the arc of history on this stuff has demonstrated, repeatedly and without real exception, that those efforts are overruled on the net outcomes by the corporate motivations of the C-level and investor stakeholders.
Try to good, sure, yes, please; but conceding almost everything and then clawing back some scraps is a despairing vision of the best possibilities of a future.
Andy McMillan@joshmillard Well said!
David Ross@joshmillard Same, but also the post immediately above yours in my feed is someone going *"I've spent an afternoon looking at Threads, let the people who want what it provides go there so they aren't making Mastodon noisy. If you want shitposting, quick throwaway puns and jokey oneupsmanship go there. If you want serious longform discussion of the important issues of the day stay here!"*
...and I'm not sure they intended it the way that reads
David W. Jones@joshmillard They were convenient for those that didn't want to spend the time doing anything except exchange messages and pictures with others. Like having a web page without requiring the technical expertise to create it. Quite a number of small businesses use Facebook as their "website"...
Taco Dave@dancingtreefrog @joshmillard this is a good point. And honestly the social part is a huge aspect of the draw as well; having your own website, even with automated tools and stuff, just isn’t as discoverable as Facebook pages for the folks that run in local groups I’ve seen.
@dancingtreefrog @joshmillard I started a project earlier this year to share friends’ small businesses. https://itsdaves.site/friend-mall/
It feels like we need a way to do this at scale for small businesses we want to support in general, and maybe have it be ActivityPub compatible? Maybe “magazine” sites like Lemmy or KBin are a step toward this. I could see myself subscribing to one for e.g. “DFW Black-Owned Restaurants” or art show pop ups.
olaolarolla@joshmillard I laugh with you not at you brah...
IanMoore3000@joshmillard I agree. I may one day set up a Threads account as well as my Mastodon one, but it would be with regret and only if there was massive proven usefulness outweighing the pain.
Jamon Bull@joshmillard I feel genuinely dirty that I signed up before realising that I can’t delete my account without also deleting my Instagram. I got totally Zucked in.
mirabilos@joshmillard @jamonbull just delete Instagram as well, it’s also just Facebook data kraken
Peter@joshmillard the fediverse will remain a confusing niche thing to the general public without someone throwing money at UX design and advertising.
muz@joshmillard I'm going to send those fucks at meta one $100 invoice for every toot they download. They legally have to pay it under the FTC act.
Chris Ferdinandi@joshmillard honestly, if Mastodon worked more smoothly there might not have been a rush to these other platforms. BlueSky smooths over so many of Masto’s rough edges.
aerique@cferdinandi @joshmillard Using all these products I really do not see the supposed difficulties with Mastodon or the smooth Bluesky experience.
It's all about the social graph.
@aerique @joshmillard sounds like you haven’t tried to follow or have conversations with lots of people outside of your particular mastodon instance, then. The whole process is clunky AF, and I often can’t see the original message that people are responding to.
@aerique @joshmillard there is also a general lack of searchability for people who are not on your instance. Bluesky renders that a non-issue entirely.
Rosano@joshmillard @adrian jack is 'only' on the board, not owner https://theintercept.com/2023/06/01/bluesky-owner-twitter-elon-musk/
eugen writes about encouraging interop, suggesting that mastodon users may not even notice threads https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
@joshmillard I'm on the "reserving my username just in case" bandwagon just now.
sosomanysarahs@joshmillard I grew up on the internet of the 90s, and I'm skipping Threads and not yet on Bluesky. But Mastodon isn't meeting everyone's needs. From what I can tell, it's not trying to. That's fine, but it shouldn't then be surprising that the people whose needs it doesn't meet are desperate for something else.
The old web wasn't just difuse and less corporate. It was funny and memetic and weird. Mastodon is largely not, and I think its antiharassment features do encourage that.
@joshmillard That's not a bad thing! It's fine for Mastodon to be the thing that it is! But it does get frustrating when people express dismay that others are still on Twitter or eager to find an alternative.
I'm not interested in a lot of the most popular topics on the Fediverse (open source software, infosec) or my server (the craft of writing). The Fediverse is full of people actively avoiding one of my favorites (politics). And without the humor culture, I find it harder to bond with users.
Ragnell the Mildly Unpleasant@sosomanysarahs @joshmillard this is something Kbin/Lemmy have gotten, though. It's funny and weird and full of memes, like old forums and early reddit. The fledditors are all happy there.
Mastodon is very laid back and thoughtful, it has a vibe that is the opposite of Twitter which a number of us found to be a relief but others just went through withdrawal over here.
@ragnell @joshmillard Definitely more thoughtful! I honestly find this place more stressful than laid back, but we all react differently to different things.
@joshmillard Mainstream media has article after article pushing Threads into the public's face, using the old "competition" model between that and the dying bird. Of course the uneducated populace will jump on the all new shiny zuck app. If they just looked at the permissions it requests on the iOS app, they should be terrified.
@joshmillard @adrian i think what threads 'grabs' is those unserved by twitter, not sure they're interested in the fediverse population which is small in comparison to what they have
Jay 🆘@joshmillard People liked Twitter and Facebook. They will like Threads and Bluesky.