BeepLibreOffice Leave X/Twitter in favor of Mastodon
arcineAmazing to see Mastodon instead of Bluesky there ! Too many people falling for the Bluesky trap…
oh_Tbh I am on Bluesky more than Mastodon. Bluesky just feels easier to use. Normal users don’t care about federation. They want the app to work easily for them. Mastodon requires a bit to get a good feed etc. Bluesky you can be lazy. Wish Mastodon had like a default “what’s hot” or “Discover” feed. Really helps find people to follow as well.
Ease of use is one of the failings of the federation that needs to be addressed or it will never have a larger pool of users.
Open source content serving algorithms? We’d need to classify the content and have a server that recommends based on the algorithm. Also, user tracking to some degree (but maybe that can be handled locally?)
ageedizzleI think a simple ‘popular’ or ‘trending’ feed wouldn’t need user tracking. Or if it was really needed to be customized maybe users could opt into share what topics they are interested in when they sign up
I don’t see how it couldn’t theoretically be done on the user’s end with the right client. Choose a certain feed and the client takes the information shared in the incoming post data like the title, description, community, vote count, and instance. Then isolates each post, classifies it, ranks it based on user preferences stored locally like upvote and downvote history, and the client then chooses the order of posts to show to the user. And if you wanted to go there you could even have a local simple machine learning model creating descriptions of image posts to cover everything.
Granted I actually know nothing about programming, but I don’t think you’d actually be processing that much data if you kept the algorithm simple. All it actually has to do is just choose a ranking based on metrics and keywords and assigned values. It also doesn’t have to achieve maximum retention or have single digit millisecond load time, it just has to give people a customized experience.
The problem is that all this overhead and maintenance would require some form of monetization, like injecting ads into the feed. Something like that has almost no demand right now, because the options we have for sorting are good enough and the people who want custom algorithms don’t know what federation means and aren’t paying. And honestly I think it might be better without it, because personally I don’t want lemmy to go mainstream and am happy with where it is now. I sort by top of the day in All, which basically crowdsources ranking anyways.
But can it really be addressed? Centralized systems will probably always be easier to use. For example, if you want to follow a lemmy community, it will be community@somewhere instead of just the community name, and it will be possible to have competing communities with the same same but different servers. This will always leave people confused, and it’s something inherent to the federated model
Actually deltachat as a federated chatclient feels nearly as easy as signal. Just login to mail account, done.
Just one setting right now really annoys me: You see all the mails in the inbox. I don’t know why that is not turned off as default.
thingsiplayI don’t think that ease of use is the problem. The problem is, people want an exact copy. Most people don’t like changes, they just hope that the alternative is the same, just without the issues they leaving it. Same expectations for GIMP and Linux operating systems… (for the normie at least).
garretbleThe last couple updates made it easier to access the trending feed (which afaik has existed since 2021) and added features like quote posts. Bluesky starter packs and custom shareable feeds are definitely its major perks.
The odds though bluesky will get bought up by right wing billionaires in the next 10 years is almost 100% unless there’s a major change in media management laws so don’t get too attached to bluesky after like trump jr buys it with his crypto bribes.
leadoreYeah, I’m surprised how many go to Bluesky. It’s just Twitter all over again, controlled by a single company.
Dessalines
nightm4re
ZerushI think they do actually want Twitter again though. Admittedly, what Twitter used to be was still much better than what it is now.
It wasn’t the “controlled by a single company” part that made me leave Twitter, honestly. It was the Nazi CEO…
that’s the best part, just as twitter was sold to a nazi bluesky can be sold to a nazi too!
that’s what can happen when it is controlled by a single company
iamthetot
bufalo1973And fly to the next private one that will be bought in time by another Nazi?
The thing that make them move to Bluesky, its Elon, not the federation (Which is a shame tbh)
kingmoth@thingsiplay @arcine Maybe I’m the only thinking like that but I consider X/Twitter and Bluesky as echo chamber for right and left respectively, there is no real discussion between those 2 sides like it can be on mastodon. And also the fact that there is a corporates behind it is not reassuring either.