The largest issue with the fediverse is that so few people seem to understand what it actually is. Even this paper talks about Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads as if they’re mutually independent. They kind of are, but that misses the point of what the fediverse is meant to be.
I am part of a public mastodon server and the academic migration was like watching people discover what it was like to “surf the web” again. This paper generally rings true to my experience. In my view, this particular failure of fediverse adoption was because there was a large group of people who were using immature technology for the wrong reasons, and the friction of their incorrect mental models outlasted their righteous indignation about Twitter/X.
If you haven’t taken a gander through the fediverse yet, give it a try. It’s beautiful and weird the way the internet was in the days of geocities. But it can take some digging - my best results have been in finding people who are running custom, non-mastodon servers.
The problem with fediverse is that it is not user friendly or not user friendly enough for casual users to join. Facebook, WhatsApp and other popular social apps thrived because you only needed your email or phone number to sign up and then you would have minimalistic UI and UX which people could learn in like 5 minutes and eventually they would stick with it.
My take on this is; back in the day when Facebook and to the extent Twitter were dominating so called "social media", being on Facebook or Twitter meant that you were actually connected with all the people who wanted to be a part of social Web. But today, social networking is so fragmented with dozens of social sites, mobile apps, fediverse networks and who knows what that I think, we are actually going back to the time of decentralized and distributed internet forums where people would gather in small communities and connect with each other, which is not necessarily bad because all the power is not concentrated in Facebook and Twitter but then again all the interesting people are not in the one place but in the 10 different places hence Zuckerberg stating that Facebook started as a directory of people which was meant to centralize all people and their connections in one place.
Content discovery on Mastodon can be daunting, especially if you are a busy academic who doesn't have the resources to stay connected on what's happening all day long. That's why we created Murmel - a service that does all the checking for you and delivers it to your inbox in a compact daily email. I can't wait to see more peoples reaction when they finally get hold of their day: http://murmel.social
The academic Imposters with Elon derangement syndrome left Twitter, making it better and Mastodon worse?
Mastodon becomes the place to be to know how to make ethics committee minutes inclusive and Twitter is where the real science anarchy is?
I think sacrificing Mastodon is worth it. There is still Bluesky
I don't think there is much in this paper to get insights from?
Personally I think Mastodon's reader UX is it's biggest failure. Lol, I just went to https://mastodon.social to do a search for an example and search is login-walled off. Could they make it any harder?
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Enforcing things equally is impossible because we don't see everything, and we can't moderate what we don't see.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Of course, those comments just as terrible and repetitive. From a moderation point of view it makes zero difference whether the high-order bit is yay or boo.
Maybe it "has to stop" but that doesn't mean it will stop. People won't stop behaving like people. All we can do is moderate what we see, as I mentioned above. Fortunately the community sees a lot more than we do—so if users bring to our attention posts that need moderation, it extends our range.
There’s a kind of insufferable harridan who thinks that Elon Musk is Satan incarnate, but when they migrated to Mastodon, not only did nobody want to follow them, but rather appreciated their absence.
I am part of a public mastodon server and the academic migration was like watching people discover what it was like to “surf the web” again. This paper generally rings true to my experience. In my view, this particular failure of fediverse adoption was because there was a large group of people who were using immature technology for the wrong reasons, and the friction of their incorrect mental models outlasted their righteous indignation about Twitter/X.
If you haven’t taken a gander through the fediverse yet, give it a try. It’s beautiful and weird the way the internet was in the days of geocities. But it can take some digging - my best results have been in finding people who are running custom, non-mastodon servers.