The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    7 hours ago

    Go and sprinkle the simplest keywords in the thread - Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed - and tell them your experience.

  • jaybone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    8 hours ago

    How much of the fediverse runs on AWS and how willing do we think besos would be to pull the plug on those?

  • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    76·
    12 hours ago

    The thing about Mastodon for influencers is… you don’t even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.

    If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      162·
      10 hours ago

      Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn’t by design, so they’re gonna have a much, much harder time there.

      That’s an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there’s a lower financial incentive.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        7 hours ago

        Mastodon doesn’t by design

        There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn’t shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it’s not entirely lacking discovery features either.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
        8·
        9 hours ago

        Mastodon doesn’t by design, so they’re gonna have a much, much harder time there.

        In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.

        Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create a false appearance of success.

        Of course, there’s still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.

        But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.

        All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon’s algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
      158·
      12 hours ago

      Please tell me how I can keep posting to twitter after I was banned for being a journalist?

      • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        24·
        12 hours ago

        My point was for people who are scared to leave Twitter. They don’t have to. They can just dip their toes in while still holding their Elon-themed blanket.

        I understand that often you can’t just drop the platform where all the engagement is when your job is to promote something. However, you can still enable people who do want to make the switch.

        • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          That one got banned too. I can’t even signup for a lot of these services. I get banned before I even make a post.

          • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            6 hours ago

            Honestly, if you’re going to do both, do bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky isn’t properly decentralised the way mastodon is, but a lot of influential people are there. Also it’s way netter than twitter was.

          • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 hours ago

            You need to use a different device and IP address. IP addresses are a dead giveaway for someone trying to create a second account, and even with a different address, browsers are easy to reliably fingerprint.

            The reason for using an entirely different device* is to prevent advertising crap baked into your software from sending Twitter or other platforms any unique advertising ID associated with one of your old, banned IP addresses.

            *With careful setup, a virtual machine with a dedicated VLAN and internet connection would work.

  • CitizenKong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    49·
    12 hours ago

    What’s happening right now is eerily close to the “Gleichschaltung” that happened after Hitler took over Germany, basically bringing all media in line with the will of the party and the leader. It was news media then, it is social media now. Because for many people, social media is their primary news source.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
        9·
        6 hours ago

        The smaller alternatives will get bigger as the mainstream social media gets worse and worse. The job for us, in whatever way we can, is to build the alternatives and make them ready to handle the influx, and make them welcoming to new people.

  • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    601·
    12 hours ago

    It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven’t migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They’re not that hard to set up, and there’s so little risk when you just don’t accept public signups on your domain.

    • DharkStare@lemmy.worldEnglish
      35·
      12 hours ago

      I agree. The Fediverse stuff is really well suited for governments and businesses. They can be in complete control of their instance, post whatever information they want distributed, and they don’t need to rely on any other business for it.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        From talking to someone involved in local government software, it seemed to me like there is a push in the opposite direction from that; they want and are moving towards offloading as much as possible to third party software vendors.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
        8·
        9 hours ago

        Yeah. I’m surprised businesses haven’t been quicker to setup self-hosted Mastodon as their primary, and then mirror that to Twitter and Bluesky and such, for disaster recovery protection.

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          6 hours ago

          Businesses I understand because that involves listening to your tech guy and approving time for it, and businesses hate spending money, even if it wouldn’t really cost them that much in practice. They have a lot of institutional inertia.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      12 hours ago

      Completely agree! Seeing the dumb little logos all over timetables and the sides of buses always makes me roll my eyes. First they had to change the “t” logo to the bird, then that’s out of date on a billionaire’s whim and they have to replace it with the apocalyptic “X”. Come on guys, this is getting embarrassing. Stop treating big private companies like Daddy, it’s time to stand on your own feet. The tools are there.