THE SHORT PITCH Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too? If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should probably stay … Continue reading Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky – and hope you will, too! →
It’s built to be decentralized though, from what I read.
It’s centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.
But all you need to know is that it’s a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.
Mastodon: Am I a joke to you?
I wasn’t a fan of the format. (and apparently I’m not allowed to have an opinion on format)
Isn’t the format literally just Twitter?
I’m not OP, but yes, that’s why I don’t use Mastodon or Twitter/X. I really don’t like the format.
I tried to give Twitter a fair shake several years ago, and I found it to be a complete waste of my time. So I don’t use it, or anything like it. That’s also around when I found Reddit, which I found to not be a complete waste of time, and that’s why I’m on Lemmy instead of Mastodon. I like following communities, not topics or people.
it’s quite different in the sense that you don’t see any recommended content, just your follows and their boosts.
That’s because its not harvesting your data in order to pull more engagement for ad revenue.
The ad revenue part is true but what do you mean by not harvesting data? Mastodon definitely stores your boosts and likes, it just doesn’t use that data to recommend more content. And the big difference is of course that it is stored on your instance’s server, not a centralized location.
I value your opinion. What do you mean by format? Couldn’t you just use a different UI?
It’s kind of you, but not a huge deal. When I tried it (when there was an initial migration to Mastodon), it was so decentralized that you couldn’t really have much of a feed and it was tough to find much of anything.
The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)
You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don’t want to see.
Caveat: I don’t spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.
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When it’s built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there’s a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.