MudMan

dark

We do “my dick sweats”, for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

I’ve been saying this from the go: users don’t need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn’t add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn’t a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes “do you want to see Threads or nah?”, which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

I’m just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).

And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.

So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go “you maniacs, you blew it up!” and so on.

People still use it all the time, often ironically.

I’ll say that, fart jokes aside, I like just saying “posts” for everything because at this point, and in an interconnected set of networks where we’re all using multiple services I’ve frankly outgrown the need to brand each bit of text I spew onto the Internet. It’s the same reason I say “I’ll text you” instead of “I’ll whatsapp you” or whatever.

Yeah, you know what those have in common? They all started providing one service more successfully than anyone else on that market and slowly accreted functionality in the absence of a popular local dedicated service. Twitter is not that, was never going to be that, and it is not becoming that, certainly not with a skeleton crew. The same goes for Reddit, which was certainly bigger than people think but not big enough to pull that move. It may have grown into a OF alternative specifically, just from having a foot on that business already, but that’s about it.

We do have one of those “everything apps” here, though. It’s called Facebook. Terminally online people don’t realize, but there are millions of people right now buying and selling used stuff, dating, watching videos and exchanging business information over it, even without accounting for the rest of the Meta ecosystem.