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#Mastodon's first annual report! Read about our financials, accomplishments, and plans. Available under:
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Problem is I don’t think mastodon is really a good format for groups. Lemmy is better because it actually has something you can subscribe to (and Facebook groups is basically just Facebook copying reddit these days).
i’m feeling pretty ancient in internet terms, and for me, the modern commercialized internet is just downright awful for data and resources. first of, you have all the blogs that makes things up just to try hit those keywords and get views to make profits, and secondly, lemmy (reddit, facebook groups, etc); all have the same issue for a resource community. the problem is the core design philosophy behind it. the idea of these platforms was to create a flow of information that will let the companies deliver ads to you, the entire design is around addiction to short snippets of information so you keep coming back, and so you keep scrolling. free services, like lemmy, have it ‘wrong’ in that way; because they are not delivering ads and thus don’t need to consolidate information in the way they are. but it is a modern expectation from users, due to the corporate internet, and there’s just no way around it to maintain modern users. but yeah, the core issues with this design is the lack of information available. i.e. if you go to any community about fish, you’ll pretty much just see the same posts over and over and over again, because it’s not designed around resource discovery. i.e. on all the guppy specialized niche groups/subs, every post is essentially “is she pregnant?”, on every angelfish it’s “what gender his my fish?”. etc. the problem here is, people are screaming the question into the void and don’t bother to try discover the answer because it’s been cleaned from the stream of data already due to the active update of the flow, like a large chat with many users, the information get quieted down. thing is, the answer to these questions which seems genuine, is the same every time. no photo is necessary for the answer, in the case of guppies, the answer is, yes, she is pregnant, becuase any guppy exposed to a male will practically immediately be pregnant and she can store sperm up to 8 months meaning that “virgin pregnancy” happens all the time. and as for angelfish, no, you can’t tell the gender of the fish unless they’re just about going to mate, where they expose their mating organs. my point is, while modern communities are addictive, on average, the same information is discussed day in and day out, for the sake of ad exposure. it’s a terrible design, but it is what it is, and it is what we have. though, i think mastodon (with groups, as mentioned), will be slightly better than lemmy, for organizing local communities. for larger discussions, it’s an entirely different matter - and facebook groups needing more space for discussion, usually use reddit already instead of facebook.
An actual fediverse Facebook competitor is sorely needed but I have yet to see one. Lemmy is the closest.
if we break facebook down into its modules, it’s not really that impressive.
messenger + friends : just a simple chat client
user profile : short personal posts and photos; the true purpose of the website and tied to messenger + friends.
flow : where you originally saw latest post by friends, so, pretty much tied to the user profile etc.
groups : a simplified forum designed around eyeball measure for the sake of advertisement; it’s and awful design for what it’s trying to do.
pages : just a simple html page - this is mainly targetted at countries like the philippines (to maintain monopoly and pretend to be 'the internet)
user gallery : just a photo viewer
marketplace : an awful imitation of buy and sell - this is mainly targetted at countries like the philippines (same as pages)
facebook business : tying it all together with office communication, again, goal is philippines and similar markets.
in reality, facebook has outcompeted their purpose with instagram and most users have moved to instagram for that purpose, because “it’s not facebook” lol. most of the damage came from their own awful algorithm of the flow hampering the information flow and keeping up to date with your friends. but the goal was to provide “relevant data” for ads in scroll-by. the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”. without groups (which is a poor imitation of reddit, which is a poor imitation of forums), facebook would be dead (again, except for countries like the philippines).
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”.
Yeah I also think it’s a matter of groups are the only way to really scale a social media service.
Humans have baggage. They come with a certain level of social toxicity. Any community has to deal with this. Dunbars number and all that jazz.
Facebook tries to get around it by using machine learning moderation, and paying people but this isn’t a scalable solution. Trolls can always produce more filth, and the pay and work conditions of the FB moderators is famously a black eye on their public image and make them look bad. And the AI moderation simply doesn’t work, isn’t smart enough.
So the only real solution is (and has always been) self moderation. Communities have to self moderate, build norms, enforce those norms etc.
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
Yeah I hate to say it but there’s a part of me that wonders if allowing instances to run ads should be something enabled by these platforms. After all, even prior to social media the internet has pretty much always been largely sustained by ads. Blogs, flash game portals… I mean Homestarrunner was unusual in it’s day for not having ads. Do I wish we didn’t have ads? Yes. But also I can see how it might simply be the nature of the beast.
I just recently learned about Friendica which is basically a Facebook alternative. It’s neat!
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
i’m feeling pretty ancient in internet terms, and for me, the modern commercialized internet is just downright awful for data and resources. first of, you have all the blogs that makes things up just to try hit those keywords and get views to make profits, and secondly, lemmy (reddit, facebook groups, etc); all have the same issue for a resource community. the problem is the core design philosophy behind it. the idea of these platforms was to create a flow of information that will let the companies deliver ads to you, the entire design is around addiction to short snippets of information so you keep coming back, and so you keep scrolling. free services, like lemmy, have it ‘wrong’ in that way; because they are not delivering ads and thus don’t need to consolidate information in the way they are. but it is a modern expectation from users, due to the corporate internet, and there’s just no way around it to maintain modern users. but yeah, the core issues with this design is the lack of information available. i.e. if you go to any community about fish, you’ll pretty much just see the same posts over and over and over again, because it’s not designed around resource discovery. i.e. on all the guppy specialized niche groups/subs, every post is essentially “is she pregnant?”, on every angelfish it’s “what gender his my fish?”. etc. the problem here is, people are screaming the question into the void and don’t bother to try discover the answer because it’s been cleaned from the stream of data already due to the active update of the flow, like a large chat with many users, the information get quieted down. thing is, the answer to these questions which seems genuine, is the same every time. no photo is necessary for the answer, in the case of guppies, the answer is, yes, she is pregnant, becuase any guppy exposed to a male will practically immediately be pregnant and she can store sperm up to 8 months meaning that “virgin pregnancy” happens all the time. and as for angelfish, no, you can’t tell the gender of the fish unless they’re just about going to mate, where they expose their mating organs. my point is, while modern communities are addictive, on average, the same information is discussed day in and day out, for the sake of ad exposure. it’s a terrible design, but it is what it is, and it is what we have. though, i think mastodon (with groups, as mentioned), will be slightly better than lemmy, for organizing local communities. for larger discussions, it’s an entirely different matter - and facebook groups needing more space for discussion, usually use reddit already instead of facebook.
if we break facebook down into its modules, it’s not really that impressive.
in reality, facebook has outcompeted their purpose with instagram and most users have moved to instagram for that purpose, because “it’s not facebook” lol. most of the damage came from their own awful algorithm of the flow hampering the information flow and keeping up to date with your friends. but the goal was to provide “relevant data” for ads in scroll-by. the bottomline here is that facebook is surviving solely on groups since all communities moved to facebook due to the user availability from back when it was “the place on the internet to be”. without groups (which is a poor imitation of reddit, which is a poor imitation of forums), facebook would be dead (again, except for countries like the philippines).
all of above, which, if you consider it, there is an actual fediverse competitor, and that competitor is mastodon. it offers everything that users came to facebook (and twitter) for, except for groups. the survival of facebook remains because of users, of course. but as they are slowly digging their own grave for the sake of ads, mastodon stands to gain. the main issue with mastodon and the fediverse is the lack of means to profit as a user, which has also become the expected norm of the internet. users expect to be able to profit form their content, and mastodon (and lemmy) is designed to prevent that as it is designed to prevent ads and exposure of that kind. so it’s a bit of a dilemma. it has nearly all the best parts of classic online communities and communication, but the audience is no longer interested because of the change in narrative and profits being more highlighted than ever in the minds of most. no one does anything for free anymore.
Yeah I also think it’s a matter of groups are the only way to really scale a social media service.
Humans have baggage. They come with a certain level of social toxicity. Any community has to deal with this. Dunbars number and all that jazz.
Facebook tries to get around it by using machine learning moderation, and paying people but this isn’t a scalable solution. Trolls can always produce more filth, and the pay and work conditions of the FB moderators is famously a black eye on their public image and make them look bad. And the AI moderation simply doesn’t work, isn’t smart enough.
So the only real solution is (and has always been) self moderation. Communities have to self moderate, build norms, enforce those norms etc.
Yeah I hate to say it but there’s a part of me that wonders if allowing instances to run ads should be something enabled by these platforms. After all, even prior to social media the internet has pretty much always been largely sustained by ads. Blogs, flash game portals… I mean Homestarrunner was unusual in it’s day for not having ads. Do I wish we didn’t have ads? Yes. But also I can see how it might simply be the nature of the beast.
I just recently learned about Friendica which is basically a Facebook alternative. It’s neat!