Does Musk gain anything for making Mastodon such a good alternative?
Discovery on Mastodon is not great. At the time I signed up most of the accounts I followed from Twitter were just repeating content but never engaging with the replies. Felt very cold and empty.
Yeah, I don’t like it there either (never been a twitter user). But it sure is weird that Musk is basically making all the important tweets from organisations who rely on that platform unavailable to the majority of the public. If such behaviour continues even the least tech savvy orgs are going to have to start migrating there, and the organic interactions may follow. Musk is basically providing incentive to migrate at this point.
Yeah no doubt.
I think what I run up against is more fundamental to ActivityPub.
My wife was going to try and sign up for Lemmy tonight, but I didn’t even know where to direct her. Lemmy.ml has signups off. Lemmy.world is a version behind. I know nothing about the people hosting any other instance currently. Lemmygrad is great but it’s kind off in a corner. Defederated heavily and comes with normy hate baggage. She was calling her self a Communist well before I got on the train, but a more casual experience is likely what she wants. Just the stuff Reddit provided, pre sleep reading entertainment/news. Twoxchromosome, parents subs, subdrama, content creator related subs etc.
I took a look at /all on Lemmy.ml and I feel like it was over run by meme posts from a dozen meme communities across the network…
I guess hexbear is technically a Lemmy instance now but I have no idea what the community is like over there.
It’s just kinda a mess lol. I felt that way about mastodon too. I have no idea what I’m missing because of how both federation and defederation works. Creative communities seem almost non-existent.
I’m not sure there is a point im getting at here lol but onboarding is not easy.
personally i think getting your wife to have a lemmy.ml account would be the best, because i doubt most lemmy instances have lemmy.ml blocked (as opposed to lemmygrad.ml), so she would have more choices when it comes to engaging in communities/posts from different instances.
hexbear is a leftist lemmy instance just like the 'grad, but it’s more casual (though sometimes gets heated) than the grad.
I think Twitter and Reddit going down the drains is an op at this point. The state department heavily used Twitter in their work. The NSA gathered a ton of data from both of them. They manipulated public discourse in real time when they needed to.
Musk is someone they have control over due to his ties to the MIC. He doesn’t just do things that would disrupt state propaganda operations without approvals.
Two major social networks effectively destroying their ability to get information produced by the community into the wider public through search indexing? This isn’t a coincidence.
I don’t see what the objective would be though. If they remained the way they were, banning and co-opting any anti-capitalist community I think they’d have a much better impact for US interests. By airfrying the frog rather than just boiling it, they’re just scaring away even the most “normie” people and organisations to harder-to-control alternatives. Just look at beehaw and how many libs went there from reddit. Even the short-term benefits of such strategy (like making smaller international organisations hidden from the public), in the long term it’s making those same people consider at least keeping a mastodon/lemmy branch. That is unless the Fediverse is somehow owned by the feds. Would be funny ngl.
I don’t think their trying to control normies who use these platforms. I think their trying to disrupt information flow from power users/influencers to normies by destroying the search indexing. If I search for stuff about the war and I get results from Twitter and Reddit countering the narrative, that has broad social implications.
That is to say, it’s a mass media disruption, not a community disruption.
Fair point. I still think that their results would be very mixed if that’s the case, considering how suddenly alternatives are getting established.
I just don’t think alternatives are able to effect mass media narratives the same way. Think of it this way.
First, narrative control was mass media control. Then new media showed up. New media control started by flooding it with state activity. That didn’t go far enough. So next we get search algorithm changes, staring with Google’s individual search bubbles which allows for R&D of advanced “forum sliding” techniques being ported into “the algorithm”. Those algorithm techniques then get ported to every major social media platform and everyone is confused as to why every single platform slides every single user into right wing extremism.
Reddit and Twitter remain the exceptions because forum sliding works for the posts but doesn’t work well enough for the comments. Comments become the place for counter narratives and they are starting to show up in search bubbles because the article triggers state narrative but the commentary produces counter-narrative.
Yes, there are alternatives, but they don’t have search juice yet and likely won’t for a specific amount of time - say 3 months, say 9 months, whatever.
If this is state coordinated action, as I theorize, then the window to searchability is likely understood roughly or even potentially influenced since search is state influenced. This means that within this window we should expect the state to be taking actions that require counter narratives to die. We see this with Ukraine now. I dread the possibility that the social media disruption is a harbinger and not a reaction.
