On Reddit you post underneath a community. The decentralized abstraction only slightly complicates this. Reddit is just a centralized version of old forums, where you had an account for all your niche interests. Lemmy is the middle ground between those old forums and a central account because you can access all the content from any fediverse account.
On Twitter, you post detached from any community, the only way to be a part of one is purely based on social groups. The average person doesn’t want to have community instances even if they can talk across multiple, they want a social media that can represent themselves and all of their interests on one account. And if you say the solution is for everyone to just join the biggest instance, how is that really any different from a centralized social media anyway? It’s just over complicated for what Twitter is.
Bluesky and Threads will crush Mastodon. And unfortunately, between those two, probably Threads will beat Bluesky.
On Twitter, you post detached from any community, the only way to be a part of one is purely based on social groups. The average person doesn’t want to have community instances even if they can talk across multiple, they want a social media that can represent themselves and all of their interests on one account. And if you say the solution is for everyone to just join the biggest instance, how is that really any different from a centralized social media anyway? It’s just over complicated for what Twitter is.
This is an interesting perspective, and I can see where you’re coming from, but I think the solution you come to kind of misses a different benefit to the setup. You have many general interest instances, which is definitely added complication over Twitter, yet this can enable better moderation by comparison to a monolithic site. From those general instances you can easily represent yourself & all of your interests as you like on a single account, and a number of folks more or less do.
Mastodon does get a bit weirder with more subject-focused/community instances, that’s true, which is probably why if you look at the server page on join Mastodon, almost half aren’t focused on any subject, i.e. General/Regional (128/306, which if I can calculate is about 42% of them?).
On Reddit you post underneath a community. The decentralized abstraction only slightly complicates this. Reddit is just a centralized version of old forums, where you had an account for all your niche interests. Lemmy is the middle ground between those old forums and a central account because you can access all the content from any fediverse account.
On Twitter, you post detached from any community, the only way to be a part of one is purely based on social groups. The average person doesn’t want to have community instances even if they can talk across multiple, they want a social media that can represent themselves and all of their interests on one account. And if you say the solution is for everyone to just join the biggest instance, how is that really any different from a centralized social media anyway? It’s just over complicated for what Twitter is.
Bluesky and Threads will crush Mastodon. And unfortunately, between those two, probably Threads will beat Bluesky.
This is an interesting perspective, and I can see where you’re coming from, but I think the solution you come to kind of misses a different benefit to the setup. You have many general interest instances, which is definitely added complication over Twitter, yet this can enable better moderation by comparison to a monolithic site. From those general instances you can easily represent yourself & all of your interests as you like on a single account, and a number of folks more or less do.
Mastodon does get a bit weirder with more subject-focused/community instances, that’s true, which is probably why if you look at the server page on join Mastodon, almost half aren’t focused on any subject, i.e. General/Regional (128/306, which if I can calculate is about 42% of them?).