Threads have been gaining traction recently and I’m actually enjoying the atmosphere there. However it’s clearly on a growth phase where they don’t show any ads or paid content. This obviously won’t last, so I’m wondering if there’s a platform which I could recommend?
I tried Mastodon a couple of years ago but it felt a bit too technical even for me, so I’m a bit hesitant to explore that. Thanks for any input and my apologies if this has been asked too many times already.
I prefer Iceshrimp and Sharkey to Mastodon, antennas can help to find content
When Mozilla first made a mastodon instance was the first time I tried it and didn’t like it. Tried it recently and it’s meshing better with me than before. Just need more people on it
I’m frankly mystified by anyone who thinks Mastodon is “too technical.”
Please explain. Because the steps as far as I know are:
- Want a mastodon account
- Search for “join mastodon”
- Pick a server
- Create an account
- Enjoy mastodon
Those arent the steps. There is a 6th one because you have to go find content. Whats served up by default is random and not very good compared with the algorithmic feeds of other platforms.
What Bluesky did right was allow you to easily get started with starter packs and block lists. You can have a good feed set up in a few hours versus likely years on Mastodon. And then you can choose if you want algorithms or no algorithms and if you choose that you want one, you can choose which one. Mastodon needs to copy those things and it will be the final destination.
Isn’t that one of purpose of mastodon? Not having addictive algorithms?
Because the steps for Xitter were :
- Want a Xitter
- Go to Xitter
- Create an account
- Enjoy(?) Xitter
Even one extra step that adds friction can lead to you just not doing the thing.
Mega-corpos spend billions to reduce the number of steps to your wallet, because they make it back tenfold.
The answer is definitely Mastodon. We just need to make it work for you, OP.
I wonder if this helps?
Mastodon has definitely improved, but more to the point, there’s really nothing else. Particularly not anything that anyone is using. Unless you widen your definition to include Bluesky.
Honestly, I’d say that Mastodon’s perceived complexity in the past was kind of an illusion anyway. The problem of choosing a server was really made out to be this huge hurdle, when in fact it was no big deal at all; I was a member of several different servers over time, and I didn’t feel like my experience was substantially different on any of them. Just join one that seems interesting or is near you or whatever, and you’ll be fine. After that, it operates pretty much the same as Twitter did. Following people on other servers can be a little bit trickier on web, but in the app it’s pretty seamless.
One thing that’s really clunky is checking the list of followers and followed accounts: depending on which instance is each account, these lists are either incomplete or empty. I don’t know if I do something wrong, but I was trying to get up to speed with Mastodon by discovering interesting accounts to follow- which is not trivial - and found the aforementioned problem. I use a third party app and various web front ends, including the “official” ones (you are forced to when you look for the list of followed/followers)
I wish these un-federated things would do API calls to get the full data. I think they just recently started doing this with replies.
Have you tried Mastodons official app? It got a lot better over the years.
It’s not bad actually, thanks for the tip!
you’re on the fediverse, saying another place on the fediverse is too technical… also mabye bluesky if this is not a troll post.
Bluesky is privately owned, so I don’t see how it solves anything. And I don’t want to limit my feeds to include only technically skilled people, does that make any sense?
FYI check out pixelfed. Here’s a preview: https://pixelfed.social/web/explore
It’s basically a replacement for Insta rather than Threads, but the upside is it tends to be less technical. Also iirc it includes all the image posts from Mastodon. If you create an account, click on “Global Feed” and start following individuals and hashtags.
