Ask Lemmy
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The number one issue with the fediverse in general is the tiny stagnant user base. Everything else is way too insignificant to matter. People could make as many fediverse platforms as they want, it doesn't mean anything if nobody is using them.
Not so many people use Mastodon, yet they get all excited and flock to Bluesky. It is possible to entice people to join, if they are offered something that they want. They have expressed reasons for not joining, or leaving after joining even for months, perhaps we should try to improve things so that they feel more comfortable being here?
The people who use Mastodon are very different from the people who use Bluesky. The people who use BlueSky are the former unhinged left wing Twitter users of years past that gave the platform it's notoriety as being the most toxic platform on the internet. When Musk took over, Twitter's title as the worst platform remained the same, except he shifted the source of the toxicity from being left wing to being right wing. This led the unhinged left wing Twitter users to seek a clone that replicated the toxic environment that they once thrived in, and BlueSky just happened to be the one that lucked out.
The point is that the BlueSky people don't care about anything outside political tribalism. That's what drove them out of Twitter and it's what drove them to BlueSky. That makes them very different from Mastodon users who, for the most part, actually value things like privacy, security, freedom of the internet, ownership, and control. The people who use Mastodon are tech nerds, privacy activist, or niche interest groups that thrive in such a space like the crypto community. I feel like even if we streamlined the process and it easier for people to join, the BlueSky types still wouldn't have an interest in joining.
Damn, I suspected as much but thanks for confirming. I never created an account so I didn't know if that would change anything in terms of what I could see was on it but it seems not. The default feed exposed to people without an account never really enticed me to check it routinely.
So where are the reporter types (& comic artists, etc.) then, mostly, other than just straight-up X, or shifting more towards private or public blogs like Substack (which is not federated though its open-source rival Ghost is)? I recognize that it is not a binary yes-no answer, and also that the answer is likely "pretty much just on X", with a much more extremely minor theme adding "somewhat, inconsistently on Mastodon, despite the fact that their followers are mostly not". And I cannot fault them too awfully much even for their short-sighted thinking, since they need followers or else they cannot exist, and when Mastodon instances go down I thought there is no way to move followers elsewhere, plus the issue of celebrity impersonation seems to remain still. Mastodon needs to work on those issues if they want people to use it.
Just like Lemmy needs to work on its ability to create at least SOME spaces more free of the toxicity that pervades the entirety of the Threadiverse and causes people to nope out immediately, then complain bitterly about us here over on e.g. r/RedditAlternatives and on Bluesky. I am 100% in agreement with "People could make as many fediverse platforms as they want, it doesn’t mean anything if nobody is using them.", which is why I am placing my hopes on PieFed to work more quickly to address the main concerns. It has already pretty much entirely solved the content discovery problem, and after expending so much effort on its API to enable 3rd-party apps I hope it gets back to enabling easier moderation features, although it already offers so much - more than Lemmy - in that regard.
That's actually why I like it better here. On Reddit I would doom scroll endlessly. Here I can take in my rage bait, get into pointless political arguments, and lament humanity's future, and still get something accomplished that day.
Also lemmy doesn't have the 'karma' system. There's literally no point to karma farm here. Like, it doesn't matter if my comments get downvoted to oblivion, it's not hurting my imaginary score that I have to maintain to interact in certain big subreddits.