Fuck AI

I know why this happens. My comments get more, sometimes many more, comments and likes on Mastodon than on Bluesky.

On Mastodon, it's all how many people you follow and who follow you back. There are other ways to find posts on Mastodon, like the federated tab on your server, but many people don't seem to use them as much. To find things on Mastodon you must follow lots of people. You have a lot more work to do on Mastodon if you want things to read and for people to read you.

Compared to Twitter, this is also true on Bluesky, but management there has tried to give users ways to find people other than an algorithm (which Bluesky does have in its Discover tab, which I notice post quality drops substantially from my curated following list), in the form of starter packs. On Mastodon the account FediFollows is a good place to find groups of people to follow, and FediTips for general ideas and advice.

that's not been my experience. I set followers to needs approval as well, fuck if i can figure out why anyone would follow me. I have kind of abandoned my masto account and now use Goto Social

I don't use Mastodon but sometimes I stumble upon other users on Mastodon. The vast majority of times, they scream out into the void. Thousands of posts, zero interaction.

I have the opposite experience. I can post the same thing on both bs and mastodon and got lots of replies on mastodon and crickets on bs.

Both of those are federated options with no central company behind them. They have issues, but not because they have a corporate algorithm feeding their users.

In general, I'd say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.

But I'm glad it's like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.

What's wrong with toots?

That's the thing, like it's just twitter with a different logo. Does nothing different, still has questionable ties to questionable people, monetization in its short term future. It's basically a Twitter clone.

People forget that Twitter turned to shit long before musk showed up. They were the ones who refused to enforce their own TOS for trump for years.

I considered it but not closed source doesn't automatically mean open source so I preferred to be more rigorous.

It is. But it think the fediverse is the next evolution of whatever is going to replace social media as we know it. So while I think this place is part of the journey, and not necessarily the destination, I think there's also some important things here that are getting glossed over by just saying it's new reddit. Like the control of it, and how it's connected and whatever else.

Take reddit for instance, like I've had some pretty big blowouts with a specific reddit power mod before, and he's the mod of what seems like a billion subs. Buddy's just a zeeb, but ive lost my patience with him, and I've had usernames be totally banned. It hinders your ability to maneuver through the entire platform, like you can do new usernames or whatever, but if they start IP blocking you, or my total all time favourite, the "shadow ban" (what a gross thing), it gets harder to maneuver around.

Whereas here, that same power mod could show up, but as fast as he can ban me, I can join other instances and basically be back in 20 minutes. It enacts freedom of speech, and allows people to circumvent suppression. Sometimes thats not such a great thing, but I'd rather be offended by something, than enable someones voice to be suppressed only entirely because one absolute skid stain loser doesn't agree with them.