Technology

the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don't know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don't give a shit

Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word "cis" and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.

Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm "to suggest the users whatever they interested in", less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.

Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.

Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.

Frankly? I'm happy that they didn't end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.

Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who'd spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That's regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.

Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying "this is fine, this is how it's supposed to be". And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.

Someone might say "but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They'd behave better." Well... we're talking about a large horde of users, they'd be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.

Mastodon isn't a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.

Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.

normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software

Wait people didn't join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?

Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.