It’s crazy how many people will just click accept on security warning them that an app will access literally everything on their phone.
It’s also crazy how many people don’t even know that Threads is Meta… where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
Living with influencers in their feeds.
ugh. influencers are the worst. old man grumble
I’ve never cared for influencers, but they also never effected me personally. Until last summer… I was blueberry picking one morning with my mom. We picked 3 very full buckets and called it a day and headed for the checkout hut. We’re hot sweaty and tired and just wanted to checkout and go home, but we were suddenly blocked in the middle of a row of blueberries with no way to get out! Why? Because someone was photographing a lady in a sundress and hat caressing the blueberry bushes. We ended up walking through the photo and I’ve never felt such “get off my lawn” sentiment before.
Lol for real though, ruining an influencer’s shot - or even better, a live broadcast - when they’re being an obnoxious asshole gives me no small degree of pleasure.
When my wife and I got a chance to go to musee d’orsey in Paris there was a beautiful manual clock on show. There was this annoying influencer standing about 15 ft in front of it and not letting anybody get closer. She would constantly whine that they were in her shot.
I walked right up to the mechanisms of the clock to inspect it while she just yapped at me and my wife laughed and laughed and laughed.
Best experience in Paris by far.
Lmao that honestly sounds delightful! Hope you guys enjoyed the rest of your trip too!
Tangentially, did you get a chance to catch a performance of the string quartet that plays in Sainte-Chapelle cathedral? If you’re at all into that style of music, it’s one of the coolest experiences I have seen like that, and I cannot recommend it enough. The cathedral itself is gorgeous, the acoustics are absolutely breathtaking, and the quartet is like crazy talented. Can’t recommend that enough.
We sadly did not get to take that in. But the second chapter of the story is how two canadians visiting paris brought covid to basel switzerland, and caused a whole company campus to close. All while ending up trapped in .ch for ten months with only two suitcases…
But that chapter is for another post.
I just wonder what they are all going to be doing for a living in 15 years…
caressing the blueberry bushes
oh my lord. lolz
*Affected
[ shaking fist at clouds ]
I think security warnings are kind of like cancer warnings in the state of California. If virtually everything causes cancer then warnings become just a normalized part of life.
It’s just another form of notification fatigue.
What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it’s always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don’t click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.
There’s no point in reading the EULA, because it’s not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It’s always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.
It doesn’t even matter if you’re smart enough to wade through the agreement, it’s still take it or leave it, and the dummies don’t even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn’t the right word. Coercion. That’s the one.
Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
EULA sucks when these companies touch him
where the f have these people been for the past 10 years?
They’ve been giving away their data for all that time and it hasn’t visible affected them negatively.
Of course it will eventually and they’ll Pikachu face then but that’s hardly comforting.
Will it? Why? It won’t affect most people personally ever, hence why most people don’t really care.
I fear you are right. While I do believe that further policital abuse of that data is inevitable (Trump or the Malaysian civil war were at least partial results of campaigns of Cambridge Analytica, for example), people probably won’t see the impact data analysis had and how they’ve been manipulated.
You expect a lot from vegetables.
How do you know that people don’t know that Threads is Meta?
No, it’s mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there’s a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it’s easier.
I’ve been trying to hammer this point home.
I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click “advanced sign-up” if you choose to do so.
The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
How?
Well, like asking users what their preferences are and select the servers based on the criteria users have chosen?
Hmm actually yeah this is a good idea, but the problem is that there’s so many servers that I feel that after choosing criteria there’d still be a bunch of servers in the list and the problem remains, right? Just bouncing ideas. I quite like this idea though.
Then the algo recommends the one with the lowest load and hides the others behind a … icon or something.
Mm this could be a problem because server load is too unpredictable. I would actually say just randomize the list, so that it kinda does its own “load balancing” by incentivizing to pick whatever random top one it selected?
Yeah, whatever metric. Could also use a mix of number of users, some form of reputation measurement, uptime, etc.
I mostly meant that the system should pick a “best server” and recommend that. Smarter people than me can come up with the best metric.
But swamping the user with >100 servers to pick from is counterproductive.
I wish the devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for creating a web site. The web will never catch on with all this complicated stuff.
Honestly I like the fact that there is some difficulty in the sign up. I think it brings a better quality of people to the Fediverse.
How is it difficult to find a server? Just pick whatever server you come across first and create an account.
You tell the average dude about how servers exist and the first instinct is that it matters, so they stop, fret about the importance, look for a second, then just drop it because they dont give enough hoots yet to invest more effort versus using a centralized service.
Want ppl to join, don’t even tell them about servers. No choice paralysis, no fear of being wrong, nada
I haven’t used Mastodon, but on Lemmy the instance you are on totally matters.
For example, beehaw.org is pretty happy to defederate. It tries to give you a more moderated and curated environment. Feddit.de is slow, laggy and often outdated, and they just deactivated federation in general (at least they said so, to me federation seems to be still working) to avoid that session stealing vulnerability.
In general, federation is pretty buggy right now, with federated posts/comments having a decent chance of not being replicated.
So the choice of instance really does make a difference. But there is no help at all up front to choose the correct instance.
And just hopping over to another instance is also not a great solution, since people are used to build their social media account. It’s not some anonymous throw-away thing.
I the case of lemmy, i feel like it’s definitely some anonymous throw-away thing. We’re not here to build a follower base are we?
Much less than on other platforms, that’s true, but after a while you do start recognizing usernames again.
Sure there’s exceptions like SrGrafo on Reddit but most are here to lurk around or engage in random discussions
you could also simply recommend them an instance
The average dude who can’t figure out how to sign up for an account on a website can go fuck off back to Facebook, where SOMEHOW they managed to create an account.
It looks like most people don’t have enough braincells to do such a simple task. Isn’t it just nice to live in a world like this?
At least this is one thing that’s not as bad as decades ago. Just remembering how computer illiterate most of the developed world used to be.
Most people weren’t ever taught about this shit and had no reason to spend time learning about it on their own. Most of us are either professional or amateur nerds, figuring this out wasn’t really that hard because of our circumstances rather than our ~superior brains~
They have just as many braincells as you, throw that attitude away.
Centralization is the core problem of social media though. It allows a single entity control over the data and as soon as you have that, you have Zuck.
Centralization isn’t the problem, privatization is. If the single entity that controlled the data was democraticly controlled and not run for profitability it’d be the best of all worlds.
In 2023, there is very little democratically controlled anything left that has not been tainted by the ‘capitalist gains mindset’ - most democratic social programs that are far more fundamental than a social network have either been corrupted and impaired by corporate greed or have had enough legislative protections or funding sources cut out that they can no longer operate properly, allowing the argument for ‘privatisation’ - a one way ticket back to corporate greed. They operate at the whims of corporations and no longer serve the people.
While I believe what you say is true, it’s not something we’re capable of in the current state of civilisation.
Everything you said is true, democracy does not exist under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. I’m just saying, centralization isn’t the problem. Furthermore you can’t escape capitalism by decentralizing.
True, but it makes it possible to breakaway from an instance or leaders that are toxic/circumventing your privacy for profit without having to find a new tool or network. You can just hop to another instance.
It’s possible as long as competition exists, but every market trends towards monopolization. EEE is real.
Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If they can’t manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.Tbh, this is not a good solution.
It dumps you in front of a wall of 22 pages of servers on my laptop (equivalent to 4.35 meters).
Most of which have completely nonsensical descriptions.
If I look at e.g. the first page (top 6 servers) I get these:
- mastodon.social: The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
- mstdn.jp: Mastodon日本鯖です． よろしくお願いいたします。 (Maintained by Sujitech, LLC)
- mstdn.social: A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.
- mastodon.world: Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.
- mas.to: Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.
- mastodon.online: A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
Ok, so of these I can only rule out mstdn.jp, because I don’t speak Japanese.
mastodon.social and mastodon.official are, I guess, the “official” instances, with one of them being newer, for some reason. What does that mean? No idea. Is mastodon.social running out dated software? If not, why fork the instances at all?
mstdn.social and mastodon.world mention that they are general purpose. Without (and even with) Fediverse experience, I would expect any social media platform to be general purpose unless otherwise stated. So they basically have no description.
mas.to mentions only that it’s “fast, up-to-date and fun”. That basically has no meaning, except all other instances are slow, outdated and boring. So now I am worried.
mstdn.social says it has a 500 character limit. Without googleing a new user would have no idea what the regular character limits are. And I have no idea whether that will cause issues when interacting with other instances.
This page is like getting to a used car dealership without a clue about cars and you ask the car dealer to help you choose a car, and the dealer is like “Yeah, so I’m gonna help you. The right car for you is any car on the property of the dealership.”
Yeah but, it sounds like you can read and retain information long enough to make decisions on your own.
Most people can’t even grasp scrolling past the ads in a Google search. If they even get to Google in the first place.
Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
I’ve seen people lose their shit over having to “sign up for another app” and honestly I don’t want people who have no respect for their data, privacy and have the personality of a wet cardboard right-wing conservative on the fediverse. That’s why Fb exists. We are here as users because we chose to, as other people chose what best suits them.
I think it’s a good thing honestly. It brings a better quality of people here in my opinion.
Exactly, I downloaded Mastodon and deleted it in one day. It was too complicated (in an annoying way) to use. I’m very IT literate, but I don’t want to learn to use a platform, or do research. I want it to work out of the box, and I want it to be easy and the content to be accessible. Now think about all the non-IT literate people out there, of course Threads will do well because it’s just create an account and you’re good to go… If Mastodon was like that I would use it.
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I’m a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
Yeah, it’s unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That’s a massive number of people who could be easily informed “hey, wanna try our new product?” As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.
I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads’ numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.
There was a time - when facebook/ig didn’t exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn’t make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.
Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.
I’ve been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.
It’s one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.
We’ll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we’ll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the ‘cool’ thing around.
Until then, it will be much much better.
My worry is once this becomes the “cool thing”, then the corpos will come in with dollar signs in their eyes. Yes, I think lemmy will be harder to mess with given its nature, but I never count big corps out when there’s money to be made.
Even my tech savvy best friend has no fucking clue
Great opportunity to educate them, and then have them host your own instance :)
Nice meme but pls.
Or!
My favourite new format, thanks
No worries! It was shared with me (on here I think) so I’m just spreading the love 😁
Most of the alt templates suck and the og is still good. Why change?
Having an alleged pedo as a template always bothered me. We can do better here surely.
That otter is no pedo!
No, seriously though, who is the guy in the OP’s template?
Drake, another person who likely fucked around with underaged girls when he got a bit of fame https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2019/01/06/drake-seen-kissing-fondling-17-year-old-girl-2010-concert-video/2495634002/
He pled guilty to ‘child endangerment’ for some texts.
Never heard of him, doesn’t look like a nice guy. Thanks for the background
That LaForge one is pretty slick though. I’d like to see more of that. If there’s a Data version I propose they duke it out.
The problem with Mastodon is discoverability. The fact that if I follow 10 hashtags, it won’t sort them on my homepage, but will be fully chronological.
Say I follow #photography. The top of my homepage would be the post posted 2s ago, no matter how bad it is. It is so hard to find quality content.
Now, Threads’ algorithm is pretty bad, but it’s still a lot easier to find quality content there instead of on Mastodon. Mastodon badly needs sorting by Hot, Active etc like there is on Lemmy.
I was listening to a podcast (by three software devs) just yesterday talking about algorithmic sorting on Threads vs chronological sorting on Mastodon. Nerds, it seems (of which I am one), prefer chronological sorting. This is because they have a community of people that they follow (I’m not using Mastodon, Threads, never used Twitter). They self-select for high-quality content. Normies, they theorized, don’t have a specific group of people to follow, thus they need an algorithm to show quality content from celebs and such.
I’m curious how you self-identify and how many specific people you deliberately follow?
I have selected some high-quality content to follow, but I still need to SORT through it. I’m into photography, but I don’t want to see people taking a mirror selfie and it being on the top of my feed just because it was the latest one posted with the hashtag.
Reddit (and Lemmy) solve this by giving me the choice. I can sort by Hot or Active, and get a balance between recent but upvoted posts, and if I need to, I can always sort by New.
The user needs to have options. Mastodon currently isn’t it for me, and won’t be until they add it. Until they do, I would take Threads with a following feed over Mastodon.
I also feel like Bluesky is the one doing this really well too. They have custom algorithms, that users can create and people can enable them in the settings, like community plugins. I really, really love that concept and would love seeing something like that on Mastodon.
Custom algorithms like community plugins is actually such an incredible good idea I wonder why we don’t have it already on mastodon
That’s my other issue with Mastodon, it’s development doesn’t seem that open, it feels like the head dude isn’t really open to change. When asked about fixing search, he said it was “intentional” and he wanted people to search less. Seems weird, let the users have the choice, right?
Heck, even Bluesky, which is VC funded feels more open than Mastodon at times.
I particularly like Mastodon’s chronological and weak search. You won’t be easily found unless you wanted to, and your timeline is well-ordered and never will it be disturbed by some algorithms. To me these are its advantages.
I don’t like it because my feed gets flooded with low quality content that’s only there because the poster used that particular hashtag. It needs sorting like Reddit, so that I can keep the good quality content on top, but also have a chronological option if I ever get bored.
It makes no sense to choose chronological when you can make it optional. Bluesky is much, much better in this regard.
The brilliance of Google+ was solving this exact problem by having circles sharing, that is sharing of groups of people to follow. That way a nerd could share their group of say news people, then a normie could click one button and follow the same gorup. Bam! The normie got upgraded to nerd-level content.
Something equivalent can most likely be implemented for Mastodon.
Oddly, I thought that was one of the worst parts about Google+. I get your point though and I respect your opinion, I just thought it was interesting how we disagree 😄
I used the Lists feature like this on Twitter. One of my most popular ones is the “Official Xbox Feed” list that had Xbox employees, developers, and official accounts all in one place. I made it for personal use but it now has 100+ followers.
I used to use Twit before the Nazi jerk off came along. I used it to follow individual game makers as they made progress on their games, creative writers tweeting out little stories, and amazing artists I would find there.
I was definitely a Twitter Nerd before it became tainted.
I love combing through the federated timeline and randomly finding someone new to follow or maybe just interact with that day. It’s my choice, it’s happenstance (based on chronological feeds and when I take time to look) and it feels like running into new people in the real world in a way.
Algorithms tend to funnel people into partisan views of the world. They find people that think like you and follow the same topics as you and eventually without realising it you become partisan and unwilling to talk or compromise with someone with different views. It’s this part of social media that has made political situations hot and compromise seem impossible… I am digressing in my ramble though.
I curate people in my follow list based on looking for things I know I like at first and people/celebs I know I follow elsewhere. 10-15 minutes a day I spend looking through the federated timeline (not the local timeline which is the only one available in the official Mastodon app) and I will interact with or find new people to follow at random. And then occasionally I go to people I am following and see who they are following to find new things as well.
All my posts are chronological in my feeds, which means I can actually find them again.
And one other thing I’ve noticed on sites with algorithms like Twitter… eventually you’re just seeing the same people over and over again from the algorithm. There are thousands and thousands you’ll never see because it will never think they are important enough to show you. Chronological feeds are unbiased and give everyone and equal platform… for better or worse… but after years of Facebook and Twitter algorithms, I strongly feel that’s for the better.
I’m really digging the simplicity at Lemmy.world, though I haven’t gotten mastodon yet. Still not up to speed on “instances” & the federated timeline (?).
Unfortunately, Threads is run by a very, very shitty corporation that sees you, me, and the rest of the fediverse as a new market to expand into (i.e. fresh meat). I wouldn’t blame people from defederating with them — their incentives will clearly push them to violate many instances’ rules against advertising.
The watch what you see with your own eyes now
oh wow, fucking lol
wait, isn’t that for their shitty VR headset?
Exactly, they’re advanced, you know 🤮 It’s getting ‘really’ disgusting, not just viirtually
No no, they do not care about us. They have an audience of 1B people who care about branding and self-promotion. Here you have 12M people who are very critical what you do and hate advertisement.
I’ve said this a bunch of times, but Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it. What it really needs is for the default tab to be a “trending” tab, cause that’s what users want to see.
Mastodon’s use of a chronological feed is what kills it.
Funny, that’s exactly the reason I like Mastodon’s feed over traditional social media. No bullshit being pushed, just the people I’m following and the posts they make.
But twitter people love bullshit!
No algorithm designed to keep you addicted or run experiments on you.
You’re fired
You can’t fire me I quit
You can’t quit I’m leaving!
You can’t leave you’re a frog!
You’re saying this… On Lemmy. You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?
I honestly much prefer the idea of a chronological feed too, but disagree that’s what kills a platform. Tumblr has both the chronological and the trending for you/for all, and it was also ignored.
Don’t forget that some people have more than one account
You do know we have three different “trending” settings here, right?
Which are optional so what’s your point?
That’s not what I want to see.
The sign up process is just too confusing for most people too. I tried evangelizing it when musk took over and that was everyones response. Need like a temporary instance for new accounts that you can transfer out of once you’ve got your sea legs
Counterpoint: This tiny little hurdle keeps out the lazy and ignorant.
That’s how I feel right now. I don’t need the Fediverse to replace reddit and Twitter, I want it to be a refuge from the commercialized crap! The people who can’t be bothered to figure out Lemmy or Mastodon can stay right where they are!
Exactly, lemmy feels like my kind of people. Going against proprietary stuff, against privacy nightmares. It’s the fact that I can relate to people here that makes it such a good replacement for commercial alternatives.
Exactly. Why would I want anyone else in my community when I can just talk to myself! !league@lemmy.ml
I think these communities are plenty big already! I spent a while on tildes before coming here so in used to, and enjoy, smaller communites.
But people using those platforms is not good for our society. Of course if they cared about freedom a little bit of extra difficulty wouldn’t really bother them. But the goal should be to make the switch as easy as possible.
The only thing complicated about signing up for Mastodon (and Lemmy) is choice of instance.
Some people need that choice made for them, even though it does not practically matter. Most instances federate with content on other instances and it is possible to migrate your content to an new instance if you change your mind in the future.
Fortunately there are regional instances for both for me so it was pretty much a no-brainer for me to use aus.social and aussie.zone
I really dont get this “Lemmy/Mastodon is sooooo haaaaard to sign up for”. I’m a barely technoliterate 30 something who’s closest thing to coding knowledge is the Missingno cheat in Pokemon Blue, and I figured it out. Its not that hard.
Like, the instances/server thing is the only real extra step you have in signing up, but besides that, its like signing up for any other website.
not that hard, yes
but not simple enough to sign up without using your brain cells.
The focus on chronological feeds is what I like about Mastodon, and Fediverse platforms in general. I don’t want to be slapped in the face with what some algorithm with ulterior motives has decided I should see - I want to see the things I follow in the order they were posted.
I think that’s why the threadiverse clicks for me. Its sorted by zeitgeist. Not influence by halo users, just, “here’s some stuff the community was into recently”
Did you mistake threads for mastodon?
What are you talking about? I didn’t say anything about Threads or Mastodon. I’m talking about Kbin and Lemmy
You can’t just make up your own lingo and expect everyone else to know what you’re talking about.
I didn’t make up anything:
- https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36395866
- https://github.com/wakest/Threadiverse
- https://www.symfonystation.com/kbin
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546755
- https://slrpnk.net/post/389762
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/595753
- https://privacy.thenexus.today/8-days-later-draft-kbin-lemmy-landed-gentry/
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/140705
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/188910
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/350431
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/571398
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/773333
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/393553
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/251053
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/538269
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/361010
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/475538
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/444869
- https://slrpnk.net/comment/496476
I used a general term that’s been in the zeitgeist of the Fediverse for a while. Clearly this is a point that will need some onboarding documentation in the overall “what is any of this” for new users
Idk. The earliest I can find threadiverse mentioned is just last month. Threads started development in January, and is actually called Threads.
It’s an unfortunate term to coin and isn’t appearnt as to what it’s referring to.
My mistake. I should have known when you said threadiverse you weren’t talking about threads. How silly of me.
Now excuse me while get a glass of Pepsi. (I’m obviously talking about getting a plate of olives)
Yeah, most people aren’t on social media to see “what their friends are up to,” they’re there for the memes, the culture, the brands (including pop artists), whatever the latest “thing” is. Mastodon doesn’t have any of that, or at least it’s very hard to find.
It also doesn’t really show a like count which I kinda get but it’s really annoying
Mastodon’s own app is kind of trash. Mastodon confused the shit out of me until I tried Ivory.
Federation is so confusing! Why can’t I just sign up at facebook.com where the rest of the internet is? You guys and your cryptofederatedarkweb.
yes, that is exactly what the Internet should be, with full VR…
Instructions unclear; dick in toaster.
(BEEP!)
Anyone else notice the cursor on the top left?
The average Twitter user has no idea what Mastodon is.
Die average Twitter user doesn’t even care about not knowing what it is.
Why would you want them to die?
Die Twitter users, die!
The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user’s perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta’s not telling us…
To be fair, Threads is almost certainly built with React Native which always leads to bigger app bundles. Not to say that there isn’t anything fishy in there, but that’s part of the reason.
I think it’s because threads is just a new front end for instagram. It’s just instagram with a twitter skin applied to it.
Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.
Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.
But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it’s own. Multiple of them will take much more.
Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread’s version’s APK and unpacked it.
It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.
The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.
Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.
Just different tech used most likely. Mastodon is a native app and Threads probably something like React Native, so it has a JS runtime inside and a bunch of dependencies.
As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it’s not even worth talking about - it’d be like 100kb at worst.
The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are “jack of all trades” type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.
When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that’s been added over time and it’s easier to just “copy/paste” most stuff they’ve ever written than to start over.
This is the equivalent of suspecting one of two books to be containing Nazi propaganda because it has more pages in it.
I’m not saying you should not be suspicious of the content of Threads but using size as a metric for it seems nonsensical to a software dev.
I can barely find anything in Arabic on the fediverse, but on threads I can find all the relevant and local posts I want in Arabic
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What is Twitter then?
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SCO Unix
What OS is Twitter?
Chrome OS. Only taken seriously by corporations (who probably shouldn’t be using it for official business anyway), intentionally de-featured and functionality limited out of some misguided ‘vision’ by management, and everyone else who uses it hates it.
If they want people to use Mastodon, then make it user-friendly and easy for the general public. I downloaded it, tried it, and was lost/confused on the whole server/instance thing and finding communities etc. Whereas Threads is pretty straight forward, it’s just a Twitter clone. User experience is more important than privacy to the general public and developers need to realise you can’t compromise user experience/ease of use/accessibility.
Ribbit
I’ve never tried it. Is it really more confusing than Lemmy?
Nah, Mastodon is a lot slicker and more robust in my experience so far (been on there less than a year, but still).
I think the “confusion” is just from having to pick an instance although iirc they made mastodon.social the “default” one for people who didn’t want to choose, so maybe that hurdle is gone now, not sure.
I thought mastodon.social was closed to new accounts for aaages now
Still looks like it’s the default when you sign up from the mobile app, but both my accounts are on tiny servers so I’m far from an expert here 😅
Might’ve just been around when I started. I think they were struggling with everyone signing up there at the time. I went to mas.to instead
They are about comparable, once you understand the instances it’s pretty straightforward. But I’m ngl, I was confused at first. I’d made my first Mastodon account in 2018! And didn’t use it till recently because I didn’t understand it for the longest.
I don’t use it either, but I guess someone from your instance has to follow someone on another instance before you see content from there…? Maybe someone else can chime in. I just get this stuff third-hand from reading things other people say and listening to nerdy podcasts.
If you use the official Mastodon app, or an instance that has disabled it - you are unable to see the Federated timeline, which is why you would only see the Local timeline - IE things the people on your instance are sharing or following.
The federated timeline is a chronological stream of everything. A bit fast, but kinda magical in a way because I discover so many people just by spending 10-15 minutes combing through it during my visit each day.
I’ve also started following the same celebs/orgs that I used to follow on other social media.
And most importantly, I control what I see - not some algorithm funneling me into a partisan view of the world, which is a massive part of the issue with Twitter and Facebook and their relationship to current political situations.
Thanks for clarifying!
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I’m genuinely curious - what do people find confusing about Mastodon? What could be improved?
I was a little confused by Lemmy at first, but downloading and setting up the Mastodon app seemed super simple and straightforward. I’ve never been interested in short form text content like this, and couldn’t find anything I thought was interesting on the platform, but I didn’t feel confused.
Would love to hear what people find annoying/confusing as I’d love to be able to help create content etc for anything that’s holding people up. Twitter owns too much social/mental weight for people and Meta is no better - would love to find a way to help move people towards something like the Fediverse.
User experience is more important than privacy to the general public
This is, ultimately, a sad truth that, in my bleaker moments, makes things feel hopeless. However, it can be addressed by improving UX, I suppose, in a pareto-efficient way that hopefully doesn’t simultaneously compromise privacy, which does seem possible.
It seems this was meant to be a response to the parent comment. Or maybe you’ve done that intentionally to highlight the need for improved UX 😅
Tbh I don’t think it matters all that much. Exclusivity is cool. Plus reddits idea of UX is literally just plastering advertisements all over your feed. Seems pretty easy to beat that out in the long run, it’ll just take some time to catch up. They had a 15 year head start
It seems this was meant to be a response to the parent comment.
Lol yup, true… definitely unintentional. I’m used to RES and being able to collapse / navigate comment chains with keyboard shortcuts
I wonder if there’s anything analogous for Lemmy 🤔 I suppose the analogous thing would be to just directly add these as features to the frontend
Not sure but there’s like 20 different apps and web apps in various states of development, along with Lemmy itself. I’m sure it’ll come sooner rather than later.
Somebody recommended Alexandrite to me recently
Woah, didn’t know there was even one web app in development as I would have thought they’d just modify the Lemmy source code directly. I suppose that would take way longer to merge and be more controversial, too, than just writing one’s own front end
Nifty
An alternative to Twitter with an Instagram flavor.
I feel like I’m the only one that doesn’t mind people joining threads. It gets more people to join the fediverse (a good thing), which not only introduces more people to the fediverse (potentially with them moving to other instances) but also potentially gets more people to set up their own personal instances for themselves OR a group of family/friends
Hasn’t it already been established that threads would most likely deathhug most of the fediverse? It’s content would be overwhelming and nothing could keep up with it. I’d rather have the fediverse be a more small scale, cozy and niche place*.
In that case you can always use an instance that defederated threads
I feel you.
But considering that the majority of instances have already blocked threads, there would not be much of a fediverse to federate with anyway once/if they do.
That’s the depressing reality that could risk killing the fediverse.
If the fediverse has to join with Zuck to live, it’s better off dead.
You spoke my mind exactly.
I got downvoted for saying that over in !unpopularopinion so I guess that makes it either a popular opinion or a really unpopular opinion
Unfortunately Facebook will most likely pursue their usual goals of mass user attraction, followed by user domestication and enshittification. They’ll try to attract as many Fediverse users to Threads as possible, then slowly make it a shittier and shittier experience to use Threads unless you have an account there or something, and their federation will get worse and worse until they’ll just split off, but this time taking a shit-ton of Fediverse people with them (who will now likely have higher switching costs due to the network effects exploited by Facebook). Not to mention that Threads will be trying to collect as much data about everyone as possible (including those who just have an account on a federated instance), and will probably try to send out ads to federated instances.
It’s possible that Threads will attract more people to the Fediverse. It’s at least as likely that Threads will end up pulling people from the Fediverse, and into an eventual walled garden.
People using threads wont make their instances and will fill the fediverse with low quality content.
Kinda refuse to believe that every single person on threads is going to post low quality content. I’d argue that content made by a bunch of people not constantly thinking about the fediverse will help the fediverse. Let’s be honest, lots of the content posted on fediverse apps are somewhat forced because we all want this to work.
It weirds me out that the discussion has moved to “quality of content” when that wasn’t the problem with Meta/Facebook embracing the “federation” (ActivityPub).
The problem that got people worked up is that there’s a history of big companies stepping in, benefitting from open protocols, and then essentially hi-jacking them. A common example would be Google doing it with XMPP, but similar things have happened, not to protocols, but to FOSS in the past. Like with Oracle buying SUN and essentially killing OpenOffice, causing people to fork it to LibreOffice to continue the product.
You also saw it a lot in the early days of the web, with the “browser wars” where Microsoft behind closed doors, added features to HTML and JS that other browsers then had to rush to implement. Companies have done it to one another too, Microsoft reverse-engineered AOL’s AIM to make MSN Messenger compatible with their protocol, so AIM and MSN users could chat. AIM didn’t like this, and it resulted in a long back and forth, until Microsoft uncovered that AIM was using a secutity exploit in the AIM client to authenticate, and eventually acted whistleblower on this.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t want the federation, they just want the users, or more accurately their data. They’ll happily federate and contribute until they feel like they’ve gotten enough from it, at which point they’ll pull the plug.
I agree with you. Lemmy is way too aggressive about this.
