"... many scholars direct their followers to Threads and Bluesky instead of Mastodon, with 2% providing Threads information and 6% providing Bluesky information ... making it even more challenging for Mastodon to become a preferred alternative for academic discourse."
All around win for Fedi/AT imo
Mastodon is maintained & occupied by pedantic nerds and *it shows*. That's why I'm barely ever there. If I want to see a bunch of infighting over the stupidest shit where nobody is listening to each other, even though they want the SAME THINGS, I'll just go to *gestures at the rest of the internet*.
I posted “information wants to be free” on Mastodon yesterday and at least three different people felt the need to point out that information isn’t sentient and doesn’t “want” anything. Ok buddy. This is why no one wants to hang out over there
My pet theory is that Mastodon is a social network for involuntarily anti-social people whereas Twitter is (now) for people who are anti-social by choice.
so i have a theory and it’s this:
a huge % of mastodon early adopters went there bc they’d get their ass beat in the quote tweets on twitter
they thrive in a dark cave where they cannot be called out in public
There may be technical issues partially responsible, because the federation structure there is “eventually consistent” wrt to seeing replies from other servers
Some might say “eventually inconsistent” because it depends on your server if you actually see all replies; it’s unlikely that you do if the OP was from a server different than yours
The sheer volume of repeat reply guys on Mastodon stems from a real technical limitation of the way they do federation over there. Even if one was inclined to read the other comments to see if someone had posted them already, you can’t actually see comments across instances in a lot of cases
The fact that mastodon has existed in one form or another for almost a decade and this is _still the case_ is just gobsmacking. Literally table stakes for a social product: “can I eventually see the entire conversation”, Usenet figured this out in the 80s, and they managed to fail at it. Amazing.
Not just lack of interest but — and this goes for most of Mastodon’s obvious technical failures — active hostility toward the idea. It’s really a shibboleth there that a crappy user experience is Actually Good. I’ve had people block my entire instance for pointing out that DMs are broken.
The annoying thing is that they could absolutely fix this (given the needed amount of contribution bandwidth…).
Mastodon *already* publishes the live replies collection for every post cross-server, so w/o changing the protocol at all, they could fetch those when someone views details.
Other than the technical limitations, that would actually be an interesting feature in an app to scan the prior replies for the same sentiment you're going to post and alert you if it's likely redundant
like, they speak perfect textbook English but it's very literal and they seem to struggle with subtle meanings and slang and lack the background radiation of US political rhetoric
good god, i'm the most literal-minded autistic foreign english speaker and if i can grasp it they can grasp it. they're just being intentionally, ridiculously, pig-headedly argumentative for argument's sake and that's why nobody wants to play with them.
probably even a bit worse, tbh. it's a country where everybody learns school english and is exposed to a lot of tv english (there's no dubbing other than for kids) so you have a population that's on average a bit too good at english to be aware of the bits they aren't good at.
I think every single tedious guy with poor social skills on fedi follows you, and they are compelled to reply in order to prove to themselves that they are are smart, successful, and hot as you are.
I’m so sorry 🖤
wow, that first guy is literally just restating the other half of Brand’s original thesis: information wants to be expensive, but it also wants to be free, and there is eternal tension between the two
