Filth wizard and Internet bellend.
Main account on Fine City Social (Calckey) - Home page
Other Fedi things:
Swear Clock - Joobly Crooblins - Shartmaildottxt
You really couldn’t be more wrong.
You don’t have to be a Randroid or a libertarian, or even right wing, to understand that a discourse predicated on everyone getting everything for free with no real trade-off doesn’t really make sense in the real world.
ODF has been supported natively by Office for years now, and LibreOffice is able to open .docx files just fine.
I’ve never found a PDF “broken by Adobes bs”.
No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.
Their following press releases would probably spin a very different narrative about immature tech and privacy concerns.
What else do you expect them to do? Say “oh yeah I guess a bunch of guys on fedi say we are arseholes, so we must be”?
I mean… realistically, why would that be their fault if they were to start a fedi instance and everyone else blocked them?
Absolutely. In my experience, there’s a really strong tendency from people who are already all-in on fedi to treat “this thing doesn’t have feature X that my previous site Y did” as simple whining and respond to it with hostility rather than constructive criticism, you can see that with the thin-skinned reaction to some criticisms of Mastodon back in November about e.g. lack of quote posts or poor discovery features.
They don’t treat it as constructive criticism or actual feedback from users but instead as an assault on something they identify with personally, which is a recipe for disaster
The sort of sneering at newbies is exactly the sort of shit that in no small part gave Mastodon a reputation of being hostile to outsiders.
If we want this shit to take off as something other than a nerd curio, it needs to be accessible, not delivered with a side helping of judgment for not being 100% on board with the endeavour from the beginning.
The thing that’s interesting to me is this:
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
Kbin is technically federated and Kbin.social is technically just an instance on a federated network, the federation is just broken right now. But the simple fact of that not being a consideration, and everyone signing up on Kbin.social, has led to comments like this where “it’s so much easier”.
It rather proves my point; putting decentralised whatever front and centre makes things pointlessly complex and offputting to end users. They don’t want to think about this shit, they just want to read stuff and post. The less they have to think about this shit, and/or the less this shit has an impact on their experience, the better for them.
To an extent, influencers wouldn’t get on with Mastodon anyway.
Looking at it charitably from their point of view, the discovery is so poor that actually building a following there is a huge amount of work they probably won’t see a return on. It’s a much smaller audience that in no small part resents even the idea of an “influencer” - someone who has that as their line of work is going to struggle and consider it not worth their time.
Looking at it less charitably, Mastodon does not reward activity on its own but instead things only get attention if they’re actually worth attention, so carpet-bombing fedi with posts most people don’t actually value is a waste of their time, and it’s a lot more effort than such people would typically be willing to expend.
Because all of the users they like and want to talk to stayed there too.
Network effects are a powerful driver. They can be overcome, but not easily.
The absolute best way to explain the fediverse is to not.
When I wrote a short guide to getting started on Mastodon I made deliberate efforts to completely ignore the technical side. The instance stuff does not need explaining. Nobody cares about that. They want to know how to find people to talk to on this Mastodon thing they heard about.
Nobody will tell you to try some chocolate by explaining the entire supply chain for all the ingredients that went into it. They say “try this delicious chocolate bar!” or words to that effect.
If you can’t think of a USP for fedi that doesn’t revolve around obscure technical details that most people do not and will never give a shit about, and that honestlly are kind of awkward to explain and sometimes even defend, well… I’d suggest going away and trying again.
In general I think decentralisation is significantly oversold as a panacea, and conversely its advocates deliberately ignore that there are pretty concrete advantages to centralisation.
Worse, the advantages to centralisation are almost entirely on the end user experience side - “you can talk to anyone on the service no matter who!”, “you only need to register one account!” - while the advantages of decentralisation are all remote and philosophical - “nobody can take it over!”, “you can run your own service!”. So centralised services will keep winning because they have the best pitch - or, at the very least, servers on decentralised services that become so big and have so many users that they are effectively centralised services all on their own (e.g. Mastodon.social, Kbin).
Most people don’t care about philosophical stuff but they do care about having a usable service. It reminds me a bit of Linux advocates who preach the gospel about open source and how bad Microsoft is and how DRM will eat their nans or whatever, but fail to see the glaring issue that for 99% of users Windows works just fine and they don’t actually care about anything philosophical, because they see their computer as a tool that plays a minor part in their life, rather than a means of self-actualisation.
That said, I think the best way to explain fediverse is to not. You don’t need to tell people all the technical details, you just need to sell them on what they care about. Leading with decentralisation as your USP is a hiding to nothing because most people don’t care - “it’s a chill place here and you can do XYZ” will work far better. Anyone who cares will find out.
They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.
This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is “well I don’t think those costs are necessary”. But they are.