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Twitter is basically just a worse version of Facebook where all the users are replaced with bots.
Meanwhile everyone thinks it is better simply because there is less drama because no one is real.
I'll take the quality interactions of the Fediverse anyday over that.
@DracoMagister When i say its worse than Facebook I mostly mean the quality of the interactions, not the company itself.
I have over 1,000 followers on twitter and used to have over 4,000. Most of the responses I get on any posts are low quality if at all. Engaging meaningful conversation on a post is almost completely non existant, it is limited to sound bites almost by design, though your lucky to get that much.
At least on facebook while there is more drama ther eis more actual content to what people say. Here you get the content but less of the drama.
I'd like to see more people like that use fedi, but, it's just really very small, and the convoluted shadowban structure frustrates attempts to use it this way. Also, PM usage is frustrated from lack of frontend UX.
Therefore, I don't agree that fedi has higher quality interactions, or even that it can outside of local extrema. Principally I think its best use case is cuteposting.
@fluffy Thats exactly what I'm talking about though. Most people who are there arent there to be themselves they are there to sell themselves as a brand, or are a brand themselves.
The academic on twitter sound more like politicians in how they conduct themselves than living breathing humans. Their mindset is to get followers and behave in a way that will make them popular, not in a way that actually reflects their personality.
Thats the very issue to me, it feels like one big advertisement, sometimes of your personal brand sometimes not. But never people being themselves really.
yes, but you can blame cancel culture for this. Look at what happened to rms. So I don't think you can get this sort of living breathing human being interaction in any public platform with strong identity.
> Most people ... a brand themselves.
sure but i think this is not the source of the formality you mention.
> But never people being themselves really.
Isn't this something that comes up even in personal chats?
Perhaps the only reason people on here are real and genuine is because they are called bloblobster or puniqt and if there is some meltdown you can just walk away. Not so if you are using a strong identity.
@fluffy While it may be counter culture to blame, or any other number of factors. Who or what is to blame is less of concern to me than what is or is not. The truth is, the qualities I describe are inherent to twitter regardless of blame, and are far less evident in the fediverse or Facebook. Reasons to avoid the platform even if the company isnt to blame for the effect.
Yea people being "fake", in the sense of trying to put on a political front (usually called being professional) is something you can see in any context. But it is far worse in twitter than other mediums. Its a matter of degrees not absolutes.
As for identity. You can pick any identity on twitter you wish, just as you can here. Neither platform requires you to identify yourself.
@fluffy If I compare the way people act with their follower count across twitter in here your assertion would not seem to hold true. Many of the most high profile accounts here on the fediverse (myself included) do not seem to behave that way compared to people on twitter with less followers.
blobcats so perhaps I simply never noticed
I wonder if twitter was like fedi in its early days.
@fluffy I think the difference comes from two main factors.
1) larger word count here, so no need for people to talk in useless sound bytes, it encourages real dialogue.
2) Twitter is something like 90%+ fake accounts I forget the exact number but it was huge. Which drives people into an artificial popularity contest. Here follower count is genuine and often not something people care too much about.
Generally agree. One question.
>here follower count is genuine
is it though? I know for a fact that I have many duplicate followers. To wit: on FSE I have 400 followers, but 10% of that is just @sjw alts. Most people have several alts, so I would not be surprised if real user count is somewhere between 2-4x smaller. 25% is not that much larger of a number than 10%.
There is a big difference between non-posting bot accounts purchased for fake followers that make up some 90% of many users follower count, and what you describe.
Simply put someone being active in two places occasionally (no idea what percentage it is but its a minority) is not a "fake" user. It simply means there is a bit of an overlap.
REgardless though if your talking about individual breathing humans then yes the number will be a bit smaller for some people here. But its a small minority compared to twitter where it seems to be a rather large minority on many accounts.
I should also say your 10% expiernce is likely unique to you. I can only think of one or two people in my follower count that I am aware of that are alts of users on another account. The actual number may be higher but its not something I personally witness very often.
I think it varies greatly on the way you use the server and the sort of account you use. On servers like blob.cat and FSE I would imagine the vast majority of users have alts because of the shit-posting highly-blocked nature of those servers. However on most general purpose instances in the fediverse like M/S, QOTO, etc the vast majority of users are active in only one place I'd say.
I don't think this is an accurate depiction, although I suppose it would be the propaganda popular in many of these weird paranoid instances which block blob.cat
Probably it is simply that people are more technically proficient and open to experimentation, and less looking for "a twitter but x is different", but rather actually want a federated microblog.
I frankly I hold the sort of people who would block fse and blob.cat in utter contempt.
The block part of the comment was directed more at FSE than blobcat.. blobcat is more about shitposting it seems. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But it does lend to people having alt accounts more.
I do not myself approve of instances that block FSE or blobcat. But FSE is certainly highly blocked, sadly.
One guy on KF said they had some on masto the cancel instances but a week or two ago he told me he closed them because it's just boring there. But KF is not FSE we probably don't have more than two mutual active users.
Maybe there is some spiritual precurser to fedi or something (bbs? usenet?). Did they have the same problems with federation failures a cause de people with verkehrtpolitik? ( @absturztaube pls rate my deutchhacken )
I wasn't around then because I'm not a #boomer but maybe moron @moron @nerdman or someone else will recall. My feeling is that this sort of failure is new, at least the part where it's prominent, and the people 30 years ago spent less time thinking about social engineering and more about software engineering, but I would like to hear from a primary source.
A lot of the time it's the case that nothing has really changed and we just think it's new because we had some assumptions...
I doubt it. It was before my time, but not that much, and at least at that time, engineers had a DEEP disdain for political crap.
Maybe someone who was there from the beginning like @r (btw r, bloat is down) will be able to chime in. To wit:
>Maybe there is some spiritual precurser to [the fediverse] (bbs? usenet?). Did they have the same problems with federation failures [caused by political disagreements]?
>My feeling is that this sort of failure is new, at least the part where it's prominent, and the people 30 years ago spent less time thinking about social engineering and more about software engineering, but I would like to hear from a primary source.
I sort of romanticize the years past as some sort of hacker fantasy wonderland but probably the reality was much different.
>I wonder if, when email was just taking off, people who operated mail servers blocked other servers if they disagreed with some of the political statements.
When internet based email became a thing, not many people had access to computers let alone the access to internet. And when internet became popular, the market was already being dominated by big corps -- AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo. So most users never bothered with running their own server and never cared about federation.
>bloat is down
works fine for me
@fluffy @sjw @absturztaube @freemo @nerdman insulated cult of personalities were more a thing, people who are beyond reproach, circle jerks, etc, but it seemed back then there were more political disagreements within those groups
>On servers like blob.cat and FSE I would imagine the vast majority of users have alts because of the shit-posting highly-blocked nature of those servers.
Not really. If people have alts it's usually on other shitposting instances for when their home server is down. People generally don't care about people on instances that block their server for some stupid reason. They're generally against blocking at the instance level in general. Also, using one account for shitposting and another for seriousposting is too much of a pain in the ass. Especially since you might start a thread with a seriouspost but further down in the replies you start seriousposting or vice versa. We will try to help people who are on instances that instance block move to instances that don't if they didn't know it was happening and don't like it. A lot of people don't know they can't see half the fediverse and they want to see it all and decide who to block on their own if they choose to.
We don't really think about the anti-federating guys at all and sort of think they are mostly cringe political activists. I don't want this to turn into a thread of us making fun of them so I'll stop here.
The part about alts being for when an instance is down is spot on. Because fedi software the small ones at the local level is usually run by ordinary people on a median salary they are often budget vms which go down a lot since pleroma/masto can be beasts. Not so with e.g. twitter, but that is what you get for being federated vs centralized.
Fran is good. Good hosting with great prices. Doesn't over provision, great support, and supports free speech. He's also pretty active over on irc://irc.frantech.ca
He also hosted the daily stormer even though he thought he completely disagreed with them and basically gave the middle finger when SJWs bitched about it.
newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-neo-nazis-of-the-daily-stormer-wander-the-digital-wilderness
Also, the fact that he accepts like 10+ different crypto currencies is pretty nice
BuyVM.png
My alt accounts are mostly a meme. However, I have used them to reach someone who didn't know their instance blocked and help them get on better instances a couple of times. I also use them when my instance(s) are down for one reason or another.
I deleted both. If people ik want me on social media they can come here where they aren't being censored and flagged for no good reason and their private data (probably) isn't being sold.
@freemo While I like the concept of the Fediverse a lot more and I agree Twitter has some issues I have had very good times there and I don't agree with it being "a worse Facebook".
Facebook is much more aggresive with data sharing and had some big scandals like Cambridge Analytica.
I also like the sarcastic humor many people have there.