Year of the Linux Desktop Fediverse!
Side note, DAE find calling them “normies” kinda icky? It’s like straight outta 4chan
The advantages most of us see in the Fediverse (lack of corporate control, low algorithm interference) are seen by most normal users as either of little importance, or actively detrimental. The Fediverse requires you engage with it to cultivate a feed that gives you what you’re interested in. But the people fleeing to Rednote want a strong algorithm that feeds them what they want, and they don’t mind influence games being played by the algorithm in exchange for this convenience.
Personally, I think there’s room in the Fediverse for an app with a “strong algorithm” provided it’s completely open ofc.
My biggest issue with algorithms isn’t the fact they exist, but that they’re proprietary black boxes so no one truly knows how it’s being manipulated
We should be able to select different fully open source algorithms from a drop down menu, and load custom ones from fediversealgorithmmenuwithdescriptions dot org, including “no algorithm”.
I assume that’s like a billion hours of work, but, goals.
“No algorithm” would load nothing at all. Everything is an “algorithm,” including listing all posts in chronological order.
Wanting “no algorithm” is like wanting food with “no chemicals” in it and not realizing that carbs, fats, proteins, etc. are “chemicals.”
Remember when Musk took over Twitter and “open sourced” the algorithm, although it was impossible to reconstruct anything from what was given, and contained clear signs of being edited and incriminating details suggesting content categorization and prioritization?
What I really want to see is Facebook’s algorithm, because it seems to just produce a neverending stream of alt-right bullshit.
It’s gonna happen in the AT protocol I’m sure.
I actually enjoy not having a strong algorithm here. This way I can spend as little as possible on my only social media app that I use.
Don’t get too high and mighty, you’re doom scrolling like everyone else.
I mean, I’ve got definite FOMO, but I generally don’t feel the need to continuously search for new content. If the comms in my feed are quiet, that’s nearly a good thing.
Have you seen what acquiring lots of mainstream users does to a platform?
Gotta second this. Especially if the growth is sudden. It’s very difficult to integrate newer users into the existing culture.
There are merits to being a smaller community.
It allows it to have a large range of content covering a variety of interests?
I don’t think there are any experiences on the fediverse right now that are comparable to TikTok. Loops is still beta, isn’t it? If Reddit was banned and people clocked to some Chinese forum I could agree with this meme.
Love your avatar. I miss Netscape. Not that I remember it being awesome or anything. Just nostalgia.
Yeah, same. I sort of vaguely remember it as a kid. I had this saved on my computer from somewhere and saw it while making my Lemmy account. What’s cool is that it is actually animated on some platforms.
Compared to Internet Explorer it certainly was awesome, as I recall.
I think that it was less: let’s find alternatives, than it was fuck you government TikTok isn’t Chinese enough. It was a direct answer to the government telling us which social media apps we were allowed to use. Also, 100% avoidable if they’d passed data protection instead. It really felt like the government enforcing private interests on its citizens.
Americans typically don’t like the government telling us what to do. It’s all fine if Facebook buys all the competition, but it’s another thing when the government makes the competition illegal because they won’t sell to zuck or musk.
Honestly, Redbook was sort of neat. I doubt it has much staying power as it was really just a protest, but it was sort of a historical feeling moment.
What is the one on the left anyway?
Red note just added a feature that lets you translate any comment to English (or presumably the local language of your phone number) . Online reviews and Airbnb have done this for a long time. It’s a simple yet amazing feature, one that will really remove barriers to appreciating different cultures. I would love to have it here so that everyone can speak their native tongue and others could appreciate it. I always want to know what the French and German communities are up to (those are the most common other languages I see).
power users/businesses: “you can’t go VIRAL on mastodon”
Regular Users: “yOu HaVe To PiCk A sErVeR???”
Perfect meme to describe what’s happening. Yes, fedi has some UX issues and is not very beginner friendly.
But also, people have gotten so used to being spoonfed content from an algorithm that tells them what they want to see that they can’t handle the prospect of “build your own algorithm”
Corpo-curated-content is a hard drug and most people don’t realize that they have an addiction.
OK but my wife is actually excited by how it lets her see Chinese experiences
I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).
If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.
Yeah, I use “normie” occasionally and it kinda makes me feel like le edgy teen. But the problem is that I’m not sure if there’s another word that quite replaces it either. Sometimes it’s the only word that works in a particular context.
Yep that’s addiction it’s hard to recover.
Who?
This is fine. I don’t want mainstream users. I want niche weirdos.
