Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.
It's the exact same in Linux. Click on it, get Internet.
You do everything in a browser anyway.
At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large language models (LLMs) and the related ethical considerations. However, I would prefer to address the necessity for governments or commissions to assume responsibility for their citizens concerning "social" media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than any emerging technology.
In that case, the alternatives are also clunky. I use Windows, MacOS and Linux regularly, and all of them got serious UX problems.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.
All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
Had no idea that was happening. What makes your say that?
* stop posting photos without a text description
* stop posting like that without a CW
* don't spell your hashtags that way
Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.
When Facebook took off, every Myspace page was so full of garbage that they barely loaded on most people's computers, and Facebook was slick and shiny and easy. The real name policy made it super easy to connect with people you met IRL. Even if it's now confusingly slow and FB Messenger can't display your recent chats in the correct order for some reason, it was the easiest most obvious option at the time.
I don't really understand why people use Twitter (at its best it just seems like a worse version of RSS), but the site presumably loaded quickly at some point and was easy to use, even if it's presumably worse now.
And so on. They persist through momentum.
Some things continue to persist, some things get beat out and die. But if you start off more confusing than your alternatives, at least compared to when they started, you won't get picked up in the first place.
It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
Many non open source apps do get critical mass but they eventually go bust. Emacs, git, Linux and I think even Mastodon have a slower uptake but do not seem to have such a high risk of collapse. While YouTube and Facebook et al seem to have an insurmountable moat and collection of users the reality is recent history is littered with boom to bust failures:
MySpace, Vine, Yahoo all the way back to GeoCities.
I would be patient and only worry if mastodon is actively dying.
For me it's the only social media app I have installed.
I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.
Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it to PeerTube.
If you don't have the content creators, you don't have content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and simple piracy, though).
I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth it.
This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.
It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?
Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.
Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
Only if it's simple for the average person
And only until an admin of a big sever dislikes something you say and adds your server to the censorship list on fediseer.
In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?
Are you on Instagram?" is easy to understand for someone not on it; they search for "Instagram", install the client app, sign up and done.
"Are you on Mastodon?" doesn't work the same way as they would need to pick a server to sign up against, which seems like an important decision (what happens if I pick wrong? Do I have to pick the same server my friend has? And so on?).
> Are you on Mastodon?
In both cases, you have to share the user handle, which is just a bit longer in the latter case.
> what happens if I pick wrong?
You move to another server.
> Do I have to pick the same server my friend has?
No.
The rest of the protocol isn't difficult since you basically just need to send JSON back and forth. The advanced options are complex but they're basically exotic cases for the most part.
I've enjoyed NOSTR a lot but feel that the definition of "relay" has been lost in recent times and NOSTR relays are today a set of huge servers that host data and act as databases, rather than the original goal of just connecting people in P2P style.
For my apps I'm developing a platform where relays go back to the original definition of "relay" and devices connect to each relay as a connecting bridge to engage in P2P between themselves using webRTC and bluetooth.
I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.
The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them.
>they'd go to prison
That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
They removed it after it stopped working due to Chrome rolling out an update.
>Unauthorized use of a computer
This is not a real thing. It's not like websites need to get your permission before they can use your computer to run javascript.
>does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
I only brought that up due to someone else thinking it was related. I agree that the permission system of android is totally unrelated.
You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
It’s not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop posting on proprietary platforms
Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.
Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?
Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.