Sort of like how they moved out of Florida and Texas. Repubs want a brain drain for some reason.
What we need are good algorithms
What does this mean? “Good” how?
Well, in the sense that it shows you the posts you want to see, like X or many other websites that are based on recommendations
They show you the posts that are most likely to drive engagement and keep you on the site, e.g. outrage bait. Whether or not that is good is, of course, a matter of opinion, but I think it is bad. Doomscrolling is much like gambling. Most of the time you spend doing it, you feel either angry or sad, but you’re addicted to that occasional hit of dopamine you get.
I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it’s more popular than Mastodon is that it’s more centralized and in practical terms that means it’s easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it’s the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it’s waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
I haven’t used Mastodon, but if it’s anything like Lemmy, most people won’t want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.
Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
