I see a lot of posts here about why the other social media platforms are terrible & #Mastodon is the one to rule them all*.
Personally, Mastodon is my favorite & I prefer the #fediverse with decentralized servers & open source standards.
But I also don’t mind coexisting with the others. Rather, I think it’s a good thing. All of us should settle in where we feel comfortable & find community.
Overstatement, but a Tolkien reference always seems appropriate.
@Sheril have just joined. @Mastodon is still proving itself to me, for now just a talent scout (just joined). Science is good. Platform feels a bit technically thin in that it doesn’t creatively distinguish itself enough from other platforms (too similar) however this place feels more real and looking forward to seeing what can happen.
@Sheril I agree with one caveat, the apps for Mastodon and other open source social media apps are much less likely to be aggressively collecting information on their users. If you want to participate in highly commercialized social media I highly recommend visiting through your desktop browser where you have more control over the data they extract from you and the collectable data is more limited.
@Sheril Fundamentally agree that it is - and should remain - personal choice. But. I used to be on Twitter for news and events (local, world, breaking) and that’s not fully replicated here. The separate silos of communities, where most can’t/won’t coexist due to the overhead means I’m missing what Twitter had. I left and won’t return as my small stand against Musk. For similar reasons won’t be on Threads or Bluesky. But maybe we can hear from them here via federation, which I think is possible?
@Sheril Perfectly put, and it's also worth remembering that different people have different needs from online spaces, either on a personal or professional level, and several different factors and circumstances play a part in their choice of which platform to use. It's also more beneficial to instead focus on how we can make this an even more welcoming space for those who choose to give it a try.
@Sheril The hilarious thing is that this is the case with each of the new platforms (Mastodon is new for most people) - whatever the platform is, that's the one the people on it think is far superior to the others, and they all have their knock-out reasons! 🤣. I see it on #Mastodon, on #Bluesky, on #Threads, on #T2...
@marqle@Sheril I don't even know what matrix is. Mastodon is already very obscure for most people, and the least mainstream I've been in decades. Matrix? Not sure I can go that far off the beaten path.
Despite its #underground#nature, it's always worth paying attention to what the originators are doing and #Firefox have started their first Matrix server just recently.
@marqle@Brendanjones@zayathejew@Sheril I am confused. To me, a messenger app is not the same as a social network. The former is mostly about private communication, while the latter is mostly about public communication.
@marqle@lostpanda@zayathejew@Sheril Right, but from my understanding and your explanation, matrix is still only used as one to one or group chat. i.e. closed communication with a known and (relatively) fixed group of people, vs. open communication with the world like on microblogging networks. So it’s not a Mastodon replacement. Could somewhat be a Friendica replacement?
@marqle@lostpanda@zayathejew@Sheril For example I have a Slack group with about 60 friends. 10-20 of us are continuously active on it. We really should shift to Element or another Matrix client (especially since +50% of the group are developers, we should have the skills to host our own haha 😅), but that’s not the point. I mean to say that we use it to communicate with a small group, and we wouldn’t use Mastodon for that.
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