Bluesky: You are immediately and automatically welcomed into the warm embrace of an algorithm that entices you into a parasocial relationship with the synthetic community it has created.
Mastodon: If you're lucky you'll stumble across a warm welcome for new users explaining how posts are called toots here, likes are called florps, and our version of Grok is called Garfiald.
Misskey is an unprecedented forking party. Sharkey is one of the many forks. Maintained by the Blåhaj folks, if I'm not mistaken.
Iceshrimp is another one to watch. Specifically Iceshrimp-NET, a full rewrite to fix the performance issues that probably play some role in why these forks often meet such sad ends.
Hi @elena !
Thank for this article. I look forward to reading more from you.
You said that you're instance calckey.world only has 54 members. It use to have more, but about a year ago the admin asked us to move to sharkey.world as he no longer wanted to host Calckey. It seems like he has kept both domains at the end.
The fundamental flaw with microblogging is that people follow other people. Those people then spew a bunch of random posts on all sorts of topics. Very few people are consistently interesting, leading to a timeline / feed of random crap with a few nuggets of goodness scattered through it. This is unavoidable because of the person-follows-person architecture.
There are other pernicious effects that come from centering the individual. The narcissism, defensiveness, dunking are all enflamed, rewarded and promoted. Mastodon avoids some of this by not using a recommendation algorithm but the fundamental mistake of centering of the individual remains.
Also short-form content tends to be brainrot that destroys attention spans and reduces complex issues to bite-sized hand grenades to lob at The Other.
Combine hand grenades with narcissism and news/politics and the result is kinda predictable in hindsight.
Forums are for narrower topics or subject, while the world is your oyster when it comes to microblogging. I'd feel limited on a forum site, whereas here I can follow everything from gaming to dog posts.
My biggest problem with microblogging sites is that I have never been able to get a good, interesting content feed out of them without also getting lots of noise. Following hashtags usually gives me a mountain of retweets (or whatever) and trying to follow groups of related people/subject matter experts gives me lots of irrelevant content. Community-style social media forces people to more strictly categorize their content, I think.
I like mastodon a lot. I have basically found my hashtags, people and news sources to follow and so my feed is always filled with content to read. Engagement is fairly good on my instance, at least with popular topics.
But I only have 20 followers in 18 months of being on it so if that kind of thing is important to you then it can be something of a negative. Harder to build an audience without an algorithmic recommendation feature feeding your posts to strangers. I find that to be a positive though.
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