i don’t agree to the existence of any faith. but pope francis really knows how to connect with people who aren’t ever going to subscribe to his faith, while simultaneously making enemies with those who do. pro-science, anti-capitalist, and the occasional troll. i don’t know if he writes his own script, but if he does, all respect to the man.
marketing marketing marketing. and timing the crypto madness, which gave them a huge marketshare and free word-of-mouth marketing access.
Brave puts most of their resources into marketing rather than development of the browser itself (unless the development helps with the marketing opportunity, like crypto).
i don’t use the mobile clients, only desktop. but for comparison, nheko is lightning fast and smooth (like telegram). but has a ton of bugs and lacks a lot of features (not to mention the interface isn’t very appealing). no client for matrix except for element offers all the current features because element is the main client used for development of the service and protocol.
people always want to argue when i say electron sucks. fact of the matter is, electron do suck, the reason most developers nowdays choose to use it is simply because it takes no effort to develop software with the thousands of free frameworks and resources on the market and the ability to make a multi-platform client with zero effort through electron, it’s also very easy to maintain. but this comes at a cost, no amount of optimization will fix the inherent issues of electron no matter how much you will it. again, electron sucks.
tauri is the future, as it seeks to resolve all the inherent issues with electron. but it is not mature enough yet for the market.
edit: full disclosure, i don’t actually use telegram for anything and i don’t support telegram at all. i don’t trust it and i don’t think anyone else should either. but i’m not going to deny the masterpiece that is the desktop client from a user point of view.
As much as I would love for matrix to be the champion of all chat protocols (I use it as my primary myself). It is undeniable that Telegram has by far the best chat client on the market. It is the only modern and fully featured non-electron chat client available, it’s lightning fast and smooth as fuck, and always ‘just works’ and without mobile/connect nonsense, which is what the enduser want. Matrix is awesome as a concept, but the only client worth your time is Element, which is clunky, slow, and buggy - of course, most of the blame is on electron. It certainly doesn’t help that the most stable server, matrix.org, also tends to bug out from time to time.
i like how piracy largely died because of how good netflix was, and now when it’s back because of hollywood gutting netflix and setting up a million streaming services no one can afford; they realize piracy is back and insist on dealing with piracy by cracking down on the users, instead of, you know, recognizing the reason for why it’s back, and offering the solution that actually worked the first time around.
While I agree with everything you said, there are some big hurdles standing in the way of mainstream adoption.
I personally find the fediverse to be a superior alternative and the answer to a call of saving the internet, taking it back to it’s origins, and pushing forward with modernity to make all the right moves, and for that reason deeply wish they had been invented in the early 2000s, before corporations took over the internet.
Yes, Mastodon had a huge momentum with millions of subscribers because of high profile users getting pissed with twitter, but Mastodon has since stagnated in user registration and all of the high profile users has since returned to Twitter because of audience reach.
Another problem is the content. Since these platforms are mainly used by leftist political users, and not oriented towards content creators, there is no incentive for ‘commoners’ to adopt the services.
Then comes the final issue, which is monetary gain by users. The primary attraction of the various platforms is the monetary gains potential for creators.
Twitter is especially big with artists (and businesses + high profiles/politicians), as twitter is a humanizing platform that, like Mastodon, lets you shout into the void and have people interact with you, your identity, and your opinion. The big names on Twitter can talk directly to their listeners (and profit from it as a secondary mechanic to fame). And the listeners can always keep up with their people of interest. I feel Mastodon cannot achieve the same results for various reasons (albeit, I would say Mastodon already today have replaced the utility of Facebook, and while facebook have shifted away from the personal stream/pages to focus on ‘marketplace’ and ‘groups’ to try maintain relevance; groups itself is a poor imitation of a single-flow forum like Reddit, and frankly, ‘marketplace’ sucks). So, to the issues I have with Mastodon:
- Media is not displayed correctly, media is cut visibly. This is a big problem for attracting artists.
- There is a lack of #tag culture (this should be empathized when posting), making it difficult to find content.
- There is a lack of algorithmic methods to highlight your media content and target your audience/reach your audience to grow a following. I know this may sound like a bad thing, and it could be, but it’s also important to pull in the content creators, which are dearly needed for a platform to grow.
- There is a lack of daily events/challenges such as “daily pixel art” or similar communities.
- Politicians, governments, non-leftist business are outright banned on the main flow which - honestly, I personally agree with, but has a big damaging effect on the adoption of the network. It’s one thing to regulate fascism and other extremes and ensure content is clean, but to outright ban people simply for existing is not helpful when they are needed to pull in users.
- The users just aren’t there to make it worthwhile. I create a lot of visuals like aquarium photos, ascii art, and pixel art. And as much as I desire and tried to use Mastodon, I just couldn’t attract a single view/like since the platform just isn’t used that way, nor have the userbase interested in such content, forcing me back to Twitter. Nowadays all I do on Mastodon is post leftist rhetorics because that’s what trends, and follow you around lol.
- I love the simplicity of the Mastodon mobile app. It genuinely plays on the strengths of the platform in the way of keeping up with friends and people of interest, but I can’t seem to figure out how to access the local and federated flow. Which essentially makes it really bad in the ways of exposition for creators, especially since #tags are not practiced - and there is just nothing to see.
- The behavior of some users on the fediverse is, for a lack of a better word, toxic. It was with much regret to see a user like Wil Wheaton leave because of the behavior of some users. It has cost the fediverse a lot. This type of behavior needs to go away. We’re not far-right fascists and such behavior should not be tolerated, anywhere.
Reddit is kinda crap. In my opinion it is a poor imitation of traditional forums. Where sub-forums are user-moderated forum sections, and we essentially just got rid of the categorical organization entity, making it more streamlined and always “latest news”. Yes, I know the goal of reddit is to be a news aggregator, and for that design, it’s fantastic. But, the downside is how reddit grew to replace traditional forums in the mind of the public. Which has lead to information management essentially being lost. This is especially noticeable in hobby subs. Granted, the whole reason for reddit’s success is the constant flow of new information, the ‘user attention’, which is the entire goal of a platform selling ads. People won’t move back to traditional forums, I understand that, but, when you go to a hobby forum, for say, guppies, every day 80% of all new posts are “is she pregnant?”, which literally can only be answered with YES. Guppies mate nonstop and any female exposed to a male carry his semen for up to 12 months. She is 99% likely to be pregnant within the year, even if she is moved to an isolated tank. …so yeah, my point is that, Reddit is not a good replacement for traditional forums, but has become one (shared with Facebook groups), and that is why Lemmy is actually the better platform. Lemmy allows users to host instances with specific interests, and has better moderation tools, the weakness of such a system is the lack of a central point. i.e. multiple instances with the same content topic could weaken the user growth potential.
YouTube…let’s face it. It’s big because it’s profitable. PeerTube cannot compete. If content creators can’t generate an income from PeerTube, then YouTube will always remain the primary platform. I don’t know what can be done about this, I also don’t like how PeerTube works. I mean, it doesn’t feel as streamlined as YouTube. In the case of PeerTube, it is not a replacement, and can’t be, both because of the federated nature and split between instances, and because of the lack of monetization available for its content creators - as, unlike other platforms, meaningful content creation for this particular platform is incredibly time consuming.
CMS/Blogging… well I mean, it doesn’t really matter. I like that writefreely exists, I’ve even paid a few months subscription for write.as as I like the project a lot. Sure, a lot could be done to enhance the experience, and help curate content and reach your reader base on-platform. But blogging is itself a medium that, what is needed, is not another platform (Wordpress is also available on the fediverse), what is missing, is a platform like Medium. The curation of meaningful content for your reader experience.
Instagram… Honestly, I don’t even know what justifies the existence of this platform. What can be done on instagram, could as easily be done on Twitter. The main draw people have to instagram, I suppose, is the ability to generate followers and become an “influencer” and make profits. Instagram in and off itself has no real meaning as there is no way to manage image flow or truly utilize it for exposure. It’s not really about image sharing either. Sure, it sets a standard, but you can’t share real experiences, because people don’t actually care about those experiences, unless you’re “important”, which, again, Twitter serves better to channel communication. So what has potential, is just… a gimmick without purpose, that people pretend has purpose, because, uh. Reasons. Whatever it is instagram set out to do, I feel pixelfed could be used as a functional base; as it is integrated to the fediverse, and the flow could therefore be integrated with your wider fediverse communication. But, do we really need pixelfed? Pixelfed suffers from the same indexing and exposure issue as the rest of the fediverse (which, ones addressed, would make it a proper instagram replacement, and do whatever it is instagram does, but better), but for now, it is difficult to curate content, and without an app it just can’t move out of the box where it sits.
Tiktok - same stupidity as instagram. We don’t need it. It has no purpose other than spam to generate followers to become an influencer, to make profits. If anything, it’s a flow that you can “scroll” to avoid boredom. I understand that people want this kind of passive pass-time, but why can’t we just all pick up a game or read something? So much more productive. A combination of both TikTok and Instagram into “pixelfed”, and a way to curate content and sync your fediverse accounts though, that could be a remedy of utility.
Pinterest is a great resource for hobbyists looking for inspiration or to find people on other platforms through their shared image links. Pinterest is an odd one, because it’s also a really good platform to promote your content and resources. In and off itself, it is essentially a haven for aristry in a way that works just… better. Than instagram ever could. For the purpose both of self promotion and for image sharing. But, I don’t see how this would help the fediverse. It does not need to be part of the fediverse, as I can’t see how it would be integrated without actually defeating the point of integration (to promote your fediverse stuff). It could easily be part of pixelfeds structure to service both Pinterest, TikTok, and instagram. To be a unique multi-purpose platform for collecting, viewing, and sharing graphical media - this way, Mastodon and PeerTube would not have to directly cater to content producers, as they would sync their content through this platform.
A lot of devs are looking to cross-platform with mobile now, too.
SteamDeck is probably on many developers mind as well. Valve really need to focus on battery life (the only negative imo) and I don’t see that happening by improving overall hardware power use for better performing chips.
Furthermore, both apple and microsoft are now shifting their hardware platform focus to ARM.
things are shifting away from the top end raw power. so it makes a lot of sense, really.