There’s literally not a better alternative and nobody seems to be earnestly trying to fill that gap. Threads is boomer chat with an instagram requirement. Every Mastodon instance is slow beyond reason and it’s still confusing to regular users in terms of how it works. And is Bluesky still invite only? Honestly haven’t heard about it in a long time.
Mastodon is a PERFECT replacement. But it'll never win because there isn't a business propping it up and there is inherent complexity, mixed with the biggest problem, cost.
No one wants to pay for anything, and that's the true root of every issue around this. People complain YouTube has ads, but wont buy premium. People hate Elon and Twitter but won't take even an ounce of temporary inconvenience to try and solve it.
Threads exists, I'm happy they integrate with Activity Pub, which should give us the best of both worlds. Why don't people use Threads? I'd a little more popular outside the US but personally, I think the "algorithm" pushes a lot of engagement bait nonsense.
>No one wants to pay for anything, and that's the true root of every issue around this. People complain YouTube has ads, but wont buy premium.
Perhaps if buying into a service guaranteed that they would not be sold out then there would be more engagement. When someone signs up it is pretty much a rock-hard guarantee that their personal information will be marketed and sold to any entity with the money and interest to buy it - paying customers, free-loaders, etc.
When someone chooses to buy your app or SaaS then they should be excluded from the list of users that you sell or trade between "business partners".
When paying for a service guarantees that you're selling all details of your engagement with that service to unrelated business entities you have a disincentive to pay.
People are wising up to all this PII harvesting and those clowns who sold everyone out need to find a different model or quit bitching when real people choose to avoid their "services" since most of these things are not necessary for people to enjoy life anyway. They are distractions.
EDIT: This is not intended as a personal attack on you but is instead a general observation from the perspective of someone who does not use or pay for any apps or SaaS services and who actively avoids handing out accurate personal information when the opportunity arises.
In my experience, Mastodon is nice until you want to partake in discussions. To do so, you need an account.
With an account you can engage in civilized discussions. Some people don't agree with you, and you don't agree with some people. That's fine, maybe you'll learn something new. It's a discussion.
And then, suddenly, a secret court convenes and kills your account just like that; no reason will be given, no recourse will be available, admins won't reply, and you can do two things: go away for good, or try again on a different server.
I'm happy with a read-only Mastodon via a web interface.
But read-write? Never again, I probably don't have the correct ideology for it.
All the people I know that are still active on Twitter because they need to be "informed" are constantly sending me alarmist "news" that breaks on Twitter that, far more often than not, turns out to be wrong.
> Every Mastodon instance is slow beyond reason and it’s still confusing to regular users in terms of how it works.
I'll concede the confusing part but all the major Mastodon servers I interact with regularly are pretty quick so I'm not sure where that part comes from.
It is not so bad with Mastodon but much fedi software gets slower the longer it's been running. "Akkoma Rot" is the one that's typically most talked about but the universe of misskey forks experiences the same problems, and Mastodon can sometimes absolutely crunch to a halt on 4GB of ram even for a single user instance.
Maybe the experience varies depending on where the user is located. Users near Mastodon servers (possibly on the US East or West Coast) may not feel the slowness as much as users in other parts of the world. I notice noticeably slower response times when I use Mastodon in my location (Korea).
I think a lot of people use Hetzner. I notice slowness, especially with media, in Hong Kong. A workaround I've found is to use VPNs which seem to utilise networks with better peering with local ISPs
It is the best internet social feed to me as well. I use pro a lot for following different communities and there is nothing that can comes close today to being on the edge of change online.
Some people don't jump on every fad out there. Most of the people who miss out on fads quickly realize that they aren't losing out on much simply because fads are so ephemeral. As far as I can tell, this is normal (though different people will come to that realization at different stages of their life).
While a fad (in this context) depends upon a company maintaining a product, the act of maintaining a product is not a measure of how long the fad lasts. Take Facebook, the product. I'm fairly certain that it is long past its peak as a communications tool between family, friends, and colleagues. Facebook, the company, remains relevant for other reasons.
As for ChatGPT, I'm sure time will prove it is a fad. That doesn't mean that LLMs are a fad (though it is too early to tell).
Sadly enough the "average" instagram user doesn't use threads. It's just a weird subset of them that use it, and imo it's not the subset that makes Instagram great lol. (It's a lot of pre 2021 twitter refugees, and that's an incredibly obnoxious and self centered crowd in my experience)
