The thing I noticed right out of the gate when I went slumming on Threads is that the Android app package is 77MB. Compare that to Mastodon at 2.5MB.
Two apps that (from the user’s perspective) do pretty much the same thing - make queries to servers and display pieces of text on the screen, maybe with some pictures or videos. Not that hard.
So what does that extra 74MB of bloat in the Threads app do? Meta’s not telling us…
Tbh bloat usually has nothing to do with tracking or something. Additional code is actually super light-weight. To add full tracking and stuff, we might be looking at a few 100kb additional size.
Using fat frameworks like react native adds much more size. Maybe another 5-10MB.
But what really takes a lot of space is animations, images, background images and stuff like that. A high-res image might take multiple MB on it’s own. Multiple of them will take much more.
Edit: I just downloaded and unpacked the newest thread’s version’s APK and unpacked it.
It has an upacked size of 143MB, of which 83.7MB are assets.
The compiled code including framework and all is 56.9MB. The rest (2.4MB) are metadata.
Mastodon has an uncompressed size of 4.3MB of which 2.4MB are code.
There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.
I’m a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.
No, it’s mastodon but centralized. It takes all the difficulty out of signing up for the fediverse, like finding a server. I said it from day 1 on mastodon. We will never see mass adoption until there’s a simple sign up process. People like centralized because it’s easier.
Finding a server could not be any easier: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
If they can’t manage that then maybe they should not be on the internet. If my 60yo dad can do it then so can they. Learned helplessness in anything involving IT is my pet peeve.
Tbh, this is not a good solution.
It dumps you in front of a wall of 22 pages of servers on my laptop (equivalent to 4.35 meters).
Most of which have completely nonsensical descriptions.
If I look at e.g. the first page (top 6 servers) I get these:
- mastodon.social: The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
- mstdn.jp: Mastodon日本鯖です． よろしくお願いいたします。 (Maintained by Sujitech, LLC)
- mstdn.social: A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.
- mastodon.world: Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.
- mas.to: Hello! mas.to is a fast, up-to-date and fun Mastodon server.
- mastodon.online: A newer server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
Ok, so of these I can only rule out mstdn.jp, because I don’t speak Japanese.
mastodon.social and mastodon.official are, I guess, the “official” instances, with one of them being newer, for some reason. What does that mean? No idea. Is mastodon.social running out dated software? If not, why fork the instances at all?
mstdn.social and mastodon.world mention that they are general purpose. Without (and even with) Fediverse experience, I would expect any social media platform to be general purpose unless otherwise stated. So they basically have no description.
mas.to mentions only that it’s “fast, up-to-date and fun”. That basically has no meaning, except all other instances are slow, outdated and boring. So now I am worried.
mstdn.social says it has a 500 character limit. Without googleing a new user would have no idea what the regular character limits are. And I have no idea whether that will cause issues when interacting with other instances.
This page is like getting to a used car dealership without a clue about cars and you ask the car dealer to help you choose a car, and the dealer is like “Yeah, so I’m gonna help you. The right car for you is any car on the property of the dealership.”
I’ve been trying to hammer this point home.
I wish devs would wake up and create a default easy mode sign-up for the fediverse with an option to click “advanced sign-up” if you choose to do so.
The easy mode would just automatically assign an instance based upon some algorithm.
Well, like asking users what their preferences are and select the servers based on the criteria users have chosen?
Huh? The default Mastodon app signs you up on mastodon.social by default. Nothing complicated about that:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/
And the devs faced major opposition for that, because plenty of people accused them of wanting to centralize the decentralized network with that move.
It’s insane how much people actually unironically shill for Meta and Zuckerberg now because Elmo is mad. Fucking Zuckerberg…
It’s shill. Like the shilling (old currency) which has nothing to do with being cool headed.
How is twitter still alive? I have been wondering it since 2013 when i stopped using it
