I'm guessing you haven't gotten a promotion in some time.

I think this was and still is in part true for me.

The distinction is one large company that has a monopoly on this specific kind of thing, versus a bunch of individual companies that all use the same industry standards to interoperate with each other.

The USPS (and probably other countries' mail services, too) is one gigantic corporation with a legal monopoly on letter carrying. The USPS uses the common highway, railway and airway systems that are also used for other passengers and freight to carry letters to their various offices to do businesses with customers across the nation. We have one The Mail Company. We used to have one The Phone Company too, but they broke up Bell Telephone.

There has never been a The Email Company. Email from the very beginning was meant to be an industry standard so that different organizations could host the service and interchange traffic between them. There are hundreds of them, a few big ones, a bunch of little ones, all sending standardized messages across the common internet.

Reddit or Twitter or Tiktok or Instagram or however many others are individual businesses. You sign up with an account with, say, Twitter, and that gets you access to Twitter, their backend software, their front-end user apps, their community, their content...one monolithic stack.

Mastodon is software you can use to make your own little Twitter. The folks that make that software operate a server running that software. So do other people; there's a whole bunch of them. You can use it to make your own little Twitter all by yourself, which is how Truth Social works. But those of us who aren't in a white supremacy retardation cult prefer to voltron all our little Twitters together into one big if nebulous network.

Lemmy does the same thing but with a Reddit-like form factor. So does Mbin and Piefed. Different software that speak the same protocol. I'm a member of sh.itjust.works, posting a comment to a community hosted on lemmy.world, replying to a member of feddit.org, each of these are Lemmy instances. Users on instances of Mbin and Piefed can also read and reply to this thread. So can Mastodon users, in fact. And Peertube, Loops and Pixelfed, which are Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram-alikes. They all use the ActivityPub protocol and can interoperate...within their own UI limits at least. Imagine being able to Tweet from Youtube. Not embed a Youtube video in a Tweet...Tweet from Youtube. Well you can Toot from Peertube. You just...Can; abstract as it is it's a thing this collection of software can do.

I'm not sure you can define "the biggest bubble" in objective terms; defederation is a thing, it exists to be able to cut off spammers, scammers, anyone acting in bad faith. More often it's used to separate servers that disagree politically, which in some ways isn't ideal but I'm pretty sure that's an unsolvable problem. A mainstream instance will get you the sumtotal; it's a bit like living in the milky way galaxy; there's some of it we can't see because the middle is in the way, and there's nowhere in it where that isn't true.

As for a feed algorithm on Mastodon...I don't know, I don't actually use Mastodon. It is my understanding that the lack of a feed algorithm is considered a feature, not a bug; how exactly to discover content I'll leave to someone else to answer.

I do occasionally receive a temporary field promotion to Major Aggravated.

Depends on.

The regular social-media user for example will disagree with you.

Everything is easy if you can put up with an amount of friction. Most people don’t want to deal with friction.

It doesn't need to be easy, it has to be nearly effortless and no unknown procedure for people to switch.
E.g. writing one sentence to get an lemmy account is wayyyy to much for most people.

Thats good. The entry friction is really the most important thing when trying to get new users.

I'm thinking we should try and sell people on a particular community first, and let them figure out it interoperates with others on their own time.

Yeah I was pretty disappointed when my server started limiting what political servers I see by default. I want it to show up and then choose for myself, not have to sell out every community. Their supposed to just showvup. It's not like they were nazis or porn even.

Unfortunately I think that bed has been shat, because everyone wants to be a general purpose instance. Nobody wants to be sportslemmy or musiclemmy or movielemmy where they only host communities that match their theme, which is why we have linux@lemmy.world, linux@lemmy.ml, linux@sh.itjust.works, linux@feddit.org...

So "Join an instance for a community you're interested in"...not sure if that's tenable on Mastodon but it sure ain't on Lemmy.

I think we're just kinda early. Having redundant communities is good for resiliency.

Honestly you could pick 3 and tell people "these are all fine choices, pick one at random"

Cheers for the lengthy explanation!

Lol. Truth Social using Mastodon seems so ironic.

1. Your server is your algorithm. That's what the local feed is for. If you pick a server that caters to your interest, then the local feed becomes a potent discovery tool. That's even more true for non-English communities because English language content is probably going to drown out everything else on the all/global feed