Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app*, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse
I would like to know what you think of this post published here in Italian: is it exaggerated or is there a grain of truth?
Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app*, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse
Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!
One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that… it sucks!
No it’s not true, it doesn’t suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.
At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it’s a bit out of competition…
* For a few days now, however, some international newspapers, but also Italian ones (let’s call them newspapers…), have practically relaunched the same press release that praises Mammoth, the Mastodon app developed by The BLDV Inc. , the Californian start-up financed by Mozilla (and THEREFORE by Google, which now finances 90% of Mozilla)
* Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?
The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.
The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.
…
Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.
From Sarah Perez’s article published December 7 on TechCrunch
In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!
That’s how: following other people’s lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!
I won’t hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.
By the way, many of Mammoth’s features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!
Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn’t able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.
Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…
In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech
A final bitter consideration? It’s not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…
We can use some better Fediverse applications. The lack of a recommendation algorithm turns Mastodon into an empty wasteland for anyone bot interested in either Linux or the Fediverse itself. There’s no one to follow and non-tech hashtags are barely worth subscribing to. Smart Lists may be what will finally pull normal people into the Fediverse.
Who cares if Google or Facebook join in. The Fediverse will keep existing as it always did. The people who Mammoth is trying to attract don’t give a damn about the Fediverse, they just want a less shitty version of Twitter.
Now if Mammoth can also fix the issue of Mastodon not being able to fetch replies consistently, we may finally have a Mastodon app I could convince my parents to try.