This week I wrote about fediverse as a countercultural place for pop culture, and how that affects goals to bring the fediverse into the mainstream
As well as the news:
- @iftas announces that due to a lack of funding, they will likely have to wind down some crucial services for safety on the fediverse
- Tapestry is a new “timeline” app by @Iconfactory
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Regarding the part of “NFL Super Bowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar” and it’s poor discussion in fediverse - maybe it’s just because fediverse is more international and don’t give a cent about NFL and it’s show?
That’s why I looked at the ratio of people discussing Superb Owls versus people discussing the halftime show. People who are posting pictures of owls on the superbowl hashtag clearly do care about it, just in a different form
Lemmy is still quite USA centric. [email protected] is a good example:
Same for [email protected]
[email protected] has been started as an alternative.
As someone who watched the super bowl and actively looked at posts in the fediverse on my second screen, I think that @[email protected] missed out on posts because he looked under the “superbowl” hashtag which had been taken over by people posting owls. Quite a few posts about the game and the halftimeshow happened under inconsistent hashtags like #nfl, #sblix, #superbowllix, #halftimeshow, #superbowl2025, #superbowlhalftime, #kcvsphi, etc. Some people used no hashtags at all and I found their posts by fulltext-searching for terms like “Mahomes”. Mainly seemed to me like people werent in agreement with each other on which hashtag to use for their posts.
It’s fascinating that when a social media is created without algorithmic boosting of content, pop culture suffers.
I guess it’s the kind of content we are very happy to consume, but we don’t care much about spreading. Had I seen a video of Lamar from the Superbowl boosted by one of the people I follow on Mastodon I would probably have watched it, but I wouldn’t have boosted it. I imagine some people would leave comments if they saw it, but that doesn’t affect visibility in Mastodon. The entertainment industry is geared towards a passive spreading of content, and that’s not what is happening on the Fediverse.
That might be a problem, it might be a good thing. But it’s at least not very surprising that the Fediverse looks very different during the super bowl.
It’s fascinating that when a social media is created without algorithmic boosting of content, pop culture suffers.
Lemmy is also mostly male, not sure that’s a consequence of the lack of algorithmic boosting of content.
In the case of Mastodon, I think an even bigger problem might have to do with age. Whenever I see an age poll on Mastodon it seems most of the user base there is older than the internet itself. It’s hardly surprising that they are not very up to date on pop culture. That it’s largely white and male of course adds to the problem.
