I don’t like the clickbait title at all – Mastodon’s clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it outlives Xitter.
Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn’t stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.
I use mastodon every day and I’m glad it’s not dominate. It’s not a vc funded a shit hole looking for a growth market. I use mastodon because not every one is there, is a nice little niche place where I can play with my friends in peace
Pew pew pew
Mastodon is the only place where I don’t get triggered, and instead get inspired and/or informed.
Good moderation, no bots, no fascists, no “famous, because stupid” idiots. Just a nice bunch of people sharing cool, interesting shit. I absolutely love it.
It’s not dead but it has one big and massive issue that prevents mass adoption - discovery. If I can’t just write the name of my friends in search and find them no matter where they made their account - for an ordinary user, or one that comes from centralized services, this seems extremely alien and hostile.
And in the end, if you can’t find your friends, you want to interact with, what is the point of using the service?
Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.
I guess it’s for people like me, who have no friends?
Problem: even with discovery, if your friends are on Threads or X, you still won’t find them on Mastodon. But its a step in the right direction.
Unless you can follow specific people on blocked instances, this is a fail. If my friend is on another instance which is blocked from my instance… whats the point of the fediverse? Might aswell go back to Facebook or X/Twitter. They are shitty but at least I can see my friends.
You would be able to find them if every instance didn’t decide to defederate with Threads.
this right here
William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon
You can put in their handle, with the domain they’ve signed up with
If you’re looking for more wider fuzzy search for that; mastodon 4.4 is gonna implement independent search services, meaning that search will be expanded beyond one server, and you can find new accounts on other servers just by keywords
I don’t know or need to know the handle. I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough. Facebook doesn’t need “@facebook” and twitter doesn’t need “@twitter” to find people if they exist there. I know the feature is coming but it is the key to make it accessible to wide range of average Joes who don’t want to, in their own vision, be rocket scientists to find people on the fediverse. It needs to be as simple as on facebook or other networks.
I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough.
I see. However; no.
Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.
I’d bet that this will be so proprietary and non-standard again that it’ll only work within Mastodon, maybe plus a few of its own soft-forks, effectively ignoring 30% of the Fediverse.
It’s open source standard, anyone can contribute…
I don’t understand. Mastodon has implemented global search a while ago. If I type “Steve” in the search bar, I get Steves from all sorts of places, not only from my instance.
Or are you talking about some sort of “contacts scan” implementation?
I made a Mastodon account during that blitz in '22. Yes, content wasn’t there yet, but honestly, it was the interface for me. It’s UI didn’t feel simplistic enough to me as someone just getting started with it.
Lemmy may have faced a similar fate for me if it weren’t for the smooth interface of Sync to be honest. I know many on here are leaps and bounds beyond my tech proficiency, but so many folks are still in the stone ages writing their passwords on post-it notes etc so to think that they’d adopt something like Mastodon over Twitter or Lemmy over Reddit seems like the bigger counterparts will always win just on sign-up flow and instant gratification.
Yeah, Mastodon’s interface has a lot of complexities. It drives me crazy when people say “just like email” … here’s the most recent diagram of what posts are visible in your federated timeline.
So just like email
I want to know what email clients these people were using lol
I think a better title & question would be, “Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?”
It’s surviving no problem, but it’s not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.
Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That’s proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it’s also clear by how many bounce off that for many there’s still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.
If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won’t leave. There still aren’t enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn’t thrive.
Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There’s a lot of negativity around Mastodon – the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a “failure”. It certainly wasn’t a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.
Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023’s Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well … how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software’s making more progress, but it’s still frustrating.
Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.
It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.
I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.
It’s designed to be anti-infuencer
When my own feed, free of the algorithm, did not have content of interest. Because I or others took turns shouting into the void. Then I would go on the explore /front page where there was definitely an algorithm of influencers, many who had follower counts of thousands, talking about the same stuff. Many seemed to be upper middle class Americans .
I soon hated them, but many were broadcast to other instances’ front page too. Between them and lack of interaction from people I wanted to hear from, I left
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Fwiw, a lot of people here call it Xhitter. Bc it sounds like Shitter, which is what the site has become (I wouldn’t know personally, I didn’t have an account there even before the Musk took it over:-).
@OpenStars I would argue that it hasn’t become that, it was that well before Musks takeover.
That’s why I never had an account there:-)
I kinda want to give it another try. There was once a blogpost posted here (i think) about basically “how to have fun on mastodon”, something like that, but i can not find it anymore. Anybody remember this and got a link?
Can’t recall what the title was, but I do remember reading a guide of sorts that essentially boiled down to “start following tags first, you can filter people later”.
I’ll say it again, the name sucks. It’s not cute, it sounds like mastrubate compared to twitter, it just is not catchy.
TicTic, snapchat, the apps that make it have a stupid catchy name, mastadon ain’t it.
i think maybe because it has 3 syllables
Twitter really isn’t that much better. I remember when Twitter first started and it was getting a lot of crap for its weird name and that you made tweets. It count on eventually, but it’s going to take constant exposure.
I like my toots.
Better name than X.
I do kind of like that they call messages “toots.” That’s my kind of stupid.
Maybe rebrand as Y
Mastodon wasn’t launched by a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup to become the phone app that replaces Twitter.
It was created by a German high school graduate and metalhead all alone as not much more than StatusNet with a different UI and some features cut for simplicity. It was designed by a nerd for nerds, nerds who didn’t rely on phone apps for everything. At this level, and back in 2016, not even an official native iPhone app was mandatory.
@thenexusofprivacy So, I’ve just kinda got a stream of random tidbits here that’ll hopefully sorta surmise my thoughts.
The good:
First off, it’s shrunk but it’s by no means dead. Things grow and shrink and grow again, if it was a straight line with no variation I’d assume it was fake.
Also, Mastodon is not all of activity pub. Threads has brought a lot if people onto the protocol, and while it’s still in development it seems to be intended to work interoperably and the devs said they plan to let people migrate out and take their following/followers with them. I expect this to really supercharge the ecosystem.
The indifferent:
This isn’t 2020 anymore, and there’s more protocols out there. Nostr, in my opinion, is leagues better in the decentralization and user options/customizations department. AT (Bluesky) is leagues better in the end user was of use department. Both of those protocols are also much, much, lighter to host.
Activity pub also has it’s advantages of course. Being the oldest and also being great for communities are two quite big ones.
Some people have chosen to either leave Activity Pub for those protocols, or joined the decentralized ecosystem directly into one of the other two. It’s indifferent, though, because it’s a decentralized ecosystem. All three can chat with each other, so Mastodon & Activity Pub may have shrunk - but the amount of people you can communicate with on them has risen exponentially thanks to bridges.
The ugly:
Federation is a mess. You can have a dozen friends on Activity Pub, a dozen on other protocols connected via bridges or threads and find you can only talk to two or three. That’s a problem; most would give up before understanding why, and many more would likely figure out why and the decide it’s not worth their time working around. After the Bluesky wave I’ve heard Mastodon be called some variation of “bickering fiefs” a couple dozen times.
There’s also some toxicity within the space. Most people I’ve interacted with have been great, but it still rears it’s head now and then. You can get nearly bullied off the platform if you suggest people be nice to Windows users. It was kinda funny to see that blog post shortly after I jokingly said “you guys would probably put a hit out on me if I said I was using Windows” in a similar thread. In a similar vein, while accessibility is great, I’d bet more people have left the protocol after being yelled at for not using alt text then there are users who rely on alt text.
My predictions:
I’d bet that all three protocols grow a lot in the future and that more platforms start integrating one or more of the three big protocols. It’s a cheat code for new platforms to automatically have a bunch of content, and it’s free platform software already built. Federation issues and fediverse specific toxicity issues will potentially be eternal septembered away. Most people won’t care what OS you use and will want to be able to talk to their friends as apposed to having current federation. There might be a small splinter group of the older crowd using opt-in federation, but most of the ecosystem will change if it grows.
I’d also bet the three big protocols will continue to get closer. All three can already communicate, and heck, I, as an incompitant programmer, made a quick script that lets any Nostr client communicate with Mastodon &/or Bluesky. Throw some compitant devs at it and soon enough you probably won’t even be able to tell at first glance what protocol the other person you’re communicating with is on. Bluesky and Nostr in the mix bring Mastodon’s ~800k monthly active users to like ~15 million. A more connected ecosystem make things better for everyone.
Good points! Agreed very much about all protocols growing, and that the ActivityPub fediverse is broader than just Mastodon.
Do you mind linking your script?
@dameoutlaw Sure
Readme is overdue to actually be finished, but the script itself is working. Can be run locally on desktop or termux, though some clients on desktop need a custom host added since they don’t like localhost and amethyst only uses it if you don’t add it as a local relay.
Re blue sky, is anyone actually federating with it? I don’t know of any other instances besides the official one.
@ColonelThirtyTwo Sorta/mostly. The protocol has a bit of a different model then Activity Pub, and it’s in development so there are some limitations, but it’s been opened and there’s people hosting their own PDSs now (the part of Bluesky that hosts your account).
To my knowledge there’s only two AT relays (the part that aggregates content from PDSs), Bluesky itself and very recently frontpage (a link aggregator). That makes the network fairly centralized right now, although BlueSky/AT has made a lot of progress in the last 9 months in terms of opening up so I expect it’ll be a lot less centralized this time next year. I’m also betting that somebody will make an AT client that pulls posts directly from PDSs instead of going through a relay at some point.
Yes but no. Due to architectural differences, federation under AuthTransfer protocol is simply different compared to ActivityPub. In its own terms it is federated as individuals’ data is stored in personal data servers (PDSs) connected to a relay, which currently is only the Bluesky relay, that roughly speaking connects them to other personal data servers.
You can technically operate your own personal data server apart from those operated by Bluesky, but I think it’s fair to say the vast majority on there don’t. It’s not clear yet, apart from fully holding your own data, how useful it is to operate your own given you only have one relay to use anyway at the moment.
So even in its own terms Bluesky really isn’t federated in much of a meaningful sense yet. The problems are twofold: a major part of their pitch is making federation Just Work™, keeping the underlying tech out of mind to mitigate confusion, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too here. Eventually, if you’re really committed to meaningful federation, you have to teach people about the value of operating their own personal data servers, at minimum, otherwise what was the point in separating it out in the architecture?
Problem is, that goes against their pitch to their audience and spoils the appeal. It’s telling a good joke only to kill it by explaining to the one person that went, “I don’t get it.”
Secondly, they’ve already upfront said that relays may be cost prohibitive for many people to operate, resulting in only a few ever being spun up. If that remains the case and is true, then even if a few were spun up, that’s not any more federated or distributed than the rather consolidated web we see now. How much of a difference would it make if the social web was running on AuthTransfer and the major relays were owned and run by Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, and Google?
Congrats you have your own data in a personal data server…But are you really the one running it, or did you just opt into the PDS entryway offered by Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc. because sorry, what’s that about a server?
Yeah, right now the way I think of it is that Bluesky is (conceptualy) a single big instance, connected to the rest of the ActivityPub fediverse via Bridgy Fed (which speaks both AT and ActivityPub). Bluesky’s decentralized in a different way, and the broader ATmosphere (apps that use AT protocol) is growing as well, but it deosn’t really have the same concept of instance.
Mastodon was around for a while, slowly being built up until 2022 when the big twitter surge happened. They had the perfect foundation to make it the next big thing and all they had to do was keep the people who joined, make it slightly easier to join, and develop a few features like quote posts.
- They banned and defederated everyone who wasn’t in a very narrow sliver of political and technological opinions.
Mastodon lost it’s momentum, but had a second shot a year or two later. Threads joined the network offering a massive user base that could talk with Mastodon users. Then Bluesky blew up and that was bridged so Mastodon could talk with those people too. Mastodon may not have been the center of things anymore, but it could be fully integrated into the other two.
- Most servers defederated with threads and bridges.
There are other things that I’m sure play a roll as well. Luck, discoverability, easiness to join, people getting board, people looking at the next shiny thing, you name it. But it does look to be in many ways self inflicted.
Bluesky, using ATProto, which as near as I can tell is not used by anyone else, is not part of the fediverse as a result. Since both ActivityPub, and ATProto, and for that matter also Zot, are all open sourced protocols, it is my hope someone will build bridge software that incorporates and provides interoperability between both. Hubzilla would seem an ideal place for that to happen since that is already it’s role, to bridge multiple protocols.
@nanook Actually, quick fun fact, there’s already bridges. Bridgy Fed offers Activity Pub <> AT bridging, and Mostr offers Nostr <> Activity Pub bridging (and can be chained with Bridgy Fed to offer Nostr <> AT bridging). Not aware of any Zot bridges except the Hubzilla plugin that lets you follow AP users.
@nate I attempted to locate AP plugin for hubzilla but could not, not in the addons, not mentioned on the hubzilla site, and could not find with gargoyle search. Can anyone tell me where to obtain?
@nanook “Pubcrawl” is what you’re looking for. Probably not the best SEO optimized name if you don’t know it by name, but works well afaik.
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There’s just not many people on there. And I already never used Twitter except to read in-time updates from people and companies, so naturally with many of them being on Threads or Bluesky, that’s where I’d go to get that information.
I mean it’s just normal to have a “social” part to social media, no?
This is a baffling comment. There are tons of people on mastodon, more than I could ever hope to keep up with. I have a couple hundred accounts on follow and never manage to keep up. Honestly it could use some sorting.
I don’t want to follow random people though? Twitter was useful as a way to follow specific companies and people to know when say, a service goes down or an update is released.
These people and companies aren’t on Mastodon.
This is the thing a lot of Mastodon users seem to miss. I was on Twitter because of specific people and companies. They aren’t on Mastodon, so I have no use for it.
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There are a lot of companies on the flipboard side, which as far as I know, most servers haven’t defederated
Yeah, chicken and egg. Unfortunate twitter has now locked down feeds so you have to be logged in, so also fuck them on that point.
It’s a tradeoff. I am so disgusted by twitter that I chose to give that up and leave.
Drag simply thinks microblogging is boring. Nobody has anything interesting to say and nobody smelled drag’s toots.
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Drag the destroyer of social media, please do Facebook next!
Nothing interesting for 99% population. Tech blogging is the hardest stuff and most tech youtubers pretty much stopped contributing. What’s the point of sharing knowledge if any gamer on twitch has bigger audience than you maybe 200 - 300 live watchers and it’s the a good number of viewers for a very well known polish security researcher ( ex Google ). So you know why social media is going shit
I don’t see the point. It’s like twitter. Never saw the point of that either instead of lemmy or Reddit honestly
Mastodon is my only presence on social media. I love it. I found (over time) a large community of people who share my different interests. I love the wokeness of it. I don’t miss my lefty mutuals who are somehow still on X/Meta. I love the absence of influencers, algorithms and nazis. I love discovery through following hashtags. I could go on and on. I’m fine with people hating it for all the reasons I love it. They would ruin the vibe if they moved there.
