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.
Personally, I just don’t enjoy that Twitter-like format. I never used Twitter so I find it… Awkward? To me its kinda like a platformer with bad controls, everything else about the game might be great but if it doesnt feel satisfying to play, I’ll skip.
I still have my account and Megalodon on my phone but I just can’t get into it.
I’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.
That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”
I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.
But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.
i have a mastodon account but it’s completely useless for me.
the only thing i use twitter for is to follow updates and news from professional journalists and artists who are not on mastodon and likely will never be. if your job depends on twitter, switching to mastodon is not going to happen.
if i want to engage with random average people, i come here to lemmy.
Uff, imagine getting news from a rightwing nutjob owned social network. Big yikes.
sports news, get off your high horse.
Sure, blue checkmark.
you are everything that’s wrong with the internet.
No u
I agree with top comment.
I’m Indonesian. Most of trending fediverse are Western related topics which It’s not relevant to me.
There’s one time when I randomly post about my country politics, and people on Mastodon just assume or comment using Western mindset.
Other than this Lemmy account, I mostly stick with hobby-related fediverse that mostly East Asian and Southeast Asian people (mostly Misskey instance)
Also, Indonesian is currently the highest user on Twitter, recently bypassed Brazil. People still use it as our local feed is… well localized. No Western-related discussion and much more comfy.
That was a great comment. It’s frustrating because the fediverse should be good at making it easy for people to find topics their interested in … but it doesn’t work out that way in practice.
I have a Mastodon account and now on my fourth, fifth instance. I instance hop a lot, which helped me find my people.
I dont agree with a huge chunk of what was said in the post. But I understand where the white people in Bali reference comes from. I am an Asian woman in tech and took me awhile to find people that I can actually connect with. What I like about Mastodon is the fact that I can find niche topics that I wont see in other social media. Also, want to flag that I no longer have accounts in proprietary social media since 2017 which probably helped my drive to find an online community.
In saying so, I have faced some crazy level of stalking (one person only so I guess its isolated?) to the point that this person messaged me on Linkedin and emailed me to tell me I was being impersonated on Mastodon. Because he didnt believe that I am myself??? He went on saying, Hi Miss, I saw youre being impersonated blah blah.
But I also want to mention that I have met so many amazing people through Mastodon.
Its a weird space, but I am weird so I guess I belong there. Loo
There definitely are some great people there. Finding the right instance makes a big difference… unfortunately, almost eerybody starts off on mastodon.social, which for most people isn’t a great choice, and don’t realize they can move – and when they do try to move, they lose their posting history which is annoying.
Mastodon is not struggling.
- Mastodon is not a single entity, if mastodon.art dies tomorrow I would just create a new Mastodon profile on another instance.
- Yeah, Mastodon use surged in 2022 and 2023, and yeah most users didn’t stay around, but compared to the numbers before 2022, Mastodon has s big bump of new users.
Looking at two surges of new users seeing the vast majority not stick around and missing that a sizable chunk still stayed is missing the point.
This article would never have been written if the user increase didn’t have temporary surges, that result would be the same number of users, but less brand recognition.
Mastodon is also not driven by the same kind of metrics as a centralized system, plenty of people can just run their own instance just for the fun of it, they don’t need constant growth.
So calm down, and take it slow.
Don’t sell Mastodon short.
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.
because its name is Mastodon, something that when people google it pulls up a band.
Also because it’s trying to be a hot fresh new thing but it’s literally named after an animal that’s extinct.
If it had a catchier and more unique name it probably would have caught on more.
Yeah, lemmy suffered from this too, SEO is completely neglected when picking name.
Because it doesn’t have $100s of millions to throw at marketing, or the name dropping of Twitter creators behind it.
It is what it is. You can either be alright with being small, or hurl money into it, but the people who hurl money into things tend to want it back at some point, and that means becoming a shitty business.
I have a mastodon account, I still check it occasionally and I’ve tried making it work a year ago, being active on it and following either people or hashtags. I also tried other networks like bsky and cara, or mastodon through kbin integration. None of them really worked out.
I didn’t have an issue with the technical side as much as with the community and its mentality. They all have this persecution complex where everyone is out to get them and destroy their way of living. They simultaneously claim it’s better and more morally superior than twitter while also responding to any questions or feedback with “if you don’t like it GTFO”. Most of the posts I’ve seen on mastodon seemed masturbatory and/or talking about other social networks and why are they bad than why is mastodon actually good. In many ways it was more toxic and negative than my carefully curated twitter feed. There’s also as much doom and gloom as on twitter, if not more, when it comes to politics (or at least, it’s harder to hide it).
The content in general was bad and boring but I don’t know if this is because of the type of people that are on it or just because the lack of algorithm means I will see any random person’s ramblings next to the biggest breaking news that I’m actually interested in. There is a lack of innovation in this area and it makes discoverability and content curation terrible, I don’t need an algorithm to read my mind but at the very least I wish it could separate trash from actual popular topics.
I found some interesting niches when it comes to FOSS developers and tech but I found next to no actual game devs, artists or content creators on it and even the usual “copy content from twitter” bots were unreliable and uncommon.
TL;DR Mastodon seems very very niche and is not currently viable as a general replacement for other social networks, and IMHO due to the community culture there it’s never going to grow into anything else either.
The first rule of Mastodon is “filter the term ‘Mastodon’”.
While you’re at it, filter out mentions of any other social media you can think of. All of that metadiscourse is apparently important for people to get off their chests, buy it’s numbing to read.
I’m fairly happy using Mastodon, but the lack of algorithms made it necessary to curate my feed very strictly. I turned off boosts/reposts in my app, too, and I now have a slow-moving, low-drama newsfeed that doesn’t stress me out just opening it.
If I do all that then my feed is going to be even emptier than it is now
That’s how filters work, yes. Follow a few hashtags of interest to find people who post about stuff you care about, it’ll fill back in.
@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.
Re blue sky, is anyone actually federating with it? I don’t know of any other instances besides the official one.
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.
@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.
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.
I’ll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.
- Echoing what other people said, finding a server was hard especially as at the time I thought defederating seemed stupid (changed my mind somewhat now that I use Lemmy). Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
- Now into the big problem I had: federation was a pain. It was my first interaction with a federated service that isn’t email and it was confusing and annoying. Finally find an account you like? Well you either can’t see any of their posts or the few you can have 1 reply and 5 likes. Eventually you realise you have to click onto the account’s instance to see everything and they have 100 replies and 500 likes (made-up numbers, obviously) but guess what you can’t interact with any of them because you are no longer on your instance. It basically forced me to browse logged out for 99% of my browsing, constantly following links between websites. I have not had quite the same trouble with Lemmy because despite having some similar problems, it has been a LOT quicker to sync especially once you point your instance to another.
- The lack of algorithm or fine control of my feed was off-putting. I still hate that Facebook and other platforms make it hard or impossible to sort chronologically, but having only chronological makes for a potential to miss out on massive amounts of stuff.
- And on a personal note, I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers. If my friends used it things might be different.
I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.
Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.
I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers
Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.
But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.
One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.
Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.
You do know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon, Truth Social and the Threadiverse?
Search that covers 100% of the Fediverse is technologically impossible. Any Fediverse-wide search would need to know all of the Fediverse. All of it.
Like, let’s suppose R is B’s personal instance. Let’s suppose B spins up the instance for the first time. Any all-encompassing Fediverse search would have to know about it immediately. The very millisecond Apache or nginx or whatever comes to life, that search would have to know it’s there to be able to always cover exactly 100% of the Fediverse.
How’s that supposed to work?
If it’s one centralised search engine, it would have to be hard-coded into the source code of every last Fediverse project out there so all new instances can automatically announce their existence to the search engine.
And that’s not four projects or so. It’s over 100. Not only Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed. It’s also Ecko and Hometown and Glitch and many other Mastodon forks. And Pleroma and Akkoma and other Pleroma forks. And Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Iceshrimp.NET and Sharkey and CherryPick and Catodon and Meisskey and Tanukey and Neko and dozens upon dozens of other Misskey forks. And Mitra. And Socialhome. And GoToSocial. And micro.blog which, by the way, is closed-source. And Friendica and Hubzilla and the streams repository and Forte. And Pixelfed. And Funkwhale. And Bandwagon. And Castopod. And PeerTube. And Owncast. And Mobilizon. And Gancio. And BookWyrm. And Flohmarkt. And so forth.
It’d be even worse if it was supposed to be built into the Fediverse projects themself. Like, you could search the whole Fediverse from Lemmy’s Web interface or any one Mastodon app.
That’d require each new instance to announce its instance to each running instance.
That’d require each new instance to know all running instances immediately.
That’d only be possible by building a list of 20,000++ Fediverse instances into every last Fediverse server software repository so that it’s installed along with new instances.
And that list would always have to be up-to-date.
So when B spins up R, the following would have to happen:
- R
git pulls the most recent version of the main branch of Mastodon’s source code to have a most up-to-date list of active instances possible. - R starts up.
- R announces its existence to the 20,000++ Fediverse instances on the list.
- R goes through a list of all Fediverse server application code repositories which it has pulled from the Mastodon code repository as well.
- R announces its existence to every last one of these repositories by creating a new branch, editing the list of active Fediverse instances, submitting the edit as a pull request and merging its own new branch into the main/stable/release/… branches of all these code repositories.
Any Fediverse server out there would be able to hack into any Fediverse server code repository and manipulate the production code. Otherwise, this whole thing couldn’t work.
Fediverse server code repositories would be flooded with automated pull requests plus mergers. Oh, and if Mastodon can add a new instance to a list in the Mastodon production source code, anything could remote-manipulate anything in the Mastodon production source code.
- R
deleted by creator
Honestly my biggest issue is getting randomly banned from trans spaces for expressing my own lived experience with surgery and how I view my own body and gender. They’re so “inclusive” that they start excluding people that don’t use their very specific language or share their beliefs exactly. They keep kicking people out then wondering where all the people went!
On the feature side, according to Mastodons recent 4.3 release post development is only 4 full time employees and a budget of under $500k annually. That is basically nothing in the realm of social media companies.
Improving Mastodons features requires money and resources, but Mastodons users are unwilling to pay for instances and unwillingly to fund development. Hell, the .world folks host a bunch of instances for collectively hundreds of thousands of users and they take in about $1k a month in donations. I’m surprised that even covers hosting costs.
So…it’s no wonder that it isn’t going to be as polished as other social media in ways that would reduce the attrition.
I stopped distro hopping and started hopping around Mastodon instances instead.
I currently have two active accounts. One is more established but the server goes down for days at a time.
The other is pretty robust but I’m still establishing myself there.
I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.
I echo the sentiment that there aren’t a lot of Asian people on Mastodon. Although it seems that vivaldi.net is mostly Japanese people.
Asians are mainly using their national instances. Several largest Mastodon instances are Japanese (Pawoo, mstdn.jp, Fedibird), there are also pretty large Korean (planet.moe) or Chinese ones (m.cmx.im, alive.bar, wxw.moe). Outside East Asia, Asian instances tend to be small, though.
I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.
If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.
I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.
If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.
Similar experience here. I have a nicely curated list of people I follow on twitter, they often retweet other users that are similar and I have a nice feed of good content that slowly grows without ever running into toxic assholes. On mastodon I couldn’t get anywhere close to that no matter how much I tried.
I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.
This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.
Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.
So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and
catowl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.
