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’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.
I’ve been engaging with Lemmy more than Mastodon. Lemmy allows for more interactions through discussions. To me, it seems like Mastodon is slower to get interactions (for context, I have accounts on three different instances and used to post dark/gothic/satirical/surrealist poetry written by me daily, but I haven’t posted in days because no one seems to be really engaging with it). Mastodon has a lot of potential, but I think few are really committed to stick to the fediverse and all its potential.
As for why people don’t come back, maybe they’re confused about which instance to use since there are thousands of different instances for different purposes, I’m not exactly sure.
I never really got into Twitter format. Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight. Mastodon and bluesky just fill that void, although has replaced twitter for me.
Mastodon has a horrible UI and UX, at least in my opinion. I’ve found Misskey and its forks to be better.
i posted in another thread how i think content discovery stinks on mastodon. bluesky is much better at it. mastodon feeds are a wall of noise
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 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.
mastodon + opt in to bridgyfed is the way
I think people are tired of the 140 character type social networks, the novelty has simply worn off. It’s either self-promotion or “I had two eggs for breakfast lol” type of posts.
People who came to Mastodon, posted “Hello world!” and didn’t bother to set a profile picture or add a description will always complain about the lack of discoverability, or the place being boring.
You literally have to put in work to set up your feed, follow hashtags, people and post yourself for it to be a network and not just a feed of things. And I think people struggle with this concept a lot.
I do understand that it’s not for everyone. But it’s not a problem with Mastodon, it’s just a natural filter IMO. “You have to put at least this much effort to integrate”. Low-effort things are usually just rage-bait.
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’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 do kind of like that they call messages “toots.” That’s my kind of stupid.
Maybe rebrand as Y
Better name than X.
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.
i think maybe because it has 3 syllables
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.
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.
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.
I guess it’s for people like me, who have no friends?
William Shatner couldn’t find me on Mastodon
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?
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
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 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.
Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.
Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.
short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks.
I 100% agree with this sentiment.
Jaron Lanier has a great book called You Are Not A Gadget, where he talks about the way we design and interact with systems, and he has some thoughts I think reflect this sentiment very well:
“When [people] design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.” (This is in reference to Wikis like Wikipedia)
“Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature.”
He talks about how when a system becomes popular enough, it can “lock in” a design, when others build upon it as standard. Such as how the very concept of a “file” is one we created, and nearly every system now uses it. Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
And the key part, which I think is relevant to Mastodon, the fediverse, and social media more broadly, is this quote:
“A design that share’s Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments.”
Fragments, of course, meaning the limited, microblogging style of communication the platform allows for. I’ve seen some Mastodon instances that help with this, by not imposing character limits anywhere near where most instances would, opting for tens of thousands of characters long. But of course, there is still a limit. Another design feature by Twitter that is now locked in.
But of course, people are used to that style of social media. It’s what feels normal, inevitable even. Changing it would mean having to reconceptualize social media as a concept, and might be something people aren’t interested in, since they’re too used to the original design. We can’t exactly tell.
As Lanier puts it,
“We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space.”
Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
No it isn’t; that’s what databases are.
That’s what some databases are. Most databases you’ll see today still inevitably store the whole contents of the DB within a file with its own format, metadata, file extension, etc, or store the contents of the database within a file tree.
The notion of “lock in” being used here doesn’t necessarily mean that alternatives don’t or can’t exist, but that comparatively, investment into development, and usage, of those systems, is drastically lower.
Think of how many modern computing systems involve filesystems as a core component of their operation, from databases, to video games, to the structure of URLs, which are essentially usually just ways to access a file tree. Now think of how many systems are in use that don’t utilize files as a concept.
The very notion of files as an idea is so locked-in, that we can rarely fathom, let alone construct a system that doesn’t utilize them as a part of its function.
Regardless, the files example specifically wasn’t exactly meant to be a direct commentary on the state of microblogging platforms, or of all technology, but more an example for analogy purposes than anything else.
What social media platforms don’t have some kind of character limit?
What platforms don’t use a feed?
What platforms don’t use a like button?
What platforms don’t have some kind of hashtags?
All of these things are locked-in, not necessarily technologically, but socially.
Would more people from Reddit have switched to Lemmy if it didn’t have upvotes and downvotes? Are there any benefits or tradeoffs to including or not including the Save button on Lemmy, and other social media sites? We don’t really know, because it’s substantially less explored as a concept.
The very notion of federated communities on Lemmy being instance-specific, instead of, say, instances all collectively downloading and redistributing any posts to a specific keyword acting as a sort of global community not specific to any one instance, is another instance of lock-in, adapted from the fediverse’s general design around instance-specific hosting and connection.
In the world of social media, alternative platforms, such as Minus exist, that explore unique design decisions not available on other platforms, like limited total post counts, vague timestamps, and a lack of likes, but compared to all the other sites in the social media landscape, it’s a drop in the bucket.
The broader point I was trying to make was just that the very way microblogging developed as a core part of social media’s design means that any shift away from it likely won’t actually gain traction with a mainstream audience, because of the social side of the lock-in.
Wow!
“Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.”
@grue @ArchRecord An example of a database that doesn’t keep it’s data in files?
I’m not a big expert on database technology, but I am aware of there being at least a few database systems (“In-Memory”) that use the RAM of the computer for transient storage, and since RAM doesn’t use files as a concept in the same way, the data stored there isn’t exactly inside a “file,” so to speak.
That said, they are absolutely dwarfed by the majority of databases, which use some kind of file as a means to store the database, or the contents within it.
Obviously, that’s not to say using files is bad in any way, but the possibilities for how database software could have developed, had we not used files as a core computing concept during their inception, are now closed off. We simply don’t know what databases could have looked like, because of “lock-in.”
Memory is still structured like a file and referenced over addresses, we just call it something else.
Bluesky certainly provides another option … when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon’s numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky’s addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn’t, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn’t have stuck around.
What are some of the issues you’d like to see addressed? I don’t use mastodon as much so I’m not familiar with what has / hasn’t been done.
ex. I hear they’ve been working on content discovery, such as with the recommended accounts carousel
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What’s frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!
Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that’s good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography … but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh – certainly not the worst, but it’s not all that well-moderated, and it’s big enough that the local feed isn’t useful for finding interesting people or stuff – and that’s now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they’re a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim … still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.
The fact that like an rethreads are not federated is I pretty big issue. Like if you come from a small instance, you’ll see most global posts at 0 likes, which makes the platform look dead.
Thank you!
@otter @thenexusofprivacy I personally find the three-pane design a bit “busy”.
Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.
why is that though?
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks
Your post could fit on Mastodon
My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.
Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.
Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.
Your post could fit on Mastodon
EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).
People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.
Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).
How is mastodon healthier? Please provide examples. Healthier for whom? As there’s an extensive list of people harmed that absolutely do not find mastodon “healthy” let alone “healthier” particularly Black and Brown folks. Bluesky defaults to the same way feeds are presented as Mastodon does, so your statement is false
My Mastodon instance uses a 500 character limit
They are in competition with Mastodon, and have a marketing budget.
Five years from now, those platforms will become enshittified as their budgets dry up. They will need to milk the users for revenue. Well see another surge in a few years, until they learn that Mastodon is actually better.
Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.
Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.
@dragontamer @thenexusofprivacy
“short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks”
I agree and that’s why the first site I put up was friendica, but I find on friendica, even though people have the space to express their thoughts in depth and eloquently, few do so, so perhaps Mastodon is so successful because it appeals to people who are incapable of effective self expression. At any rate, it is a reality that it is, so I do run one of those also.
Microblogging is definitely useful for many things, short and quick thoughts, links to news articles, jokes, memes etc. You can also comment and share things easily. Microblogging actually resembles instant messaging in a lot of ways, just with an undefined ’group chat’ size.
I find it kinda funny that Twitter has become so toxic that people start thinking there must be something wrong with the format.
Also RSS clearly can’t replicate a big chunk of the desirable properties of microblogging (eg. easy sharing and commenting).
