Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
You must log in or register to comment.
To paraphrase my opinion from back then:
- Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
- customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
- better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
- stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
- many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods
What is HOA?
Home Owners Association a group or people that “polices” neighbors and has a hisyory of doing shady things. But he’s referring to the actitude of “coming outta nowhere to tell you what to do” they have in common.
What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.
Yeah, turns out weird, hostile, anti-social nerds are weird, hostile, and anti-social, and they probably ruined our best shot at freeing the web from VC backed corporate control of communication.
Personally, I’m excited there’s a decentralized option that’s super popular. Yes, relatively very few run their own PDS, but if the main bsky instance becomes a problem for anyone, people can easily migrate.
It’s not just data ownership either; The AT protocol supports community-built algorithms, relays, and app views.
The whole thing’s just a scam to off-load data storage costs to super-users. It’s sad that people are excited about it.
You have to understand we are not normal users. Anyone even remotely interested in federated software are not normal users.
Bluesky may not have 57 third party apps and that’s why people are flocking to it. It’s easy. The signup process through the app involved no selecting of servers, no understanding of what it actually is under the hood, and users are greeted by a default algorithm that feels very much like old Twitter before Musk.
Basically, regular users do not care about the fediverse and just want a competent and polished app and site experience.
I’ve got an idea as to why.
I went to mastodon.social and see a Linux meme, some heavy political commentary, and a bunch of posts about mastodon being better than Twitter.
I then went to bluesky.app and see some political riffing, cute animals, a comic, some jokes, a company, and even Don Lemon.
The average person checking them both out for the first time, mastodon is nerd shit and Bluesky is normal shit.
I’ve tried to stick with mastodon for a while and after using it for months, your description of checking it out is STILL what my feeds look like. That’s all there seems to be on Mastodon.
Because centralized services are easier to use.
This exactly. I didn’t join Lemmy for a long time, because I would search for “Lemmy”, get confused when I see a page asking me to “pick an instance” instead of seeing a front page, and then leave because I thought that they were all independent from each other.
It wasn’t until reddit killed my favorite app that I finally decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
I’m running my own PDS on the AT Protocol 🤷♂️
Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.
That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what its advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.
That’s exactly what drove me into seeking out Lemmy instead. I hopped on Mastodon and it made me feel like I was being coralled into following some niche hobby forum exclusively, and I wasn’t into that. It didn’t explain that the instance itself was largely irrelevant and that the rest of the platform would open up to me after choosing one.
Lemmy still had a learning curve, but having experience with reddit I was able to pick it up easily enough.
Because none of those points matter to the average user.
People want a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. They want Twitter without Musk.
Bluesky is a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. It is Twitter without Musk.
It looks exactly like Twitter, it feels exactly like Twitter (both the Web interface and the official app), and it’s for tech-illiterate dumb-dumbs.
Only recently has an instance selector been added to the sign-up process of the official app, but Bluesky still markets itself to its users as the self-same kind of centralised monolithic silo as Twitter and Facebook.
Mastodon has a vastly different UI and UX from immediate pre-Musk Twitter, but people don’t want to learn anything new. And truth be told, I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon.
Also, Mastodon advertises the fact that it’s decentralised with lots of instances to choose from, even though the gGmbH would rather want everyone to be on mastodon.social. This freaks people out.
Joining Mastodon is actually no more difficult than joining Bluesky in practice because the official app railroads everyone to mastodon.social without forcing them. But people won’t know until they’ve actually installed and opened that app.
The only reason why Mastodon grew so quickly to such an enormous size in late 2022 was because it was the only alternative to Twitter that anyone knew, including those who pulled Twitter users onto Mastodon. The only other advantage it had over anything else was that, unlike Twitter, it didn’t have Musk and uncontained droves of Nazis. Had people been sent to Akkoma or Calckey instead of Mastodon, it would have exploded the same.
Inb4 “How can people use e-mail then?” That’s because everyone’s on Gmail, and many think e-mail is a proprietary Google product.
I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon
The *keys have a UI that has a similar design language to Twitter, but a fairly different layout. I think it’s close enough that people would recognize it as “Twitter, but different”, vs Mastodon’s “Twitter, but archaic, and also different, and therefore confusing”.
The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.
It made my soul sad.
But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO. The push-and-pull between “we want to be mainstream” and also “fuck the mainstream normies” is palpable, and super cringey, and it turns people away quickly.
The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.
If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn’t Mastodon, they’re hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They’re most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they’re likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.
The most extreme case I’ve encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn’t ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.
But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.
Worse yet, “coming into it” is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. After learning that there’s, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.
Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica’s own culture, adopt Mastodon’s culture instead and stop using all of Friendica’s features that Mastodon doesn’t have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon’s because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.
It’s almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn’t assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.
Well lots of offoces used Microsoft for email and out sode i workd email is password reset, receipts, and new account confirmation. When the last i sent and email that wasn’t work or those things? About 8 years ago.
But yes tryings to explain instance and federation to a regular user is only going to confuse them. We need mastodon to be a sample as login and use. If we bring up a single tecnical term we lose people.
it’s been better marketed, and people struggle with the concept of federation and picking a server. and I guess the invite-only, artificial exclusivity strat has actually paid off for them initially, unlike for Google+.
also, a matter of culture. I’ve seen many newcomers complain about how some long time users act as HOA, reminding everyone to act according to the long-standing rules. many people of colour have experience many forms of racist behaviour, too, which has driven some communities away.
oh, and the federation/defederation business sometimes gets way too messy, which [cynic mode on] makes it difficult for people who want their Personal Brand™ to gain as many followers as possible over the entire network.
people struggle with the concept of federation and picking a server
This is a HUGE reason. I didn’t know when I first signed up for Lemmy that I was on what is essentially a tankie instance. I didn’t know when I signed up for Pixelfed that I wasn’t going to be able to see shit because the first server I signed up for wasn’t really federated with anyone and I’ve mostly given up on it. I still can’t see a bunch of stuff on Mastodon without switching through several accounts with no rhyme or reason.
I’ve said before that I obviously like it here because I’m using the services, but it’s not easy. Most people don’t know about the fediverse, and most of those that do want to be passive about maintaining their social media. Most of the fediverse is built for nerds.
It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.
Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.
It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.
And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.
Do you use Mastodon on the web or app?
Every platform and app I’ve seen does a piss poor job of explaining what federation is and how to sign up. “Wtf is mastodon.social?, Why is this one in German?, Why can’t I login after signing up?” New users just get confused and give up.
This article gives a good view from an average user’s perspective.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
For most people that’s a complication, not a bonus.
I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.
At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)
I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.
In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.
I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.
IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.
The “just pick an instance!” and “my instance shut down” thing is a core pain point here.
BlueSky is corporately run, and it’s semi-centealized. This is bad for the internet, but it’s good for the user. At least on the surface. And that’s what users care about. It provides a sense of stability, and an umspoken promise that if anything happens, it’s the company’s fault, and the company’s problem.
The fediverse is run by hobbiests. You join some hobbiest’s forum or microblog, it connects to a bunch of other hobbiest’s forums or microblogs, and if things break, oh well, it’s just a hobby! And if that hobby becomes stressful for the hobbiest, they just abandon the hobby.
Leaving the users holding the bag.
The fediverse is unstable as an end user, because, as it’s currently structured, it’s not really designed to have end users. It’s designed to have hobbiest tinkerers. It’s right in the oft repeated motto of tne of the fediverse: users should own their data!
But who owns the data in the fediverse? Who actually controls it?
Server admins.
You own your data by self-hosting.
Like a giant computer nerd.
It’s just easier. I have both but I almost never use Mastodon anymore. Federation there doesn’t seem to work right. I didn’t know what an instance was so I joined mastodon.social. Finding and following people in the app doesn’t always seem to work right if they’re on another instance. Doing it in a browser is even more painful.
The people I liked to follow and interact with on X, many tried Mastodon and abandoned it, and many more are now on Bluesky. This creates momentum to “follow the crowd” as it were.
Additionally, you only have one chance to make a first impression. A lot of us tried Mastodon earlier and it wasn’t ready. Bluesky started as invite-only, which drummed up interest before catching this zeitgeist of people leaving X.
Lastly, and maybe it’s just me, but the font sizing on the official Mastodon app on Android is generally too small and can’t be changed. Bluesky allows me to change it and make it more comfortable to use.
Evidentially mastodon makes it hard to find people on purpose unless you know their name “to stop harassment” I’m told, except I’m not sure how it does that at all and it just makes it harder to use the damn platform. That’s my one real complaint about mastodon.
Unpopular opinion here, but: as opposed to other twitter clones like Hive Social and such, that also look sleek and are simple, but didn’t go anywhere, Bluesky did manage to attract a sizeable crowd of creative and talented open source indie devs that are passionate about it and build cool stuff on atproto. Whether it’s custom feeds or star sign labelers or alternative clients that add more features or entirely new appviews like the oekaki board PinkSea, you get the feeling it is a pretty vibrant ecosystem and this has sustained it all these months.
While this is true for the Fediverse as well, I think it’s fair to say that there have been rumblings here about lack of direction and proper stewardship of the Fediverse and if you want this place to succeed you can’t just sweep it under the rug, shrug your shoulders and say “well, people who pick Bluesky over Mastodon are just stupid”.
install mastodon
Pick an instance
Hit up all
giant penis
That’s why. That’s the reason.
but you could review the instance beforehand…
Is Jimbo Normalman going to review the instance beforehand? Lmao.
Are you talking about a Bhutan instance lmao!
There’s a high amount of friction to get people to join the Fediverse. I had to put in more effort than I’d like to figure out how things worked.
My biggest worry was picking the wrong Mastodon instance and then having no easy way to migrate my stuff to another server. Even after you pick your instance, there’s so much setup for things that you kinda just expect to work.
