As much as I’d love to see mastodon grow, I feel like a lot of people here like to ignore the number one most important feature of a social network: who’s on it.
Bluesky didn’t start with millions. Europeans chose it when there were none. Like Facebook getting its start because Savarin used his college frat connections across the country to get the ball rolling, I’m sure there were paid influencers who got things moving for Bluesky.
and mastodon just can’t have the social network with how confusing it is to a normal user, just like lemmy.
Decentralized platforms will never take off as long as people talk about how it works, you just need a URL with a sign up function that works and an app you can install, log in to and it works. That’s what a normal user wants.
Finding accounts to follow on Mastadon is fer less intuitive than finding some Lemmy communities to follow
If they want to reach their customers, they likely won’t find them on mastodon… hard to ignore millions of engaged users 🤷♂️
You seem to mix up cause and effect.
Mastodon moderation is also absolute garbage.
That’s not consciously why, but it’s certainly part of the stack of reasons that made BS blow up despite coming in from the rear in both building the tech/site and having absorbed the first wave of Twitter departures.
Incidentally, I have a dormant Masto account and active accounts here and on Bluesky.
Masto is a big disappointment and surprisingly bad fit for the Fedi/AP structure.
Strongly disagree. Bluesky is extremely American-centric and basically just a bulletin board of “hot takes”. I find Mastodon much deeper, more engaging, and international. I’m glad I deleted my BS account and replaced it with Mastodon.
edit: However, I was never a Twitter user in the past
I have to say them setting themselves up to have “BS” as an acronym was a bad choice. Although I still hope it was intentional.
Look, it’s fine. You don’t need to be into successful things. But a bulletin board of hot takes is the core functionality of microblogging.
If you make a Twitter-like for “deep” conversation then… don’t make that. That’s why I prefer it here.
The character limit is in place because Twitter was a constant flow of headlines scrolling past your feed. You stepped into the stream and let the news and hot takes wash over you, get mad every now and then and ragetweet back, join a dogpile, whatever.
It’s toxic and bad, just like all social media, but it’s intended to feed you quick bites of condensed info constantly.
You want deeper, then go somewhere where you have no character limit, proper discussion threading and no focus on media posts. So… you know… here, kind of. Reddit, but by extension here.
But Twitter was successful because the flood of microhits was useful for famous people to reach out to fanbases asymmetrically while still retaining some feedback and validation and for people who needed access to those (journalists, marketers and activists, mainly) to be able to reach out and receive info from them directly and easily.
Mastodon is NOT that, and so Mastodon makes no damn sense. This does. Pixelfed does. Mastodon does not and it will never be a Twitter replacement for that reason. And since it’s made to be a Twitter replacement it will never be much of anything else, either.
Mastodon exists, currently, because enough people like it (and some of those people, myself included, like it in part because it’s less Americanized than BS). Perhaps a Twitter replacement should be better than Twitter. Maybe for many people Mastodon is an improvement.
“Enough” is true, in that as long as people can have instances up the software will run.
“Many” is a stretch, if you compare it to the alternatives.
As I said elsewhere, nobody says you have to like the popular thing. I’m fine with people hanging out in a niche alternative if that’s what they want. Hell, I’m here.
But the thought that Masto would replace closed socials and specifically Twitter that was popular when they were seeing growth coming from Twitter users came and went.
Mastodon moderation is also absolute garbage.
I mean, if it’s that big a deal you can always roll up your own instance. Isn’t Truth Social just a rebranded Mastodon fork?
I’m more annoyed by the search and the front page, which forces me to switch between channels in order to put together a feed. It’s poorly integrated and difficult to navigate.
That’s before you get to simply Networking Effect. The people I want to follow aren’t on Mastodon, so I’m not going to be on Mastodon. As soon as they all jump over, I’ll join them.
First of all, if the response to moderation is “well, you can just do it yourself”, then it is absolute garbage.
But on top of that the problem with Masto moderation (and moderation here, while we’re at it) is that blocking doesn’t go far enough and the answer from the evangelists always ends up being “you should defederate”, like people were hardlocked to instances.
It’s weird, it doesn’t scale, there is no proper concept of blocking anyone and no way to enforce individual penalties. It’s a mess.
It kinda works here because the subreddit equivalents typically ARE tied to instances, and that’s something you can sorta manage, even if the individual moderation is still trash. But for a Twitter clone? Just not fit for purpose.
And I’d say while most people aren’t aware of that and Masto never got popular enough for it to be a real issue, it’s part of the cocktail of bad tech-to-design fit that made a bunch of people with big followings bounce. They showed up, had no existing userbase, the chronological-only firehose restricted them to followers in their timezone and they didn’t have proper moderation to shut down the army of Mastosplainers that kept popping up to explain why having reach is bad, actually.
So it went back to being a residual thing for progressive tech people happy to have a small chat with the same four guys who procrastinate in their same timeframe. And for porn on main, I was suprised to find when I moved to a larger instance.
Luckily there is active work on things, both on protocol level as well as with some kind of “federated moderation system”, aimed to reduce workload for mods and admins and increase consistency without weakening the strengths of a federated system (like that rules and moderation styles can differ).
In general the Mastodon gGmbh was simply overrun by demand (and they REALLY didn’t make things better by funneling people towards them with that awful Mastodon app), and both them losing tax exemptions due to bad german governments as well as bad decisions by Eugen (like working with Meta / Threads) lead to Mastodon underperforming. That shit sucks.
It can get better though, and people are working on that.
I think the reaction to Threads federating was another nail in the coffin. Threads lost its spot as the leading alternative for very good, self-inflicted reasons, but if anybody who does Twitter for a living needed proof that Masto couldn’t be trusted was that they saw the notion of a large participant with a critical mass of users, tons of resources and at least some version of a recommendation engine as an affront.
Everybody panicked about “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” and it turns out Meta didn’t need to expand or extend anything, the temper tantrum from even the suggestion that they would use AP (whose goals were supposed to be universal interoperability in the first place) was enough to crack Masto in half and throw the entirety of it into a massive spiral of open-source style arrogant, holier-than-thou ragefest. Threads became THE subject matter of Masto for the foreseeable, after Elon and Twitter were THE subject mattter for a long time. It was positiviely stalkerish behaviour and a significant reason I left the moment Bluesky gave up the PR-ish “we’re cool because we’re invite only” crap.
As for the working on that part, I’ll believe it when I see it. In the time they’ve been “working on it” Twitter died, Bluesky was made, ran under the radar for a while, then blew up and every other alternative died.
It’s too late now, anyway. It’s the husk of Twitter and Bluesky now. If Mastodon ever had a shot at mainstream prominence that window is now firmly closed and never coming back.
The Lemmysphere never had a shot at mainstream prominence and Reddit was never in trouble the way Twitter is, much as people around here are often in denial about that. It is more sustainable as a small thing, though. It’s effectively just a mid-size forum and as long as your interest overlap with the communities that do exist it’s fine being small. Probably would be nicer being a few times bigger, but hey, that may still happen over time.
Mastodon needed to be a proper social network and that is never going to happen now, new features or not.
