While I agree with the article and a lot of comments, I am still active on my Mastodon account and I am enjoying it more than ever.

Disclaimer: I’m a white male westerner working in IT. 😉

A friend of mine works in linguistics and education. He was an avid Twitter user and has since migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon. He says, Mastodon is quite complex and clunky but on Bluesky there’s not much happening in his bubble.

For me, the quality of the conversation and the regional character of my local instance is a big plus on Madison. On Lemmy, I read a lot on international and tech topics, but on Mastodon, the conversation is related more to my countries politics and my region.

So, maybe they lost a lot of users. But the 14% that stayed are a good start for quite a vivid community.

If anyone has questions on how to get something out of Mastodon, ask away or follow me here: mateng@nrw.social.

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?

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

mastodon + opt in to bridgyfed is the way

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because no one is on it. I don’t do twitter/facebook-like social media to interact exclusively with random people. I have no family or friends on Mastodon and couldn’t tell you if any “content creators,” for the lack of a better term, that I follow elsewhere are on it to follow.

I think because when it comes to Instagram or Twitter type social media more people probably use it only to follow accounts and have no interest in being involved in it. So closer to treating it like a rss reader than something like lemmy or reddit. And conversation feed sucks in general.

I use squawker for Twitter. Can’t comment, like, sub, or whatever and account follows are just local feeds like Stealth for Reddit or NewPipe or Freetube. And that’s all I need from it.

Mastodon is just like Threads : a hype , wait for the hype to end and you’ll see that it doesn’t offer something that would impress an ordinary person who isn’t a nerd or tech savvy enough to continue using it… What I’ll say now is more like random thoughts about federation and it applies to any federated service but this post inspired my thoughts so …

The two best features I can think of for a Mastodon are :

• Open source: an excellent thing but it’s probably not important for an ordinary person who still uses the products of big companies just because they are “convenient” and “common” even when his data is the cost
• federated: although it provides freedom to choose where you want to join, it creates a lot of confusion and inconvenience as well : I personally have somewhat specific interests and I usually tend to avoid public instances dedicated to “everything”, however, every time I decided to join a federated service I got the same confusion : “which instance should I choose?” , I had two accounts on Mastodon before I deleted one of them ( and I’ll probably delete the other soon ) and I felt this confusion the two times I created an account, I have two accounts on Lemmy and I felt this confusion the two times I created an account, one account on Peertube and it’s the same ( this was the most difficult of them honestly because Peertube’s filters are very bad and whenever I could find an instance that I considered good, it turns out that registration is closed, or needs approval), the same confusion also happened when I created an account on Kbin/Mbin , the same on Pixelfeed , the same when I searched for an instance of friendica and it will be the same when I think in the future to repeat the experience on any other federated service… Now, someone may come and say the famous sentence “it doesn’t matter which instance you choose, at the end you can follow anything from any instance” and honestly this sentence is a pure myth imho because … first : when you register an account in an instance, you will constantly notice the “local” section, which shows you what’s happening on the instance you are in , and it’ll form part of your experience in the instance depending on the instance itself and people on this instance , also , let’s suppose that a large number of annoying users existed on a popular instance and the moderation of this instance couldn’t solve the problem ( or didn’t do anything about this in the first place) , what might happen is that moderation of other instances might decide to defederate with this instance, and this might affect an ordinary user who has done nothing but joined the instance - and any other person who isn’t annoying but but ended up on this instance -, I know that this point is unreal currently but it might be real one day especially that some instances are known for not being tolerated with specific behaviors
• Another confusion that might happen … I’ll explain it with my own experience : when I was still using my first Mastodon account, I left the account for a few months and then decided to return … but guess what happened ? I forgot which instance I signed up for in the first place ! fortunately, after two attempts in two different instances, I found the solution : I searched on a random instance for my Account (I still remember the username ) and was able to find it … I was lucky in this, but I can’t guarantee that everyone will be as lucky as me and will find a way to remember ( this is both a good and bad point for the federation , on the one hand I forgot where I registered because the instances are similar , and on the other hand I found the instance which I registered in using another instance )

I don’t see the point. It’s like twitter. Never saw the point of that either instead of lemmy or Reddit honestly

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 thought this was about the band and panicked

Let’s see:

Network effect hits Mastodon specially hard as it competes not just with Twitter, but also Threads and Bluesky. In those situations, a smaller userbase means that people will outright ignore you as an option.

The way that federation was implemented; as linearchaos mentioned in another thread, if you settle in a smaller instance (the “right” thing to do), you won’t get “good collections of off node traffic”. So it creates a situation where, if you know how federation works you’ll avoid big instances, and worsen your own experience; and if you don’t, well, Mastodon’s big selling point goes down the drain.

Federation itself introduces a complexity cost. That’s unavoidable and the benefits of federation outweigh the cost by far; however, the cost is concrete while the bigger benefit is far more abstract.

Branding issues. Other users already mentioned it, but you don’t sell a novel tech named after an extinct animal.

And this is just conjecture from my part, but I think that microblogging is becoming less popular than it used to be; people who like short content would rather go watch a TikTok video, and people who want well-thought content already would rather read a “proper” blog instead.

On a lighter side: the very fact that we’re using the ActivityPub now helps Mastodon, even if we’re in different platforms (like Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, SubLinks). Due to how federation works, you’re bound to see someone in Mastodon sharing content with those forums and vice versa; it could be a bit less clunky but it’s still more content for both sides.

On the text: I think that the author reached the right conclusion through the wrong reasoning. The activity peaks don’t matter that much, when there’s a huge influx of users you’re bound to see some leaving five minutes later. The reason why Mastodon is struggling is this:

Source of the data.

See those slopes down? They show that the stable userbase is shrinking. Even users engaged enough with the platform are slowly leaving, but newbies who could fill their place aren’t popping up.