I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus.
I’m putting my hopes on blue sky/AT which appears to solve the above pain points: https://blueskyweb.org/
What you might say is 'I don't think Mastodon is going to replace Twitter', but I don't think you can argue that Mastodon won't benefit from the Twitter exodus because it has already gained a million users.
Looking at the charts on https://the-federation.info/mastodon you can see that in May there was an influx of about 500 thousand new users after Musk's acquisition of twitter was announced. About 100 thousand of those stuck around. This time the number of new users is 1.1 million and still rising. So proportionally, the Twitter exodus will probably bring Mastodon at least 220 thousand new permanent users. My actual guess would be that a higher proportion will stick around this time, because of network effects.
Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another though as was the case for AOL in 1993.
Mastodon's adoption for at least the past six years has tended to be driven by failures and frustrations with other platforms, and Twitter in particular. Those seem to be occurring in increasing waves. There's some grumbling and adjustment with each, but so far, knock wood, Mastodon's assimilated the influx fairly well.
At the time of the September that Never Ended, Usenet was ~1m total users (based on data from John Quarterman's The Matrix (1990) citing DEC researcher Brian Reid, which I've referenced in earlier HN comments). I believe AOL at the time was at least of an equivalent magnitude, if not several times this.
But it's clear with the planned changes that they're turning paid blue check accounts into the equivalent of the ads you see at the top of your Google search, placed above 'organic' results.
Picking an email provider is quite critical - if you change your email address, you can be only reached if everyone knows your new address, lets not even get started about where the email is used to identify you with other serviced.
I think your choice of a a mastodon server falls in the middle ground between those examples, at minimum, there needs to be a bit more education of users to overcome (perceived?) hurdles there. I can confirm that while I noticed mastodon before, earlier attempts to use it stopped at the question on how to select the proper node and what consequences that has. That might be a perceived problem, but one that needs to be overcome if mastodon should be a popular Twitter alternative.
I go to https://mastodon.social/ because that's where people say things are happening, and I click "Create Account." I'm told I can't sign up here, but I can "Find another server"
You've already lost a huge percentage of potential users, but let's say I press on. I click through to https://joinmastodon.org/servers and see things like glasgow.social and metalhead.club. I'm neither Glaswegian nor a metalhead, so what do I choose? On what basis do I make this choice? It's immediately overwhelming, with a very real fear of picking the "wrong" server and somehow missing out on, well, I don't know, because how would I?
im not at all sure why people are panicked about this.
Okay, so if you don't already have a friend on Mastodon, then what? Have you actually looked at the list on https://joinmastodon.org/servers recently?
Half the comments here say it doesn't matter what server you choose, and half are saying to be sure to choose the one that aligns with your interests, which... see the list above for why that's an issue.
Panic? No. It's just an example of mastodon needlessly limiting itself in terms of usability right at the starting gate.
why is this a key statement? my point is that being on a friends server hasn't altered the experience at all.
i migrated to my friends server a couple days ago from mastodon.social--i literally haven't noticed any difference at all, the experience from everything i can tell has been identical as it was prior. the server im on made literally no difference.
i still follow the same people.
i still have the exact same followers.
my timeline is identical.
i still see all of tehir posts.
they still see mine.
i still see posts they repost.
again, i have noticed absolutely nothing meaningfully different. other than maybe the address i type into the address bar to reach the site, but i dont think thats "meaningful" in any meaningful ;) way.
The phrase is key because it reflects a familiarity which new users do not have. Have you never in your life been introduced to an environment you didn't understand and felt put off by everybody using words you didn't know, or words you did know in ways you didn't understand? Never, in any situation?
Because that's exactly how it feels for many, many, many new users of mastodon now.
what im trying to say, again, is that their panicking is entirely unfounded.
whether you create your account at mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, mastodon.online, vis.social, toot.cat, or your friends totallyraddomainname.com--its not a life or death decision.
particularly because you can simply migrate to another server if you're picky about some minutia that most people don't care about. it feels like overblown fearmongering.
sure, maybe they're experience analysis paralysis, which is definitely a problem sometimes for those who are terrified of technology, but at the end of the day it is over analyzing. one of the reasons mastodon so drastically overtook other federated attempts is because it made it possible to migrate without losing your followers, you just move and poof, you're done. it removes the importance to which server you choose.
As it happens, I picked a server earlier today, more or less at random (one that didn't manually review applications), so I'm set. But the experience was very negative, and fraught with apparent peril.
If the choice of server matters so little, perhaps this site could be improved: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
how so? its just a protocol, just like email. which concerns do you have that it is not as portable as email?
Sorry for the rant, my previous instance went read only, and I had to go find a new one. I know what i want and not being bale to search for it except by rough approximations was incredibly annoying.
I've been looking for a small project to work on and this is perfect.
I think the biggest questions I'd have are: - How do I know an instance is trustworthy and the mods behave professionally? - How do I know an instance isn't going to go down and lose my account?
It seems like there's this "local community" idea where when you join a server, it's like a mini-twitter in its own right. It's a cool idea, but then it seems like part of the decision of which instance to join should be whether you feel like that local community is a good fit for you?
Of course, on the fediverse, no one cares about adoption numbers. :-)
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise excessive/massive reach...The Fediverse might offer less, but richer interactions.
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise users as cattle/"eyeballs" to ad buyers...The Fediverse offers none of that. (Though, individual instancves have every right and possibility if they so choose to create their own ecosystem of ads to pay for their operations, and their people would need to know that of course)
- While, twitter (& other commercial socials) promise a platform for creators to publish their content to a wide audience...The Fediverse offers the same publishing (or better) capabilities and tools, but to a smaller audience...and, at least the existing creators on the Fedi are quite cool with that; most prefer it that way!
To me, living on the Fedi, is like people purposefully, willfully, happily (and not accidentally nor due to duress) moving to the rural country away from the big city...and not caring that others feel like "hey, the big city living is where everything is awesome" ;-)
For marketers, politicians and others that use Twitter as a megaphone for their personal brand.
Everybody else just wants to see funny memes, cat pictures and occasionally have the small topic conversations that make Twitter occasionally worth it.
Just because email exists as a federated thing doesn’t mean existing users could use it if they had to sign up for it again.
I wonder if a statement exactly like the above one was said about alternative email providers being coinsidered by many AOL.com account holder so many years ago?
> ...I don’t see this platform being able to benefit from the Twitter exodus...
I suppoose it depends on how "benefit" is defined. But, also, Mastodon might be considered a platform, but (thankfully!) it only represents a single slice of the greater fediverse.
Ultimately, if people chose NOT to migrate over to the fediverse, or choose NOT to use the mastodon stack, or do NOT join an instance, etc..., that's still ok, and not considered a "fail". The fediverse is not an industry, nor a competitive landscape in the same fashion that twitter, facebook and other commercial platforms might operate. In fact, the fediverse is not even a platform at all; its a federated network.
the people who do care about otehr things can go to the more specialized servers. everyone wins.
getting back to a norm where people have choice seems ideal from my perspective.
I think a lot of the complexity of it could be hidden away so that the average user has a similar experience to a Twitter signup, but idk how much friction it would cause to make something like this appear centralized.
What I see though is that there are dozens of servers, none of which I know anything about. So it's more like if you had to select an e-mail provider from a list of domains you've never heard of before. Not impossible, but not as easy as signing up on twitter.com.
...but agreed that ultimately being strongly tied to an instance run by someone else is not ideal. I'm glad there are people working on it!
How does AT solve this specific pain point?
this is incredibly incredibly hyperbolic if ive ever seen hyperbole.
i just migrated my account the other day (i wanted to move onto a friends server) and it was absolutely not "woefully complex"