The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump
wired.com
wired.com
I think Fediverse is here to stay. But because of its ethos, it's highly unlikely to be a majoritarian platform, and that's kind of its function, to be an alternative place for non-corporate social networking. It's much more likely that if Twitter fell that another heavily-funded corporate platform would replace it, not the Fediverse. It might even use ActivityPub and federate, but it will have ads, and an algo feed, and more or less work like Twitter. This is what most people really want.
This paragraph sums it up well:
>“The biggest lesson of what happened is that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse can scale. This was a big question,” says Robert Gehl, a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada. He has studied Mastodon and says it’s enjoyed peaks of interest followed by slumps before. But that pattern can still add momentum. “Each time, a percentage of the wave sticks,” Gehl says. “You get people converting to it.”
and that's backed up by the two instance admins quoted too, from mastodon.world and mas.to. More active users than before the bump, even if that's down on the peak.
For a publication that was once the cheerleader of the "disruptive new world" the explanation and context of the "mastodon slump" reads rather shallow. Maybe Wired doesn't want to get burned again by wide-eyed excitement that has ended up as a dystopia. We understand.
Anybody remotely familiar with the "fediverse" would know how niche this whole endeavor was for a long time. How totally not fit for "primetime" in any sense. The idea that centralized social media masses would migrate en masse might be a corporatico's or investor's "event risk" nightmare but is neither likely to happen nor desirable if we want the fediverse to mature into a better alternative to the status quo.
In fact mastodon is just the thin edge of a wedge. By happy coincidence it is well placed to validate an approach that (as it gets debugged) is threatening not just twitter, but a whole bunch of other "brand names". Prepare for the "they fight you" stage because it won't be pretty.
“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” ― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science.
"I am going to use her latest WIRED article to illustrate an all-too-common trope in reporting on alternative social media: it’s what I call 'The Killer Hype Cycle.' ...
The Cycle goes like this: first, a journalist notices a fledgling alternative social media system. Looking for a click-worthy angle, the journalist declares it the next ‘Facebook Killer’ or ‘Twitter Killer,’ arguing that within months, the corporate social media giant will be ‘killed’ because its users will leave en masse for the new alternative. Later, when someone notices that Facebook or Twitter is still active despite the presence of the ‘Killer,’ another journalist (or even the original journalist) will declare the alternative a ‘failure’ or simply ‘dead,’ mainly because it did not attract hundreds of millions of new users in a matter of weeks. The cycle appears to end—that is, until another alternative is noticed by a tech reporter, and the cycle is repeated."
The people I miss most are those that have large audiences on Twitter. They are (logically) hesitant to move over, and so I return to Twitter once a day to see this content.
I've stopped using Post.news and Hive.
Most people still don't know that many (most?) Mastodon instances are run by private people, self-funded, or more or less successfully crowd-funded. They're not cheap to run (there's some great write-ups) which basically means someone is footing the bill for your Mastodon space.
If they decide to shut it down, that's it. There's a commitment for some servers, to notify users ahead of time — but a quick glance at the crypto debacle shows how much those promises really mean at the end.
If the admin of an instance has trouble keeping it updated, has trouble paying for it, has bad intentions or gets compromised, all your data on that instance (and possibly your digital existence on Mastodon) goes down with it.
Also, Mastodon doesn't allow a full export (try the backup, it only gives you partial data). So, yeah, for now, it's fun. But this will inevitably lead to problems. Problems that can be solved by tech folks, but not by the wider public, who may not be aware of why they can't post anymore, all of a sudden.
With cryptocurrency projects, people have a massive financial incentive to build them, promote them, take people's money, then disappear. It costs money to make the product, so you make more if you just pretend the money has disappeared.
With mastodon instances, I don't see the parallel. The benefit to instance admins is that they get to participate in a community that follows exactly their rules, and be in control of their own identity (and those of the users of the instance). They only get that benefit as long as they keep running the instance.
As in instance user the risks I can see are:
- The instance shuts down without warning, so the account migration feature can't be used. This can happen for technical reasons, or because the instance admin wants to screw with people, but there's no real motivation for doing that. The risk is also perfectly manageable -- backups are a good idea, and most people keep an eye on who's following them and follow back if appropriate.
- Your data gets used in a way you don't like (admin sells it, or looks at your DMs, or gets hacked). Again, I don't see the issue for most users -- it's a social network, most of the interesting stuff is public. Are people really using the DMs on social networks for stuff they want to keep private? That just feels like the wrong tool for the job. IP logs might be interesting, but there's not much you can do with them these days, and if you think you're likely to be a target there are ways to mask that.
Most of these problems are really the same or worse for centralised social networks, especially as they generally want ID verification (via phone numbers), which makes the data more sensitive, and a much more attractive target than some random instance with 5 users.
Anyway, sorry for the long reply, I was mostly irked by the bitcoin comparison, and for hitting some common anti-mastodon talking points that never made much sense to me. I agree that regular people trying to use it will probably have issues caused by misunderstanding -- in my mind it's more like twitter re-worked for nerds who like IRC, rather than twitter 2.0 for everyone.
100% agree.
In a downward trend, I might reasonably expect that this set of feeds I've set up would go quiet, as new posts fail to hit the high water mark I had set at the peak. Instead, my experience over the past couple months has been the opposite. Breakout posts are getting scores that have kept me pushing my thresholds higher and higher. I don't know what this says about overall usage and engagement, but I think it at least suggests that in certain ways related to popular posts, it's continuing to go up and to the right.
[1] Such as the recent spectacular implosion of mastodon.lol after its owner got horribly abused by members over Hogwarts Legacy. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>