Why has Mastodon adoption stalled?
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Setting aside the question of whether Mastodon adoption has actually stalled, I submit that federated social media will not grow to replace centralized platforms (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) because that would require "normies" to adopt them, and normies:
- Do not care enough about 'freedom' to leave Twitter and Reddit
- Do not understand what 'federation' is, and/or don't care if it's technically 'better'.
Normies will leave Twitter and Reddit when everyone else does, and they'll only leave to go where everyone else went.
To me, federation is a nothing-burger, a solution in search of a problem just like blockchain. I do understand how it works. I use Mastodon and Lemmy. I can't find any benefits that don't come with tradeoffs. And the "email is federated" comparison holds no water -- it's a completely different use case.
I believe the long-term usage of these technologies, eventually, is either zero OR an eventual community decision to pool resources and merge all instances into a single isolated Mastodon or Lemmy instance as a responsible commercial entity or nonprofit that aims to not make the same mistakes as Twitter or Reddit.
And it's not like it's impossible. There are such obvious pain points that could be addressed that would immediately make it significantly more viable, yet it's the usual OSS/Linux story that it's "good enough" or the usual attitude of "don't complain, we're doing this for free" or "then do it yourself".
What's good enough for people who know what federation is and are motivated by that to use lemmy isn't good enough for your average guy or girl who just wants random shit to read or watch when they're bored.
That’s also a big reason why I come to HN. It isn’t Reddit. Though that’s getting worse as it grows, of course
One could imagine a client picking an instance at random, completely transparent to the end user.
Probably not simple but it's possible. (technically it's simple enough, I'm talking about the non-technical challenges)
To me it’s the solution to the problem of starting communities. Or it’s difficult to start a forum these days because it’s not Reddit. You have to get buy-in from tons of people. Huge friction. Reddit and Twitter style but-in to new tags or new subreddits is basically zero friction. The fediverse solves that problem to me. You can create a forum that isn’t on Reddit now while having a non-zero chance at people joining, people that are in the fediverse that is.
That’s huge to me because it felt to me like the internet was dying due to centralization. It was Reddit or nothing.
It’s already successful in my view. Obviously it has a long way to go on UX, but it’s got so much potential.
What happens when your chosen instance shuts down because of lack of funding, or gets pwned because of an admin careless with security, or the admin is a malicious actor and starts messing around, or there is some (whether justified or not) inter-instance drama and as a result yours is getting cut off from the rest of the network?
Instances shouldn't be a thing. They are not a thing in conventional social media platforms the fediverse is trying to displace, and those conventional social media platforms displaced the earlier iteration of the fediverse aka forums and websites because most people don't want the extra friction and overhead of maintaining a server and having mostly-isolated communities.
Non-ActivityPub implementations such as Nostr actually have a better chance at displacing conventional social media because "instances" aren't a thing; the network isn't balkanized and clients are in charge (so inter-instance drama isn't a thing) of fetching content and choosing which content to display, with relays acting in the background and mostly being replaceable (cryptography ensures relays can't actually tamper with any content).
> Bluesky: “If you liked Twitter, you’ll love Bluesky.”
> Mastodon: “If you hated Twitter, you’ll like Mastodon.”
That actually sounds like a good niche for each of them.
The whole point of federation is to not be a monolith where one change in the rules affects everyone in the network.
Mastodon isn't a brand so much as it's a grouping of a bunch of different brands (servers). In a way Mastodon can't win or lose because of this. If you have 10 people on a server and they're happy- you've won.
Gruber has a hard time wrapping his head around this, partially because it's just not his thing.
Maybe we shouldn't be wanting people to just be moving to different platforms and we should be helping people develop healthier habits?
Ok it's not growing at the crazy rate that hit when news of the Musk twitter takeover broke. That's not a bad thing as the infrastructure couldn't sustain it, but it is growing.
I'm following @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social and it reports a consistent steady growth in the number of user accounts. As of 48 mins ago ..
12,811,208 accounts
+594 in the last hour
+2,367 in the last day
+195,778 in the last week.
.. and it's quite typical to have just over 200k new accounts a week.
Then there was the news that on the 17th April 2023 the number of monthly posts across the Fediverse crossed one billion for the first time.
Personally my timelines are a hive of activity, far more than I can possibly keep up with.
It doesn't look or feel stalled to me.
like 'search term [this thing] - outside my current bubbles (instances they are called?)
(or nostr or matrix or other systems for that matter ) -
I think adoption is multi faceted - reasons to get people to check it out - reasons to get people to keep using it.. and if people check it out but do not easily find things outside the current instance censor bubble they will see it like every other centralized system, just with less..
So the building network effects will pull back as people can not easily find more / expand..
this is an assumption, as I have not used the mast client and don't know if it is easy ux/ui to search for more outside the home base thing.
I'd like to see a chart showing that for all the fediversy things. (how easy to search outside base 1 or whatever)
Federation means that your moderators have control of the discussion. That makes it closer to Reddit than Twitter, where moderators set up their own rules for each Mastodon instance.
For example: https://mastodon.gamedev.place is a game-design focused Mastodon instance, akin to /r/programming can only talk about programming related things (or you get banned and/or moderated out), game developers are hanging out here to talk about game-design issues.
If you want to talk about other issues (general stuff, politics, whatever), you need to reach out to the federation and find a home for your words.
-------------
When #RedditBlackout reached full steam, I realized this. Federation is more of a Reddit thing than any other social media that has come before. Between volunteer moderators, and the "subreddit" feel of Federation (be it PeerTube, Mastodon, or Lemmy), its more obviously a Reddit replacement than anything else.
---------
That being said: a large instance like "https://mastodon.world", with a moderation style of general-topic is closer to a Twitter replacement.
The problem everyone is trying to solve is content moderation and aggregation. Content moderation is hard for centralized system because they have advertiser's they need to answer to. A blog solves that by putting the onus on the user. Aggregation used to be easy until the browsers remove RSS feeds from being discoverable. I just think activity pub is overkill given the existing technology.
Mastodon is already in a froth over whether we absolutely without question block all Meta instances from the Federation, or whether we should leave the door open for known bad actors and give them a chance at collecting all our data and ruining this too.
Adoption will be a torrent in a moment, and most likely a lot of the current users will be on a splinter Federation, much like we're already splintered from Gab.
I can't speak for everyone, but I think I speak for most of us when I say that we like it exactly like it is, cause right now it feels better than any other social thing I have used on the internet, going right back to irc.
The VC viewpoint seems to be that we need more people over there in Mastodon, but the fact of the matter is that I am having the best interactions I have ever had on the internet, and a bunch of Facebook people, well, it would be like back in January of 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, when all the CMKs (Christmas Modem Kiddies) showed up and filled the BBSes with inane stupidity for a few weeks, until they found a new distraction.
Then later, you know, on Usenet, we used to complain daily about the idiocy of AOL users who had been provided with an easy onramp to fill up our boards with inane stupidity, but unlike the CMKs who would fade out after a while, like a yearly fishfly life cycle, the AOL people just kept coming and coming and coming.
The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!
Seems to have slowed since this Wednesday, that's not enough to indicate any long term trend.
Also, what on earth is really mean by "the platform’s ideological zealotry" ? Doubly so when comparing to Musk's twitter.
"Ideological zealotry" could also refer to the fact that usability problems are often excused with "but it's open source". Some people care about that, but not everyone does, and if Mastodon wants to attract Twitter users, they'll have to iron usability issues out because those users don't really care about whether something is open-source, they only care about whether it actually works smoothly.
Mastodon instances might or might not have particular world-views and rules. That's not the same as "mastodon as a platform" has it. Instances are set up for all kinds of world-views. If some of those worldviews don't win out in the marketplace of ideas, that's still not zealotry.
I think that there are things about those "stricter rules" that can be (but should not be) confused with "ideological zealotry" : the desire of moderators of those instances (moderators who do not have the resources of a large company behind them) to keep civility and not expose themselves to legal risk. And I think that there's also the lack of another common driver of zealotry: the drive for "engagement" even if via outrage, and thus profits to feed back to the VC. The absence of that in Mastodon could be confused with "a different, countervailing zealotry", but it is actually not that.
> Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.
This is ideologically zealotry compared to major platforms.
Only because our expectations have been so bent out of shape by "major platforms", thus unbending somewhat seems radical in comparison. The mere absence of "what major platforms do" is not IMHO in itself a zealotry.
Sure, I can find an instance which mostly agrees with my views but I don't find much value in "preaching to the choir"...
All you're telling me - if this accurately characterises yourself - is that your views are such that most people don't even want to hear them, let alone "mostly agrees with your views", and for once you are shamefully denied a captive audience because mastodon isn't a VC-funded outrage machine. Oh noe.
Well, I'm quite happy with this state of affairs. Preach to your choir all you like, I'm sorry that your horrible views are very unpopular, but I don't have to care now. I have freedom of association, it won't arrive in my feed. Wontfix, works as designed.
I also reject the "denied a captive audience" premise because other than HN, I don't really talk in other people's spaces. I have my discord server, that's where I talk most of the time. This is just my observation, it's not a personal grievance about being banned from some of the instances or whatever. That has never happened to me.
Sure, Mastodon might work as designed - but I also have the right to disagree with how it works and tell other people my reasons for it.
Also, please stop assuming my views are horrible. If you would like to learn more, we can have a chat (I'm fully aware that this offer will be declined; this is just a rhetorical device from my part), but if you don't care, it's only yourself to blame when your echo chamber implodes in a grotesque and macabre way.
> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
> Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
> Con: LOL no...no not those views
> Me: So....deregulation?
> Con: Haha no not those views either
> Me: Which views, exactly?
> Con: Oh, you know the ones
But by all means, let us know which views you have that are "not extreme or horrible" but also "instant ban"
We buy all sorts of stuff that we don't need from horrible people, so what is one more? What most commentators don't get it is that Musk is just a guy, a horrible guy with a megaphone, yet he is so far removed from the daily life of users and citizens that a couple of very cheap earplugs will suffice to not hear a thing he says.
This makes sense if:
* you conflate prospects with scale, and
* you deemphasize the possibility that Bluesky might follow the same trajectory as Twitter. What the cool kids are referring to as "enshittification" these days. Bluesky's decentralized features are still unproven.
Ok everyone settle down, it wasn't that funny.
That is the ultimate freedom. Has zero centralized servers that behave like little kingdoms that kick out users.
This translates to a visceral “ugh” that I feel every time I _see_ a mastodon link.