Mastodon has hit 2M active users today
cyberplace.social
cyberplace.social
People can complain about UX and the slow grow (especially compared to Threads) but the truth is - right now, there is enough audience and content to make it engaging and useful. I don't think there is much value in the explosive growth that some people want from it.
Mastodon might have had slow growth but it definitely is a community. It's going to operate differently. It won't scale fast or make big ad revenue money. That's okay. That's great, actually.
Threads is _clearly_ a Hail Mary play to extract as much ad rev as possible from Meta's most engaged social network, Instagram, by putting those same users in a new space and hope they have enough juice to keep each other occupied long enough to justify the CPM.
Agreed, megaforums with links between them, but just enough to enable migration rather than direct contact, seems to be the way to go. I think another type of person is going to emerge from this though, and that's a lot of people who just decide to opt out. I like to think that people will take the experiences of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and so on... and realize that disengagement from these platforms is in and of itself empowering.
A move away from endless engagement, endless over-consumption of meaningless twaddle, and distancing from the sorts of people and drama that only really exist online in the first place. Maybe we can all finally accept that, "Twitter isn't a real place," and all that entails.
I do want communities to come together online when it is fitting to do so, and it seems like we need some platform(s) or another to accomplish this, but they need to be designed to not bring out the worst behaviors in us.
Then you look at the federated feed (all messages that are sent to your instance) and follow anyone who posts anything remotely interesting.
Once your feed is too quick to follow, unfollow anyone posting any message you feel is uninteresting until the feed slows down.
At this point you should have a pretty nice starting point.
That's how I started in 2017 and I'm still there so I must have done something right at least.
I appreciate the thoughtful response!
Edit: I do love mindly.social for a more laid back/be nice overall sentiment. Although this week I decided to move back to mastodon.social because of the comments/replies thing I mentioned in my other comment here
I went for fosstodon.org, as I think this suits my interests well enough, but there are other general or broad topic instances out there.
And the second thing is the type of instances that are blocking mastodon.social: based on what I usually see going on on mastodon and lemmy, they are probably instances focusing heavily of LGBTQ+ or other marginalized communities. So unless that's the most important thing to you, you won't miss it.
quick note: those communities can be REALLY annoying sometimes. I remember seeing people mentioned that they got jumped in because they posted food pics without content warning, in an instance about.... food and cooking. So, if instances like this are blocking mastodon.social... go ahead
Adding an 'originally-posted' field to exports, and allowing mass-posting on the target should technically work, and non-technically be a tricky problem.
The Mastodon API (currently the defacto API for Fedi clients) has no support for backdated posts (see [1]) and servers will push out any status you create to your followers which would mean a deluge of previously seen content. Backdating and a flag for "do not push out backdated posts" could be added[2] but there's a whole raft of problems that come along with it (resource usage for large accounts, who can use the functionality, how do you stop abuse, etc.)
[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
[2] I fudged this into my Akkoma instance to let me backfill history from a Twitter bot.
A lot of people join on a big instance (like mastodon.social, which is the biggest). It doesn't matter as much, as long it's not an extreme-left/right oriented instance, because those end up blocking or being blocked by other instances. You can follow anyone on any mastodon server that is not blocked by/from yours.
If you basically want to have niche discussions, joining a niche instance might be the way (like urusai.social for anime). If not, I personally prefer just going with a big instance. I'm just moving back to mastodon.social for my main profile, and there are 2 reasons:
- Searching for content: if you are on a small instance that doesn't federate with a lot of instances, searching will not return any posts/users from those.
- Reading replies to other's posts: This is where it's a bit weird, and they don't yet developed a solution. If I post something on instance A, and you are on instance B that federated with it, you see my post. But if a person from instance C (that federates with A but not yet with B) replies to my post, you won't see their replies. This lead to some people being like: "is that why a bunch of people on different instances reply the exact same thing, as if it wasn't already said in the replies?"
A much larger number have set up Threads accounts and either posting on Twitter less or are gone entirely.
It's anecdotal, but I think Mastodon missed the boat, in large part because of the pretty terrible sign up experience.
Most people noped out at "First, pick a server, but don't worry, this list only includes the ones who promise to be safe!", most of the rest when they hit "The server suggested by the person you want to follow is not taking new signups".
The Fediverse missed the boat of becoming the next public square because it was never sailing that route to begin with, if you'll pardon the slightly twisted metaphor.
ActivityPub, and by extension Mastodon, are not community spaces; they are tools for building community spaces. There are at least three major spaces currently: the heavily-moderated, mostly lefty area, the barely-moderated, heavily alt-right area, and the area dominated by Pawoo and defined primarily by Japan's legal jurisdiction regarding image media. There are some interfaces between these broad areas, and some sub-divisions within them, as well as some smaller, mutually allowlisted islands that don't federate outside at all.
Building a new public square may be Eugen Rochko's goal, but it's not what most instance admins and moderators want. Joining the Fediverse looking for a new Twitter is and always has been a mistake.
I agree entirely. There were a lot of people saying that the Fediverse was the next Twitter but that fell flat due, in part, because a lot of Mastodon communities weren't interested.
In the current context of defining the right in terms of extremism there is no value in a public square including more extremists or their apologists. They have nothing to say worth hearing because the nuggets of wisdom would be embedded in an ocean of bullshit. Incidentally this is essentially a heavily moderated mostly lefty area by most current right wingers definition. Because of this its filled with actual discussion.
I always laugh when I see that "furry" is a category too choose server from on the official page. Sums up Mastodon perfectly. Too bad there is no "hentai" that would be the cherry on the cake.
Regardless, it makes sense that platforms promising openness would attract groups that aren't in the mainstream.
You’ve clearly never lived on an octopus farm!
> Too bad there is no "hentai" that would be the cherry on the cake.
It sounds like you think "furry" and "hentai" are congruent categories.
My understanding is that hentai is pornographic. Furry, conversely, is not. More information: https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post
Source: I've been on the Internet a while.
Furries are about as sexual as any other fandom. You don’t want to know the piles of Picard slash that has been written, then serial-filed to absolutely make it into a publishable novella.
No, what you’re really saying but you might not realize you are is that you don’t like the queer/lgbt & sex-positive spaces that form in fandoms and which are less interested,conversely, in your judgement of them.
Now, my UUCP job is nearly done. The latest installment of “The elves of Borimir” is out and my phone line is getting tied up watching you bozos hate on furries.
>> "No, what you’re really saying but you might not realize you are is that you don’t like the queer/lgbt & sex-positive spaces that form in fandoms and which are less interested,conversely, in your judgement of them."
I don't know if you've seen The Fandom, but it covers the furry split out of the anime fandom over the queer stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY
We're probably better off for having been given a reason to grow bigger than we could have inside another fandom, but the reasons were still clear, and not much has changed about outsider response except their voices have gotten smaller relative to growing acceptance.
Hey, furries are awesome. They're tough bastards and I (and I am not being sarcastic) love how they post cartoons of bunnies with come-hither looks or dog-men in leather fetish gear in every forum that allows posting images, no matter how irrelevant to the topic. It's refreshing to see an entire community that's simultaneously very dependent on the Internet, and not taking the whole thing too seriously.
I have to wonder, why do some people just not realize how deeply integrated furries are into the internet's infrastructure? Have they just never looked at their coworkers' profile pictures?
It's certainly not perfect, but it's a better experience than Twitter for many of us.
I get that a lot of Mastodon users are like you are happy with where Mastodon is. I'm not even mad.
But a lot of people ARE looking for Twitter 2.0 and a lot in the Mastodon Community WERE saying "we are it"
Yeah, I figured out pretty early that it wasn't going to be what I used Twitter for. Threads, as much as I hate Meta, might just be what kills Twitter.
For me, I use mastodon exactly the same way I used twitter. I talk with interesting people, I post random thoughts, and generally look for discussions about topics I find interesting. It is a substantially better experience than twitter because there's no algorithm messing with what (and who) I can see.
There seem to be two primary post-twitter constituencies that do not see the world the way I do:
1. People who want to see what Brands and celebrities (or their PR team) are talking about and consume their content
2. People who want to fight with others or consume current events news (overlapping circles in a venn diagram)
Honorable mention to identity-based communities that need to pick up and move to ONE place to save their community.
I'm none of those things. Threads coming closest to replicating the vibe of twitter is a massive turn-off for me. And given I don't really want to be in the halo of either group 1 or 2 above, I'm ok with social media fragmenting like this. (I do miss seeing the identity-based communities well-represented... there's some of that on mastodon but not enough.)
Musk came in and almost immediately broke this (it started to fray badly even before the blueticks got bumped to the top of replies and all that). People started complaining that there was porn on twitter now; there had _always_ been vast quantities of porn on Twitter, but in general if you didn't follow it the algorithm wouldn't show you it. I started using Twitter in 2007, I tweeted my last in December 2022. And in the last month or so I blocked more people than in the previous 15 years. I had to block Musk himself then; I find him intensely irritating, but previously the algorithm had never, or at least almost never, shoved him in my face, presumably because the people I followed and interacted with were not Musk People. In the last month, I saw him (and others of his ilk; Jason Calacanis, for instance, who I had completely forgotten even existed) constantly. Along with loads of sports stuff, for some reason; not for me, but I assume someone in the new guard thought it'd sell ads.
Twitter was hundreds of subcultures existing a hairs breadth away, but only barely noticing each other when they brushed up against each other. There were the Nazis, the knitters, the politicians, the pornographers, the scientists, the shitposters... I'm not sure that Facebook will be able to recreate that on Threads, or even particularly want to recreate it on Threads (Facebook probably doesn't _want_ a million porn accounts). It's arguably a historical oddity; the self-segregation originally existed because of the nature of pre-algorithmic Twitter, and when The Algorithm arrived, Twitter was presumably careful not to make it a big change, not to upset things too much. Twitter was all things to all people, Mastodon is many things to a few people, Threads will likely be a lot of things to most people.
Well, they were probably telling the truth from their perspective. Mastodon likely does a good job of replicating the value that those people were getting from Twitter. But not everyone experienced Twitter in the same way.
From my perspective, Mastodon was Twitter 2.0 for what I was looking for in "a Twitter".
I think it is very clear that for good and bad, Mastodon and Twitter completely diverged somewhere around 2016. The Twitter of 2022 even before the new CEO's shenanigans looked almost unrecognizable to me, as an early Twitter user, as a Twitter user that left for Mastodon in 2016. From what I've heard Threads does a much better job at looking like 2022/2023 Twitter, and good for them for making a Twitter 2.0 that those sorts of users seem to want. (That certainly wasn't what I wanted from social media. Threads was a good reminder for me that I was entirely bored of Instagram notification spam and never using that account anyway, so I finally deactivated my Instagram account.)
Yeah, not everyone experienced Twitter in the same way. The way continuously updated, heavily A/B tested software-as-a-service works as a river that you can never step in the same water twice, it was almost impossible for even just a single person to experience the "same Twitter" over time, so of course not everyone experienced Twitter in the same way.
I meant more in the sense that different people would follow different accounts / hash tags based on their interests.
I understand that for sports fans, or other stuff where the 'load of live react' is the main Twitter appeal, Mastodon will never be Twitter. And that's for the best? Twitter might be better without the sciency/boring stuff, and Mastodon for sure is better without the Twitter noise. Only stuff I miss are universe collisions, when a bball fan meet a statistician, i learned a lot.
The people you followed on Twitter who faded away from Mastodon after an early signup, those are the ones who are there for the vanity metrics (which at some scale do translate in to commercial value but for the vast majority do not.)
I believed the opinions of how bad Mastodon was from a user experience standpoint, and a sign up process, until I signed up last year. It's all bullshit. My feed has multiple people I followed on Twitter, it's cleaner, and the people who just posted for engagement are gone. The signup process was painless. It's arguably easier to use than Twitter.
It "missed the boat" by not predating Twitter.
Why did Google+ fail? Bad sign-up experience? Incomplete features? Buggy? No, of course not. It failed because it didn't predate Facebook.
Threads predated Twitter?
> Why did Google+ fail?
It was a bad copy of Facebook where the product was designed to herd/drive people to Google services and not actually provide a usable social network.
(And yes, you could argue Youtube -> Google+, but no.)
Basically the same experience but rather than being told they weren't accepting new signups I got a page about how they wouldn't accept racists or transphobes. I only heard about the signup situation when I wrote a similar comment to this one here on HN. With that kind of UX the whole product is basically dead on arrival. It almost feels criminal for such an opportunity to have been mindlessly squandered.
https://fediverse.observer/stats
I suspect it's hard to measure this accurately as the users are spread over several thousand servers, and presumably servers can lie about their user count. It's like measuring how many email addresses exist, you can only estimate.
What matters more to me is what kind of community exists. I joined Twitter late and found it was hard to engage because it was so chaotic. People shouting past eachother or making cheap shots. Not my thing, I didn't stay. Mastodon "looks like twitter" but doesn't feel like that. We know that community-based moderation can work at scale, that's what Reddit uses, so I'm hopeful Mastodon will keep it's safe feeling.
Some people seem intent on causing drama, but most actual server admins seem to just ignore Threads until it becomes a problem.
The drama lives on and on.
Freedom of Association is just as important and key part of Freedom as Speech, though many, especially Americans, tend to forget that it exists as a related Right. Blocking on Mastodon isn't a bug, it's a feature. Drama from blocking on Mastodon is maybe a bug, but criticism and deliberation and community opinion gathering and consensus building are features (and Freedom of Speech) that sometimes look like drama. People expecting useful criticism and deliberation to "kill" Mastodon because "drama" are missing that process survives iteratively and the process isn't a bug.
(But I still don’t think meta is going to enable activitypub)
https://lemmy.world/post/1232070
And a Mastodon instance (mastodon.lol) from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 (though there was some warning)
The image they're looking for is on Wayback machine, if that's helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.ne...
Everything people found complicated about Mastodon is there in Bluesky in some form.
The bigger issue currently is that there is a problem where the did:plc method used for all the currently issued did's is stupidly centralised. Though if Bluesky were to mess that up badly enough there in theory nothing really stopping other parties from deciding to crawl the audit log and take over processing of DID's if clients agree.
They do certainly need to fix that DID bullshit, though, or they have a chokehold that is worse than the bsky.social domain.
It's the rough outlines of a good idea but a really dumb mechanism full of the idiotic NIH issues that you can find throughout. I'm certainly no fan of the protocol, and their "why not ActivityPub" part just demonstrates that they don't really understand either ActivityPub nor the space.
E.g you don't need a stable ID and they made a stupid choice in assuming so. The recovery keys allowing the user to update the DID could equally be used to sign claims about a change of id and push them to the followers/following. As such the recovery key part is good - it's all the Fediverse would need to adopt to be able to let users do unilateral migrations (coupled with regular backups/exports; frankly having a standard API for the clients to pull that would be good).
I at least know I never had to set up any kind of recovery key for my Bluesky account, so I assume this is handled on bsky.social even though my handle is @ my domain.
Why? If they federate, I can follow people who post on Threads, but I get a chronological timeline I control and no ads. They make money on ads. So why should they federate? To "slurp up everything"? They already have much more than Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse have.
c/daily/monthly
It's kind of their carrot to get good will and PR from the vocal-but-small nerd-crowd though I think. Facebook could outright block people with adblockers; but don't as an example because (people would throw a shitfit). Good PR/Vibes from federating could go far fighting the 'ewe meta' stigma attached to Threads.
That would surely get them banned in a lot more instances, but I guess it would technically be possible for them to make 1 in 10 of your posts an ad.
It sure seems like a terrible idea to me, I'm just trying imagine how exactly they could make it go from an interesting idea of federating, to something that is terrible as meta is one to do.
I think probably the real reason they are federating is to avoid anti-trust issues.
There'd be nothing stopping that celebrity from shilling for a product on their Threads feed and their followers would all get any such shilling. There's already some of that on Mastodon, which is OK if instances permit it (authors, artists and small businesses promoting themselves).
The thing you get from federation is more granular social graph data than you can obtain from public scraping. Not just "X liked this post" but also "when did X like this post?"
Meta specializes in social graph analysis. More data leads to more insights, which leads to more targeting for advertisements in places they do control. There's the direct profitability angle.
Additionally, it will make Meta's properties feel more "complete" or connected to the rest of the world (despite many people's distaste for Meta as a company and their business practices). Being able to stay in touch with Meta objectors through ActivityPub will lead to more social pressure (or inertia, depending on your perspective) to stay locked into Meta properties for their incumbent users.
They only stand to gain from this plan. There is a cost, of course: Some CPU is expended that doesn't include adverts. But they've probably done the math and concluded that they can accept that hit and still profit.
And you haven't mentioned the moderation costs to Meta. They'd have to decide who to federate with, which instances to block, which accounts to block.
What about my comment obligates me, in any way, to mention that? It seems like an odd thing to demand.
What's going to happen is: the far-right pockets are ad-unfriendly (ad-adverse?), so they're out. But the far-left instances are anti-corporate, so they'll block Meta. What remains are heavily skewed towards the statist democrat types who are generally civil and well-mannered. I wouldn't expect the moderation burden to be too heavy from that crowd. The only significant moderation cost will be if Zucc abandons all sense and federates with instances that allow right-wing extremists. That would be an expensive blunder.
(Still stupidly rate-limited on my main account, so have to reply from this one. Dang it.)
Instagram has 100 million accounts.
~~Can we not do that thing where we mock autistic people throwing a fit? (That's what /\b[Rr][Ee]{2,}\b/ means.)~~
Deciding to federate means accepting content from that other site. A mastodon instance federating with Threads would mean that Threads content would be visible on that instance.
However, if an instance decides to not federate with Threads, Threads can still get the data from the instance.
With the permisivity of the protocol, Meta (and anyone) can consume any ActivityPub data they want.
Compare this to email. A mail server can block incoming mail from some other mail server (e.g. a known spam farm). However, mail servers don't block people who have email accounts on their servers from sending mail to abuse@spammy.mail.server
Trying to change it so that federated content only goes out to pre-approved sites (because face it - if threads.meta.com is blocked it is would be trivial to spin up notthreads.notmeta.com and consume the same data) would fracture the fediverse and make small sites difficult to federate with... and lead to very much what we currently see with email - you can't stand up your own email server and send mail to gmail... which is very much what federation is supposed to not be about.
Well, in practice it's pretty easy to block Facebook-range IP addresses at the firewall level, and then there's no other way for Facebook to get (authenticated) information about posts/users. "Will admins end up going that far" is an open question, but it's not like Facebook is going to be renting out residential IPs and forging user-agents to get around these types of bans.
Trying to prevent Meta from being able to consume ActivityPub content is an arms race that Meta would win with the collateral damage being every small instance of an ActivityPub application.
That collateral damage would be inflicted by other ActivityPub instances rather than Meta itself.
Is that within the context of Meta wanting to ingest data from Mastodon in order to train their AI or whatever data they want to ingest? Of course they can do that, setup their own instance or their own cloud, and ingest a lot of the posts coming out of the main Mastodon instances. Any company can do it, and it has nothing to do with Threads being on ActivityPub. You don't even need to go that far! You can add .rss to any user on Mastodon and get a fully public feed of their activity (if they didn't put their profile private)
Or are you arguing that Meta can ingest Mastodon posts within Threads without the consent of Mastodon instances? Because that's quite unlikely, they said they want to be good citizen of the federation. If a server is not federating with them, then they will just obey the block and won't go around those blocks to show content in Threads even if the users/instances decided not to be federated with Threads
This is the common case but AFAIK doesn’t have to be true. Mastodon lets users make their AP outboxes private. Followers can be screened before posts are sent to their instances.
de-federation puts the power directly in the communities hands. if Meta wants to join with out EEE tactics, theyll need to first prove anyone on Mastodon sees value in a facebook presence.
Threads is a entirely different kettle of fish. A significant number of the people I follow are ALREADY more active, or just as active, on Threads as Twitter. A fair number have stopped posting on Twitter entirely.
Mastodon is not and will never be "normie" friendly, so it'll never be a contender. Sorry, just the way it is.
Time will tell how things play between Twitter and Threads, but Twitter seems to be taking some interesting steps towards maintaining it's relevance.
Mastodon was always a joke and still is.
Threads has 100 million users already. We'll see if they maintain.
But sure, if my usage was reacting to the masked singer or the Chiefs winning another game, mastodon would probably be useless.
Those of use old enough remember the drama when AOL users were set free on the internet, with email and web access...
It's also funny how folks here don't realize that this is all related to the Digital Services Act in the EU which gatekeepers like Meta have to interoperate with other open protocols such as ActivityPub to allow users to move off of their platforms and to not incentivise lock-in. Meta would not risk not doing so especially with a new platform that has just captured 100M users in less than a week.
So yes. Meta is serious about federation [0], especially when they sent the NDAs to the admins of the largest Mastodon instances which haven't denied federating with Meta. Contrary to the denial I've seen in the comments here on HN.
[0] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2023Jul/00...
It turns out very bad takes, self-promotion, fake guruism and rage baiting mostly exist on social media because of the algorithms
The text:
10k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
100k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
1,000k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
1,300k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
1,400k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
1,800k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
1,900k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
2,000k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"
I'm starting to think these people aren't real doctors.
I'm not sure how mastodon people are so bullish on it. It's like they never sat a normal person down and asked them to try going from 0 to 'tooting'.
I don't see how it is different from any other service where you can sign in with google/facebook/etc.
> I don't see how it is different from any other service where you can sign in with google/facebook/etc.
It was an account merge. You cannot delete your threads “PROFILE” without deleting your instagram.
There is no other service which utilizes google/Facebook/etc to login that when I cancel my account on that platform I lose my google/Facebook/etc account.
From the TOS “You may deactivate your Threads PROFILE at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram ACCOUNT,” (emphasis mine)
Hell even the tos clearly states its not a threads account. It’s a profile based on the instagram account which are irrevocably tied.
But hey, they are working on it. Ya know after all the publicity about shattering “SIGN UP” records.
Mastodon isn't for everyone. And that's okay.
I think being bullish on Mastodon in particular is missing the point; a similar comment compared it to saying “Yahoo Mail will be the forever future of electronic messaging!” in the 90s. Of course not; email the protocol was the future, yet yahoo mail chugs along to this day. Likewise ActivityPub (which Threads intends to support) will probably be the future, not any one particular UI implementation in front of it.
Maybe. Or, maybe it won't. But then again, even if it doesn't take off to the level that people hope, a couple million active is plenty of company still, if it can be sustained.
I want to interact with experts in subjects I'm interested in, the occasional media figure, and some brands. Sadly brands are lacking, but I get enough of the rest on Mastodon to keep me happy.
It's a shame Patrick Rothfuss isn't on Mastodon, but John Scalzi is, so that's cool.
I just don't "get it", what it is, what it's for, etc.
I had this feeling quite distinctly when I first used twitter too though
> The recommendations don't seem to work.
> There is no algorithm to show me miscellaneous content.
My advice to find content is to browse #introductions and find hashtags for topics you're interested in, and then follow those hashtags and browse them for people you find interesting and follow them directly as well.
For me it's a negative. I want the site to guess what I want to see and give me content accordingly, rather than me having to choose
Not sure why it is that slow, might be the server? Mine is quite fast and followed the WWDC keynote in real time with sometimes dozens of toots a minute
#bookstodon #rust #programming #go are some good ones. #maths is excellent (but I'm in maths grad school). There's a growing number of sharp wits and interesting bots to follow. For sure the content exceed my time budget for entertaining social media. I haven't tried getting targeted answers by asking Mastodon, so I can't comment about that.
Sign ups != active users.
It's a long game of wanting an entirely different model where the threshold to try new things is far lower because you can tap into an existing network from day one.
But Mastodon in itself is valuable to me already today. If it keeps growing, great, but I'll be there even if it doesn't. It's taken over the place from Twitter for me as the one social media site I keep permanently open on a separate virtual desktop. I check Twitter less and less.
It's such a blessing that Twitter and Reddit undid the world where Twitter and Reddit were considered the only choices. They forced out the early adopters of the next generation of social networks.
Who knows where or if Mastodon will fit into that, but what's important is that it's become normalized to try new options. Of course the masses will stay where they are for quite a while, but it wouldn't be good for them all to flood a new service still trying to find its identity.
In essence, we have seen the ghettoization of political organizations when it comes to influence over social media networks. For the previous ~10 years, Twitter was the place everyone of every background roamed and progressives were very successful at leveraging the platform (and influencing the corporation externally and internally) to center their issues and create a false consensus on their positions and to get opposition exiled into ghettos.
They have since been ghettoized themselves as many left Twitter because their rivals have been allowed to participate, pulled from exile and others emboldened. Hence there's this desperate search for "New Twitter" amongst the chattering class. The election cycle is going to heat up in 6 months so it's becoming critical to try and herd normies into a place of their choosing where their media and influences can again dominate. Mastodon was too hard. Threads is a deal with the devil (Meta is evil) but it's the most legit chance to un-ghettoize them and reclaim social media dominance and thus real world influence like they've recently lost.
Why is that relevant? Like I genuinely don't understand this incabability to imagine people just...interacting via a medium, and that it is ok if not everyone is on a single platform. Not everything is about shareholders and creating another megacorp that can ruin my experience as fast as possible.
Sure, some people are not tech literate enough to use a platform like Mastodon, but that is perfectly fine, there are more than enough options for them. Also yes, Mastodon isn't the right platform for people that mainly want to sell you something or 'build their brand', and that is fine too! (certainly a plus for many)
Meanwhile every relevant (as in: information and tweets I actually appreciated, compared to a ton of accounts I followed, but were just rather 'low effort' content I don't exactly miss) account I followed on Twitter is now on Mastodon. So all I need to stay and be happy on Mastodon is for it to not lose those users again, and slow growth is a plus too.
Because millions of Twitter users are (were?) looking for a replacement and a LOT of people, rightly or wrongly, were selling Mastodon as that replacement.
Once you get past the user-hostile joining and following process, ultimately Mastodon just has awful content discoverability since there's no algorithmic feed available, not even good reply displays. You're relying on your follows to retoot anything interesting, and one prolific poster can completely flood your feed.
It's just not good enough. I really tried to like it, but it just isn't.
Following the conversations here, you can sort of see why. Seems like a lot of Mastodon didn't really want to be a Twitter replacement and it also seems like a lot of Mastodon admins and users are happy for that.
I entirely support that, I just wish they hadn't wasted a lot of people's time by pretending.
I don't get this. I read what Mastodon was from their own site, decided that sounded way better than Twitter at this game, and went there. And it was better for me.
I don't recall being misled.
How much time could possibly have been wasted?
You will also notice that Mastodon doesn't have quote-boost, and searching is limited to hashtags/users, and it will only find text results from posts of users you follow already (or even just you, I'm not sure). These are made on purpose, and even adding the quote-boost is being debated for like 5 or 6 years, and it's not going to happen unless it's a setting so you have to allow people to quote-boost you.
I saw a list of Ukraine war accounts on reddit, which as interesting as it is, isn't the vibe I want to center my day around.
I strongly prefer the latter.
How about you?
On the flip side, threads appear as toots/posts and replies, and replies to replies, etc. on Mastodon.