The main issue with other platforms is that the content that exists within are too wild-west. Anime isn't a everybody thing nor are geeky Programming/Linux communities or furry artwork for that matter.
Where do I find TikTok content within Matrix? That's what the current content-matter is.
The corporate apply heavy exploitation; psychology and social exploits to the user. And while the other platforms don't and carry merits such as privacy and the likes; people really just don't care they are being used for systematic learning, being manipulated because some peer is influencing them.
Companies pay large amount of money in R&D for developing social exploits, all the way down to the background colour of the icon of the app. A platform has to have a gimmick to catch. Privacy, decentralized isn't it.
These foundations don't have corp money to pay for content producers, influencers and so you then end up with dwellings of niches which can turn urk at best.
So, they want the experience to be like Twitter for the users that don’t care about decentralization, but to be backed by something like ATProto underneath for those who care.
I’d say Mastodon is more “the entire point is that it’s decentralized”. Bluesky it’s a major point, but not the entire point.
What use is first delivering today's table stakes features 5 years from now, albeit fully decentralized and open?
Build a good enough version now, and then tackle the end to end encrypted fully decentralized version. The cheap version can give them the breathing room to build the better version.
And I'd say that was the right tradeoff to make. Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work. And no, I'm not going to spend hours digging through docs.
You go to https://joinmastodon.org/, click on "join" (or pick another server if you are adventurous), fill in your username and email and you're good to go.
Why do people invent fictional horror stories about a service that's at this point functionally as easy to use as any bog standard website?
And that gives me access to the entire service? Or just bits and pieces of it? And how do I find other services? Asking around? Who's seeing my data if I sign up on another server? What are the anonymous operators of said server doing with my password and email? How do I message someone from another server? Are those messages secure at all?
Decentralized works for motivated parties. It does not work for the masses.
If you have zero knowledge and don't care Mastodon functions exactly like Twitter. If you care more, you can invest time, host your own server, do what you want, that's optional.
If decentralized systems don't work it's amazing that my grandfather is able to send emails every day. Which is btw the exact equivalent to Mastodon. You don't care you sign up for Gmail, if you do, run a server out of your basement.
That’s simply not true. Even as a technical user I sometimes stumble over things like not being able to follow an account after being linked to their servers web site. “Wait, why am I logged ou– oh, this isn’t my server.”
Nope. Just pointing out the downfalls of decentralized, and the fact that compromising with some centralization (as Bluesky is doing) is a better way for most people.
Regular consumers hate this because they don't know what they're getting into, and it feels like the social media equivalent of a crypto scam where you're invited to buy a coin, any coin. It was probably intended to resemble arriving at college during rush week and pick a social/activity club to join, except you have to pick a server without any real way to browse around and understand what differentiates them.
I don't know how you define "average person" but plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon.
This argument that Mastodon is "too complicated" is perennial, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the growth of its adoption. It's particularly weird to keep seeing it on a forum full of people who think compiling software from source and working in arcane terminals is trivial.
You can just sign up for an instance like any other website (or multiple.) Or you can pay any number of hosts for an instance of your own (I use masto.host, $9.00/mo.) Or just run the activitypub plugin in Wordpress and your Wordpress is now also a Mastodon node.
If I can do it, it ain't that hard.
I'm following ~500 people at the moment, and getting relays from a few instances. I see a constant flow of new stuff but I can also easily leave and do other things, because Mastodon isn't designed to maximize engagement and addiction. I don't feel a constant need to post or comment or chase endorphins. The scale is just fine for me.
You can stick your head in the sand if you want and hope the year-long freefall stops rather than consider there might be a problem. It's what I've come to expect.
If you prefer Bluesky, that's fine. Competition is good.
How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?
All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.
I personally haven't experienced any of the "overhead" of Mastodon that you're mentioning, and making seem far more common than it is, but Mastodon seems far more stable than Twitter as a platform and a community at the moment.
And sure, some people might not like it, and that's fine. There are and will always be alternatives. But anything is better than Twitter.
They're not targeting the average customer (by whatever metric you measure an average customer). They're targeting people that value decentralization.
Nobody cares about protocols, except maybe the handful of infosec nerds on Mastodon. It's about a middle school-level rearranging of friend groups. A VIP lounge where they only hang out with their own.
There was an exodus of a small subset of users, and BlueSky was there like an abandoned building that was squatted. It being invite-only added to the exclusivity as invites were passed amongst like-minded peers online, further adding to the echo-chamber.
Sorry, but I think that deliberately obfuscates the changes Musk has made at Twitter. See https://ketanjoshi.co/2024/04/19/you-are-the-fuel-that-energ... for one summary.
Do you get upset if the CEO of your electric utility made stupid political statements?
Or if the owner of a car dealership cheats on his wife?
Tiger Woods slept with like fifty waitresses and masses of people were furious. Why? What did they expect his life as a star athlete was?
People dislike Musk out of pure jealousy and try to rationalize it via other means. The logical option would be to simply not care.
That’s like my utility company insisting I watch a message from their CEO on all devices they power every once in a while, or the owner of my car dealership calling me every once in a while unprompted to chitchat.
If you know the secret to stopping car dealership spam, please share!
I don't think this is true. Most people I hear express that they don't particularly like him, also attribute it to things that made me not like him. The rescuer story, the absurd trolling, the disparaging of specific individuals, the pretending to be for "freedom of speech" until the speech is about him.
This is a person I once thought had the desire and the means to push humanity forward. He's done so much, all of it tainted by, well, being absolutely unhinged.
Censorship is bad, but amplification of horrible takes is not equivalent the absence of censorship.
The quality of ads (I was using the official client) was also quickly approaching the quality of predatory late-night TV shopping channels (“call NOW to get our ULTRA LINT REMOVER with free shipping!!!”).
The problem is the definition of 'horrible takes' is, and always will be, subjective.
Possibly there is also a way to run a social network uneditorialized, but Twitter clearly isn't attempting that.