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Primarily Mastodon decentralizes so much, there's no possibility of discovery. You can join a server with the people you already know, or guess about whether you'll like people on a server and join one, but ultimately your ability to discover content is restricted to known accounts found outside the Fediverse, or (effectively) friends of friends. Unless you join a megalith central instance (defeating thr decentralization purpose). This lack of discoverability defeats the entire purpose of the modern social media internet age where you're able to join global communities of topics rather than just people you know.
That said, BlueSky is an easy answer right now, but it's basically just old Twitter with pubic DNS for a centralized username manager. Sure, in concept you can almost host your own, but there's multiple discussions about how actually hosting your own data still isn't possible after 2 years of promises from the development team, and it would be against both their economic and technical interests to ever make it possible. Furthermore, the actual broadcasting is also still centralized (the PDS I think it's called?) so everything has to go thru them still. While I don't like it, Nostr is technologically probably a better way forward, but it needs a big funding injection (and developer interest) to setup some reference implementation relays and moderation servers.
That way they always maintain control of their main outlet (even if not many people actually access it there) and not have to worry about who controls other sites in the future.
Twitter started as basically just exactly that. (Formerly) a democratized way for anyone to broadcast anything to the world for others to find. Measuring reach of the message became useful when you're trying to become a growing voice, but governments aren't. Replies and replies to replies are primarily people broadcasting their own separate messages, just with context for the topic. The back and forth becomes a public discussion (as in the "public at large"). But governments don't care about that, they're just broadcasting their messages somewhere people can find them. It's purely a convenience to the public if they post them in a forum that facilitates easy authoritative reference, but that could just as easily be blog posts on their own website.
Which one?
So when are you going to tell me how many DAUs Mastodon has, to show after the failed migration from Twitter / X?
Why do you care so deeply to moan, at every chance you can, about something that doesn't impact you one way or another?
You're the only one complaining about (and seemingly offended) over the fact that someone showing the basic reasons why former Twitter / X and new users are not choosing to move to Mastodon, as other social networks such as Bluesky have largely handled this better than Mastodon should have.
So once again, how many DAUs does Mastodon have to show for after the failed migration from Twitter / X?
I have no connection to Mastodon (other than having an account), and am not a representative of theirs or their users, except maybe in your fevered mind. I wouldn't know how many DAUs the Mastodon network has, nor do I care, because it's irrelevant to me.
Besides, I'm certainly not the only one complaining about your obsession:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33125070
You've been at it for over TWO YEARS, now, banging that drum of "Mastodon has few users, therefor it is a failure".
Maybe if you think I'm the only one complaining about your posts, you should consider that Warnock's Dilemma applies:
Says the one who is obsessed with being the only direct reply-person about me critiquing Mastodon's fundamental issues, (with evidence and predictions) whilst you reacting without any counter-argument other than issuing these amusing complaints. Your "question" was an attempt to derail the discussion and added nothing other than you being childish.
An influx of new users from Twitter / X to Mastodon should have happened weeks ago in the millions, just like it did with Bluesky. Twice. Why didn't it? I provided that straight answer to everyone here, and somehow that offended you?
Please.
> You've been at it for over TWO YEARS, now, banging that drum of "Mastodon has few users, therefor it is a failure".
So it is evident that after two years (since the Twitter / X takeover), Mastodon was entirely confusing for new users and was unconvincing for them to stay. Even when there was a significant change, it was self-contradictory.
My point continues to still stand unchallenged and this is why little to no-one can take you or Mastodon seriously.
I’m Danish, I’m not a fan of right wing politics but at the same time I find it absolutely insane that an American tech company can ban our elected officials from the “town square” if they say something horrible. Of course this is more a failing of our own institutions than anything else. The EU has hosted their own mastodon instances for their organisations and personnel for a while now, but here in Denmark our institutions have been too addicted to the popular platforms in my opinion. I think media companies should really do it as well, both to “own” their content but also to not give over their business to social media.
Anyway, I don’t see the issue with “which one” since that part is one of the main features.
Not simple enough for normies. Not enough people. Who wants to be on the 10th largest social media? Full of sketchy content.
Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow. Sure local server timeline and global is an option but then it's no better or worse than the random crap X's algo throws, uncontrollably, in your face.
Except nobody picks email servers really anymore.
And even back in the day, during the main growth phase, people didn't really pick email servers. They picked an ISP (like AOL) which gave them an email server. And there really was very little choice.
> share your handle(email address) with your friends.
People don't use twitter to talk to their friends. They use twitter to hear from people they don't know. And they won't know which server people they want to follow have signed up for.
Now they need to figure out how to search for them across all servers.
People don't adopt "tech", they adopt "solutions". And everyone I hear about that tries Mastodon says it's tech, maybe even good tech, but nobody says it's really a one click solution.
Make Mastodon adoption as familiar and easy as Bluesky is and it would will growth faster.
Saying "you just have to understand these 3 things" isn't how to get adoption. And saying how easy they are to understand doesn't help either. Figure out how to make it so they have to understand 0 new things - that's how to grow adoption.
People struggle with emails everyday. Phishing, spam, identity theft, etc. We just delegated the complexity to Big Tech and even then it is barely working.
> Pick a server, sign up, share your handle(email address) with your friends.
Just "picking a server" is one step too much that the vast majority of people don't even know what it means or entails, hell most people don't even know what a server is.
Also nobody is going find friends and share their handles with. Facebook just proposes you people after subscribing. X and Reddit just gives you the front page that makes the news. Mastodon / Bluesky / Threads never make the news.
> Content wise it's a timeline so you, by default, only get who/what you follow.
People don't know what they want or what to follow. The "I just get a community of people I want and know" becomes an echo-chamber very quickly and echo-chambers are boring and doesn't get millions of views. Call it "random crap the algorithm throws" if you want but it doesn't change the fact that people want to be on the social media where everyone else is at.
I want to find person X's email/mastodon. I know their name and they use that name attached with the account, how do I do it without leaving the application?
With Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, I can just search and find the person.
1. Account portability
2. Data distribution on the network (Mastodon is known for DDOS'n small servers when a post goes viral)
3. Global search