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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason Mastodon isn't listed here as an open alternative? Not a single word of it in this article.

Surely it should have significantly benefited from the X exodus?

What can Mastodon do other than be user friendly like BlueSky to be on the radar as a true alternative to these corporate or VC backed social networks?

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I've seen reports of the fediverse getting a bump in users. End of the day you will almost never see news about it because it has no marketing budget, and offers no investment opportunity. Money talks.

It remains imo the best social platform because of those reasons.

By one count, Mastodon has been stable at about a million users for the last year; this hasn’t increased significantly with the rise of Bluesky, and may have dipped a bit. I would suspect that a more viable Bluesky is cannibalising some users from Mastodon; anecdotally I use Mastodon less since Bluesky has become more viable over the last month or so.

Just as Android is a popular Linux kernel-based OS because it discarded the desktop Linux userland, Bluesky is, successfully it turns out, a case of being open, federated, and popular because they focused on product, not on existing standards that hadn't quite hit critical mass.

> What can Mastodon do...?

Be centrally managed and accessible from a single point... But then it wouldn't be Mastodon.

When Twitter was sold there were many articles about Mastodon, but it seems that BlueSky got critical mass now.

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