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Comment by davepeck | Hacker News Reader

Alas, this is par for the course in the Fediverse. Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this. (Maybe Lemmy, to some degree?)

Social networks that focus on people and user experience have a shot. My hunch is those -- like PeerTube -- that focus on technical, political, or philosophical motivations will always be niche at best.

(Which is not to discourage experimentation! This seems to be a fantastic moment to experiment with social media design.)

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> Mastodon is the only ActivityPub-using social network I'm aware of that has broken away from this

I tried signing up for Mastodon a couple years back, and failed somehow. Thankfully Threads and Bluesky are easier to use. Hopefully Mastodon has improved, but I'm already using two other competing micro-blogging platforms now.

Yeah, absolutely. Despite its growth, IMHO Mastodon is still a usability mess in the sense that a typical user will find it needlessly complicated compared to any alternative that is perceived as equivalent. The confusion starts early, with onboarding. I think this is one of the reasons why, for instance, Threads became a larger social network in its first ~24 hours than Mastodon had in its entire 6-ish year run to that point.

I was curious what the experience was like, having never used Mastadon. I searched for "Mastadon Signup"

First page is a bunch of rules. I don't mind moderation and decorum, but leading with that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit.

> that sends a signal to me that the moderation is going to be even more capricious than Reddit

That's actually where mastodon (and other fedi-platforms) different from a mainstream social media, because you have a choice:

- you can choose an instance with very strict moderation to be in an echo chamber with like-minded individuals.

- or if you choose instance with little to no moderation - you'll find yourself on a platform where everyone speaks what's really on their mind, even if it's socially unacceptable.

Choosing instance is hard, because popular ones are blocking a lot of small instances (mostly because of spam). But simply choose a server close to your interests, you can transfer your account between instances later.

> you can choose an instance

I'm out

Do you not think that Meta onboarding its 2 billion Instagram userbase into Threads had something to do with it?

Yes, of course; that was clearly the high-order bit.

But even if it was dominant my hunch is it was unlikely the only factor: Bluesky also rapidly outgrew Mastodon, without a Meta-like advantage.

From cloudflare 2024 stats bluesky traffic shot up during the US election but is now back below (aggregrate across all servers) mastodon traffic [1]

But its true that mastodon did not have a major breakthrough as of late and bluesky will likely surpass it in the near future as some important "high information quality" communities (journalists, scientists etc.) seem to migrate there in preference.

Orientation towards general (mainstream, non-tech) users, easy usability etc is indeed a problem for the fediverse. The reasons are mostly an anti-commercial ideological stance which on the one hand makes funding scarce. Hence brilliant open source products - there are many more than peertube - remain unpolished, not marketed at all etc.). On the other hand this hostile culture keeps mainstream actors from joining the revolution.

But make no mistake this is a revolution. The hyper-concentration in social media is an aberration that does not fit any other pattern in society and the economy. Some more pragmatism from the decentralization pioneers will accelerate the inevitable.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2024-year-in-review-intern...

Arguably, Bluesky being spun off from Twitter and having Jack Dorsey as one of the founding members is a somewhat Meta-like advantage, in a sense of immediate legitimacy in the press and networking opportunities/connections in Silicon Valley. Mastodon had to start absolutely from scratch. I had zero connections to anyone important when I launched it. Bluesky also raised over $8M in venture capital funding, while Mastodon was being developed on a $0/mo budget for the first year of its existence, and something like $5000/mo for the next 5. Our current annual budget of around $500K still pales in comparison to the money Bluesky has at their disposal right now to spend on e.g. marketing. They also have the advantage of not really trying to do decentralization. That being said, venture capital money isn't free, while Mastodon's funding comes from the community with no strings attached, so in the long term, I believe in our approach.

To add some color to my comments: I also believe in your approach and I admire the work you and your team have done.

To sum up my entirely unoriginal opinions:

1. Mastodon has far better usability than any other Fediverse software I'm aware of

2. Despite this, usability is still a material coefficient of drag on Mastodon's growth

To be clear, I don't believe Mastodon has to or even should aspire to match the growth of other more centralized networks; only that usability is a drag on what would otherwise be natural growth for Mastodon itself.

I know you and your team spend a considerable amount of time and energy on usability, so I hope I'm not saying anything you don't already know infinitely better than I.

How did you fail?

I'm not the person you're asking to, but I failed at the "choose a server" part. I started having a bunch of questions over the choice of server and then gave up from analysis paralysis.

What are the implications of choosing one server over the other? Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers? If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Matodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one? If I choose the Fencing server, will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider since I'm not originally from the Baking server? Will they even be able to organically find me? How does the algorithm evaluate these choices? Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general? And so on...

> What are the implications of choosing one server over the other?

Unless you choose a political or spam-friendly server - it doesn't matter.

> Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?

A little.

> If I really like Baking and really like Fencing as well, should I join the "Mastodon Baking" server, the "Fencing fans" server of a neutral one?

Shouldn't matter.

> Will the people on the Baking server start seeing me as some sort of outsider.

Never seen anything like this, but I can imagine if you choose a server associated with 'A' and leave a comment in a server where people hate 'A', they might have a prejudice against you, so it's better to choose a very neutral, general server.

> Can I restrict/split my posts between Baking, Fencing and general?

Use tags.

> How does the algorithm evaluate these choices?

There's no algorithm, you follow people you like and block people you don't like.

> > Does this affect search and discoverability in between servers?

> A little.

Can you please elaborate on that?

Thanks for the answers!

On mastodon you have three timelines/feeds: local, federated and global.

Local is for posts local to your instance. Federated is local + posts from other instances, from people that are followed by somebody on your instance. Global is for any posts from anyone.

For example: if you join art instance your local feed will be very artsy and federated feed will be slightly artsy.

It matters little, because most people use and subscribe to hashtags to discover posts. Federated feed is too random, especially in big instances.

Relevant blogpost:

- https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2022-11-03_what-i-know-abou...

Thanks a lot for the link! That solves my questions!

Maybe I'll join.... (but still: which server!?)

Just pick one. It's not a permanent choice, you can transfer your account between instances.

I would suggest to pick one of the larger instances – they are stable and have been for a while. For example, I'm on mstnd.social. You can also go with the official mastadon.social, probably the simplest. hachyderm.io is also a popular one, especially with programmers.

Mastodon has changed quite significantly since a few years back. We take product design seriously and spend a sizeable amount of our resources on improving usability and reducing friction. If you could, please try again, and let me know how it goes this time. If you are an Android user, I strongly recommend our official app, as in my (obviously biased) opinion it is the best social media app right now and the user experience I am most proud of.

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