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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

And with that, I think the door on Mastodon gaining widespread adoption is closed forever.

We had a very brief window when the Twitter Exodus was happening and non-techies were giving Mastodon a try. But it wasn't good enough, as far as giving the Twitter refugees what they wanted to see, and so they simply moved on to the nearest Twitter-With-The-Numbers-Filed-Off platform and stayed there instead.

There's probably a good post-mortem study someone could do on this (someone more tuned in than me, since I never had a Twitter account to begin with), and the larger ramifications for why many of the FLOSS platforms fail to gain the adoption they think they will when the flagship proprietary platform becomes intolerable. cf: the failure of Windows 11 refugees to move to Linux, Chrome refugees to move to Firefox, etc.

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I tried Mastodon twice, and got banned in both occasions for saying things mildly critical of Israel and Ukraine.

Mastodon's biggest problem is the hyper-aggressive content moderation on the larger instances. Speaking about Mastodon's tech and UI, it's vastly superior to Bluesky. But they drive people away and then complain that people don't come.

The fediverse can be quite an echo chamber.

But to be honest the UX of Mastodon is just unusable. Following someone is not a click on Follow button. It's the most basic feature I can think of. And it's complicated there. It just couldn't work. Bluesky just did it better.

I agree that the UX of Mastodon was not the best. I tried several times to use it and it just never "clicked". Bluesky just worked for me, almost without trying.

Maybe my problem with Mastodon was choosing the server to join. My brain knows that it's federated and it really doesn't matter which server you choose. However it always felt like I was choosing the wrong server somehow. Just that little bit of friction was enough to drive me away.

Most tech discussion I follow is still on Mastodon. And when Bluesky inevitably goes the way of Twitter due to VC toxicity, Mastodon will still be standing.

> And with that, I think the door on Mastodon gaining widespread adoption is closed forever.

Probably not _forever_; Bluesky is, at least for now, centralised enough that if Bluesky-the-entity screws up sufficiently badly, well, where else are people going to go?

But, honestly, Mastodon as _mainstream_ was always a long-shot. UX matters, and while Mastodon's is _fine_ once you're used to it, it's quite hostile to new users. Bluesky had the advantage that people already knew how to use it, because it's basically the same UX as Twitter.

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